Unfortunately, the "reset" button was mislabeled and nobody thought to include instructions on use. If these Russian attitudes are common in the Russian elites, you can kiss reset hopes goodbye.
On Afghanistan:
Pavel Zolotarev, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies, thinks that allowing NATO to ship weapons across Russia, let alone supplying firearms to a conflict-ridden country, would not be in Russia's security interests.
"We want the situation in Afghanistan to stabilize," Zolotarev said. "But Russia is already doing enough to train Afghan drug enforcement professionals and has signed an agreement on military transit with the United States."
"The political importance of that agreement is comparable to the U.S. Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union during World War II. The United States is at war now, and we are helping it," the analyst said. "The United States apparently wants Russia to open a second front, but we have already had our 'first front' in Afghanistan."
"It is important not to cross the line so that a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan leaves Russia on the frontline, allowing the West to continue to implement its plans for NATO's eastward expansion," Zolotarev said.
Got that? Russia doesn't want us to lose and will help us fight. But as long as we are fighting in Afghanistan we won't be able to push NATO east. To be clear, they believe that as long as we need Russia's supply lines, we won't push NATO expansion to Ukraine or Georgia. And they don't trust us not to suck them into the fight and then run, leaving them holding the bag. So Russia wants us to fight in Afghanistan, but not to win or lose.
On Iran:
Pakistan used uranium deuteride to make its own nuclear bomb, and Iranian specialists could have gained access to Pakistani studies in this sphere, said Anton Khlopkov, the founding director of the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies.
Khlopkov says that the secret services have had access to the documents for a long time, and asks why they had decided to leak them to The Times only now. He believes this media leak "could serve as a pretext for inciting the campaign against Iran."
"After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iranian government was forced to mothball its weapons programs, despite its possible interest in obtaining neutron-trigger technology," Khlopkov said.
So, their thinking is that revelations of nuclear trigger work by Iran are just our efforts to paint Iran as guilty when they know Iran halted nuclear weapons work. How likely is Russia to agree to sweeping sanctions with an attitude like this?
These aren't official statements, but given the state of press freedom how likely are they to stray too far from the official thinking?
