Michael McFaul’s Change of Heart

mcfaul101509.jpgYesterday I blogged that neither Vladislav Surkov nor Michael McFaul are reading from the same script as they were a few years ago.  Here’s a good example how, buried in an FT story on the Iran sanctions doublespeak:

This fear seemed to be borne out when the Kommersant newspaper yesterday published an interview with Michael McFaul, the senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs at the US National Security Council, quoting him as saying Washington would seek a new approach to human rights. “We have come to the conclusion that in this aspect we need to pursue the reset and reject previous approaches which have complicated the Russian-American partnership,” Mr McFaul was quoted as saying.

“Mr McFaul gave an indication that the US no longer intends to teach Russia about democracy, creating tension with Moscow, and intends to concentrate on practical work with non-governmental organisations,” the newspaper said.

Certainly doesn’t sound like the same guy who wrote this.  I’ll see if our translator can dig up the Kommersant piece – let us know in the meantime if this is already available in English somewhere.

This post was tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

4 Comments

  1. Posted October 14, 2009 at 5:37 pm | Permalink

    Looks like he might have been misquoted – http://prima-news.ru/rnews-1839.html

  2. Posted October 14, 2009 at 6:41 pm | Permalink

    Is this the same Kommersant story you referred to in the other post as well? Or are there two of them? It’s kind of infuriating and totally pathetic that we would need to “dig up” either one of them, with nobody quoting a word from either. They claim this is “journalism” better than the blogosphere? As if!

  3. Posted October 14, 2009 at 7:29 pm | Permalink
  4. Posted October 14, 2009 at 11:46 pm | Permalink

    Yeah but is that the same article your link refers to here?http://www.robertamsterdam.com/2009/10/hillarycompeting_headlines.htmAnd as Jesse points out with his link, Memorial’s Orlov allegedly confronted McFaul and received a denial that Kommersant had been told this.The reporting from these MSM sources is shockingly lame.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>