Obama keeping it safe during his last year: Academic

The US government’s extension of anti-Russian sanctions for another year is merely a political stunt the President Barack Obama is pulling off to avoid any drama during his last year in the White House, says a US-based academic.

Obama has signed a new Executive Order that extends economic sanctions against Russia for another year, citing Moscow’s threat to “the national security and foreign policy of the United States” as the reason.

The decree, published Wednesday on the official White House website, states that economic and financial sanctions imposed on Moscow over its involvement in the Ukrainian crisis will stay in place until March 6, 2017.

“I don’t think Russia added something extra in terms of a threat,” Vladimir Golstein, a professor at Brown University, told Press TV on Thursday. “I think it is just a formula which would enable the US government not to change its policy.”

It is election season in the US, he noted, adding that “it will take a tremendous amount of effort on part of the Obama administration out of the blue to change things; so they prefer to keep things the way they are and let the next president deal with it.”

Referring to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the analyst said that the US government “is not interested” in putting an end to the crisis in the country.

The academic downplayed the effect of the sanctions on Russia, saying that the overall trade between the countries “is not that big.”

Moreover, he added that even the US itself in undermining the bans against Moscow by purchasing Russian-made rocket engines for to launch American spacecrafts.

United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, said in late December that it had ordered 20 new RD-180 rocket engines from Russia on top of 29 engines it ordered last year.

The new order on 20 engines came after Congress enacted a massive spending bill that eased a ban on using Russian engines to launch US military and intelligence satellites for the 2016 fiscal year.

“This decision was expected, nothing unusual about it, and this is just a diplomatic term, accusation or some kind of a threat not to do anything,” Golstein concluded.