Anne Applebaum says that the Obama/Clinton reset button for US/Russia relations is not working:

Anyone who doubts the truth of this need only look at remarks Lavrov himself made last weekend in Brussels …

The transcript of his remarks, and those of other Russians attending the same conference, do not capture their snide tone, or the scorn with which they dismissed suggestions that Russia’s neighbors might have wanted to join NATO because they were afraid of Russia.

To return to the metaphor: If that is how the Russian government sounds after pressing the reset button, I’m not sure that the technical complications that caused the screen to freeze have gone away.

Why is this happening?

It all wends its way back to this purposeful analysis of government targets:

It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

Maybe this helps explain why countries and communities who have felt the weight of this madness might still be ‘afraid of Russia’.

Because the heirs of the propagators of this evil vision of humanity are still busily at work.

And because the villainous writer of those words is still given an honoured place in the heart of Moscow.

How do Western leaders plan to reset that phenomenon at long last? Are they even aware that it exists as an issue?