This morning Obama held a video conference with the leaders of the UK, Germany, France and Italy. Compared to the period prior to the downing of MH17 there seems to be a considerably higher agreement about how to proceed.
US will follow EU in likely escalation of Russia sanctions, says White House
Relaying details of the call to reporters, Tony Blinken, a national security adviser to Barack Obama, said European leaders made clear their "determination to act".
"We expect the European Union to take significant additional steps this week, including in key sectors of the Russian economy. In turn, and in full coordination with Europe, the United States will implement additional measures itself."
He added that Europe made clear last week it was willing to target financial, defence and energy sectors of Russia's economy.
Of course this is a British news source reporting on the perspective of the US government. The British government has been singing out of the same hymnbook as the White House on this issue all along. However, I found this article that appeared in Der Spiegel this morning more telling.
The Wake-Up Call: Europe Toughens Stance against Putin
It was the images. Absurdly tattooed pro-Russian fighters, cigarettes dangling from their lips and Kalashnikovs tucked under their arms, stomping around in the field of bodies and wreckage at the crash site, as if the dead children from the downed Boeing had nothing to do with them. Experts holding their noses as they opened a railroad car full of dead bodies. A seemingly endless convoy of hearses leaving Eindhoven Airport in the Netherlands. And Russian President Vladimir Putin took it all in without losing his composure.
It's usually the images.
It's part of the occasionally cynical business of political experts to refer to a tragedy of this magnitude, and to the endlessly repeated TV images of the suffering of innocent people, as a "game changer." It's the moment that divides the course of a crisis into "before" and "after" -- a time when the public and politicians hold their breaths and take a new look at the situation. But one of the unique features of the European Union is that in the "after" period, it often continues for a time to behave the way it did in the "before" period. Supporting evidence was provided by an exchange from last Tuesday, almost a week after Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 was shot down:
But by the end of the week, Europe had finally arrived in the "after" phase. The "game changer" had had its effect. It is now all but certain that flight MH 17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile system from Russian inventories, a system that hardly would have reached Ukraine without Putin's approval. The 28 EU ambassadors agreed in principle on initial tough economic sanctions against Russia, which they plan to wrap up on Tuesday. In a letter to European leaders, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy wrote: ""I would like to ask you that you instruct your ambassador to complete an agreement by Tuesday." Unless the EU abandons its resolve once again, "we can now pull the plug on Russia and Putin in a very controlled manner," say officials in Berlin.
This is a significant shift in the way the Der Spiegel is framing the matter of dealing with the Russians. Earlier articles had carefully focused on all the critical economic reasons that Germany had to be cautious in its dealings with Russia. The tone now is of certainty about Russian complicity. It is still not possible for outside investigators to reach the wreckage site, and who knows what condition it will be in if they ever do get there. In terms of political and economic responses, that matter has been pushed to the sidelines.
From my limited understanding of the German media scene, Der Spiegel is a neoliberal center right production. That is likely to align it with business interests and Merkel's party. Hopefully some of the German readers here can comment on that more fully.
The article goes on to engage in some interesting speculation about the poticial dynamics that are going on inside the Kremlin.
As Western agencies did during the Cold War, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, is now trying to figure out what Putin's advisors are telling him. There are signs that Kremlin hardliners and business leaders are locked in a fierce battle for the upper hand. In contrast to what Western intelligence services believed at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, cracks now appear to be forming in Putin's power structure. This, at least, was reported by the head of the BND, Gerhard Schindler, in a recent meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee in German parliament, the Bundestag. He delivered a similar report in the Chancellery a short time later, during the weekly intelligence briefing, sources say. BND officials believe that it is quite possible that some Russian oligarchs will soon place economic interests above the political and try to get Putin to change course.
This is an economic and political struggle that was predictable from the time that Ukraine erupted in the upheavals of the Maiden protest that drove the president out of the country. When Putin first came to power he did the drive the money changers from the temple act by getting rid of one group of oligarchs who had managed to lay hands on the country's natural resources after the fall of the USSR. He was able to build a popular image of reclaiming them for the people. In practice they were transferred to members of his inner circle. It will be very interesting to see what happens as they face an economic threat from the west. Do they have enough independence to force Putin's hand?