It began with someone on Twitter giving me a heads up, saying that the Russian media would be replaying it on a loop for at least a year. ‘It’ referred to a recent CNN interview with Barack Obama in which, according to the Russian link my follower had provided, Obama ‘admitted’ that the US was behind the February 2014 ‘coup’ in Ukraine. When I checked the latest headlines online, sure enough it was one of the top stories of the day. The Russian press was having a field day. If John McCain’s visit to Maidan hadn’t already provided enough ammunition to Russian state media, Obama’s ‘admission’ had now armed them as surely as Russia’s ‘humanitarian convoys’ armed the separatists in the Donbas.
Of course, the White House disputed the Russian interpretation of the comment, which hinged on a single phrase in which Obama said Yanukovych fled after ‘we had brokered a deal to transition of power in Ukraine.’ The statement, it said, was most likely a reference to the so-called 21 February Agreement, which Yanukovych essentially repudiated when he elected to flee the country. Moreover, not only was this agreement not a coup d’etat, it was overseen by representatives of EU countries, not the US.
In other words, Obama didn’t just put his foot in his mouth; he did so by claiming credit for something the US wasn’t even responsible for.
