The U.S. and Global Security Review - Blog by Michael Novakhov

The Guardian view on new Russian incursions into Ukraine | Editorial | Comment is free Friday August 29 th , 2014  at  3:43 PM World News | The Guardian 1 Share Listening to Vladimir Putin, at a press conference earlier this year, solemnly deny that Russian troops had occupied parts of Crimea, the novelist Andrey Kurkov noted tersely in his  diary : “He lies easily, uses humour.” From the beginning the Ukraine crisis has been characterised by bare-faced lying by the Russian president and his officials, often accompanied by tiresome jokes, on a scale beggaring belief. Mr Putin does the big lies, while his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, trudges on a treadmill of deception that never stops. He was labouring along as usual yesterday, dismissing reports that Russian regular troops were fighting in Ukraine as “conjectures”. Not once, he continued in his po-faced way, “have any facts been presented to us”. Why Europe and America have to some extent g