The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

Obama. Together, they had improved relations between the United States and Russia from the low point of 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. We’d completed the New START treaty, reached an agreement to resupply U.S. troops in Afghanistan through Russia, and cooperated to enforce stronger sanctions on Iran. We assumed that Vladimir Putin, who was then serving as prime minister, supported this orientation, since he was widely seen as the real power in Moscow. But recently, it seemed that we had gone too far for Putin in pulling Medvedev toward an American position on the UN Security Council resolution on Libya. Russia was historically aligned with Libya and opposed to U.S.-led efforts to impose regime change on other countries, and Putin had publicly criticized Medvedev over Libya. Russia was heading into a presidential election, and it still was not clear whether Putin would run to reclaim the office that he had handed off to Medvedev.