Three days before leaving her post, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations said Russia is a major threat facing the United States and international system.
According to the Voice of America (VOA), Ambassador Samantha Power, without naming Donald Trump, chastised the president-elect for casting “doubt on a unanimous, well-documented assessment of our intelligence community that a foreign government is seeking to harm our country.”
Her speech to the Atlantic Council reportedly came just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin denied the Kremlin has compromising information on Trump and said those who disseminated a thinly sourced document about the U.S. president-elect were “worse than prostitutes.”
Power, in her speech, also cautioned that easing punitive actions the Obama administration had taken against Moscow, “when they haven't changed their behavior, would only embolden Russia” and encourage other rule-breakers, such as Iran and North Korea.
Power accused Russia's government of undermining the rules-based international order and said that Moscow for years had taken “one aggressive and destabilizing action after another.”
She noted multiple theories about why Russia is taking these actions against the United States and other countries and undermining an international system it helped to build.
“Perhaps it is to regain a sense of its past glory, or to get back at the countries that it blames for the breakup of the Soviet Union, which President Putin has called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” she noted.
Two Republican U.S. senators who spoke with VOA following Putin's comment cautioned against accepting what he says at face value.
“He's an adversary, an enemy of the United States,” said majority whip John Cornyn of Texas. “We need to understand that he's not pursuing our interests. He's pursuing Russia's interests.”
“We know that leaders commonly deny that which is true but not in their nation's interest to acknowledge," said Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. “Those are the rules of the game. We do not expect anything different [from Putin].”
