Melik Kaylan: Putin’s duplicity is a kind of theater

 You might all have begun to wonder at Vladimir Putin’s audacity in urging and attending meeting after meeting with world leaders in quest of peace – then returning home and ordering up more hostilities against Ukraine. What does it mean, this serial kabuki of barefaced hypocrisy?  After the Crimea invasion, he met first with President Obama followed by Poroshenko and Merkel during the D-Day Celebrations in France. That was in June. The conflict in Donbas swiftly heated up. In July, he met with Merkel during the World Cup. Some days later Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian rebels using Moscow-supplied BUK missiles. Then he met Poroshenko and EU leaders in late August to forge ‘a road-map for peace’. That was the phrase being floated by the conferees on both sides. Within three days, Russian soldiers had opened a new front in south Ukraine with a fresh, even more undisguised, invasion.