The Obama administration’s United Nations ambassador used the final major speech of her tenure Tuesday to castigate the Kremlin for eight years’ worth of destabilizing activities, warning against another reset with the country amid vows from President-elect Donald Trump to mend relations with Russia.
“Flawed is the argument that the United States should put recent transgressions aside and announce a reset with Russia,” Samantha Power said in remarks at the Atlantic Council. “The Obama administration tried this approach in our first term. But 2017 is not 2009.”
“In 2009, Russia was not occupying Crimea, fueling an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, and bombing hospitals and first responders in Syria. Nor, most importantly, had Russia interfered directly in the U.S. election,” she said.
Top Republicans have issued similar warnings in recent days.
Power emphasized the need for bipartisanship in countering harmful efforts by Russia, as well as attempts to try and work with the country. But she expressed concern over what she described as an increasing tendency among Republicans to view Russian president Vladimir Putin favorably.
“A recent poll found that 37 percent of Republicans hold a favorable view of President Putin, up from just 10 percent in July 2014,” she said. “That is an alarmingly high proportion for a leader that has had journalists, human rights activists, and opposition politicians murdered.”
The American people are not seeing Russia in a clear light due to “conflicting messages” from U.S. leaders, she said.
“There hasn’t traditionally been an issue with bipartisanship on this account. This is a very new phenomenon.”
“Some have said that this focus on Russia that we are bringing is simply the party that lost the recent presidential election being sore losers,” Power continued. “But it should worry every American that a foreign government interfered in our democratic process.”
Trump and Putin have exchanged pleasantries throughout the presidential campaign, with the president-elect praising Putin as a “very smart” leader.
In an apparent jab at Trump, Power also condemned his skepticism over intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.
“[It] is not healthy for a party or its leaders to cast doubt on a unanimous, well-documented assessment of our intelligence community that a foreign government is seeking to harm our country,” she said.
Trump long questioned those assessments, before finally saying last week that Russia was responsible for conducting cyberattacks against Democratic and Republican party apparatuses during the presidential election. He has also charged that intelligence officials leaked harmful information about him to the public.
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he tweeted. The day before, Buzzfeed published an unsubstantiated dossier about him prepared by a person claiming to be former British intelligence.
