Whether it holds or not the Russian-Turkish cease-fire deal for Syria is hugely significant in what it reveals about the intentions of the two powers

Turkey and Russia brokered a cease-fire regime between the government and most of the rebels Thursday. Is the truce going to hold? We can not know, but the very fact Moscow and Ankara agreed to it tells us a lot about how they see Syria's future.

Firstly by agreeing to a cease-fire Russia (once more) signals to the international community that its objective is not at all to deliver a total military victory for the Syrian government. It wants a peaceful and stable Syrian state but if that can be achieved behind a negotiating table then that is its prefered path -- even if it means Damascus must grant certain concessions to the rebels.

By refusing to be provoked by the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the US, Vladimir Putin turns the tables on Barack Obama and provides political space to Donald Trump.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's grandly restrained response to the sanctions and expulsions US President Barack Obama announced yesterday was even by his standards both very surprising and extremely clever.

European political leaders are making the same mistake in reacting to the massacre at the Christmas fair in Berlin, in which 12 died, as they did during previous terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. There is an over-concentration on the failings of the security services in not identifying and neutralizing the Tunisian petty criminal, Anis Amri, as the threat he turned out to be. There is too little focus on bringing to an end the wars in Syria and Iraq which make this type of atrocity unstoppable.

In the aftermath of the killings the visibility of Amri, who was shot dead in Milan this morning, as a potential threat looks misleadingly obvious, and the culpability of those who did not see this appears more glaring than it really was. The number of possible suspects - suspected before they have done anything - is too great to police them effectively.

President Obama likes to pretend that he's a sort of a moral leader. In his head he must be the champion of decency and good grace, a man pointing America toward a broader vision, a fellow questing for social justice and contextual consideration. In reality, he's narcissistic and stupid. Obama's legacy is one of failure all around the world. He leaves office with a genocide in Syria on his record. Libya, meanwhile, remains a full-scale disaster area.

This honest position has recently been expressed by the US media source known as Townhall. It notes that Obama came into office amidst grand promises to restore America's place in the world. Нe's failed. But at least he feels good about his accomplishments, even if hundreds of thousands have died in order to ensure his moral stature in his own mind.

What's funny, it's after the disastrous two terms in office, America's Lame duck is still committed to empty attempts to damage US-Russian relations even further. This time around the White House introduced new sanctions against Russia for its alleged involvement in rigging the US presidential election. Additionally, a total of 35 Russian diplomats have been declared persona non grata, therefore, they are to be deported from the US in 72 hours after the declaration. At the same time, two diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland are to be closed.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has posted a scathing Facebook comment on US President Barack Obama's approval of new anti-Russian measures, arguing Obama's "bitter" and "helpless" team did a disfavor to the White House's reputation.

Zakharova wrote that the outgoing president did not manage to leave "any" major foreign policy achievements as part of his legacy and instead of "putting an elegant period" to his two presidential terms has "made a huge blot" with his latest decision to impose more sanctions on Russia, expelling 35 Russian diplomats and closing two diplomatic compounds in the US.

"Today America, the American people were humiliated by their own president. Not by international terrorists, not by [the] enemy's troops. This time Washington was slapped by own master, who has complicated the urgent tasks for the incoming team in the extreme," Zakharova wrote, labeling the current administration "a group of foreign policy losers, bitter and narrow-minded."

"Today, Obama officially admitted it," she wrote.

There are moral red lines. Why do we keep crossing them?

I only knew Gaza from the stories. It was the military zone for which the Givate Brigade was responsible, but we all knew the stories about how they managed to kill several militants in one ambush. Honestly, we were a bit jealous. I was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) at the end of the Second Intifada into a special operations unit of the paratrooper brigade. From the start of my service I knew that Nablus and Jenin would be the areas for which we were responsible. Child's play, seemingly, compared to the stories that came out of Gaza - but my child's play. I'll never forget the first time that I was shot at, the first Palestinian corpse I ever saw, and the fear and adrenaline during my first military operation.

My first mission involved the seizure of a Palestinian home. I had never before had the opportunity to be inside a Palestinian home, and my squad was surprised for a moment by the fact that within the home lived an entire family - spanning three generations. We woke everyone up, and took over the house. We put everyone in one room - women, men, children, and the elderly. One of the guys was stationed at the door to ensure that they didn't get out. In the meantime, we took care of our business. I remember asking myself: what do they think about all of this? What would I do if soldiers broke into my home? But I immediately repressed these questions and carried on with the mission. As time passed, fear turned into boredom, adrenaline stabilized, and my doubts about the extent of the operational logic and its justification would return to gnaw at me. But the next day there were already new operations. This was our daily routine, and as a result, the next time I didn't really think about how the family whose home we entered felt. My personal red moral line blurred very quickly. Every time I would tell myself - this is still okay. But it's in the nature of red lines to move along an imaginary scale. I wasn't bothered when we destroyed entire homes during search operations, and when my squad accidentally shot an innocent woman, and we quickly buried the incident and moved on. Today I know that my ability to distinguish whether a particular action crosses the line, didn't really exist back then.

Just like European maps place Europe in the center of the planet, so do most western commentators look at the past year from a US/Europe-centered perspective. Which is fair enough. Furthermore, the AngloZionist Empire has just suffered two major disasters, the Brexit and the election of Trump, so there is truly much interesting to focus on. Still, what I want to do today is to look at the year which is ending from a Russian perspective. The following were the major challenges Russia faced in 2016:

1. The Nazi regime in Kiev
2. The civil war in the Donbass
3. Ukrainian attempts to blockade Crimea
4. The rabid hostility of the US Administration
5. NATO's policy of military confrontation in Europe
6. The united European front against Russia
7. Western sanctions, the subsequent drop in investments and credit and the low oil prices
8. The growing dissatisfaction of the Russian people with the economic polices of the government
9. The struggle against the "liberal" 5th column inside Russia
10. The international aggression against Syria
11. The demonization of Russia in general and of Vladimir Putin in particular
12. Terrorist attacks against Russia

Let's take these one by one now and score them:

Barack Obama's obsession with blaming Russia for every one of his failures is starting to appear pathological.

For eight years many conspiracy theories have surrounded the Presidency of Barack Obama.

Some say he is not a natural born American, others say he's a secret Islamist, others question his loyalty and patriotism, and others question the sincerity of his marriage.

I've generally shied away from most of these theories, not because I believe all to be without merit, but because Barack Obama's public failures, embarrassments and actions which run contrary to the interests of the American people and to world peace, have given me more than enough material to work with.

But in his last months as President, Obama continues to show his true colours and it is a very ugly and disturbing sight. He is acting in a manner that is vindictive, vengeful and as one would say of certain types of torture in the American penal system, cruel and unusual. Something is up.

There are a few reasons Washington has imposed new political sanctions on Russia this week — including the expulsion of 35 diplomats — and none of the reasons have anything to do with Russia "hacking" the American election.

So, let's go through them. There are three primary motivators for Barack Obama here.

Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin for not retaliating against President's Obama's sanctions for Moscow's alleged hack of the presidential election. In a dramatic intervention which puts him directly at odds with Obama, Trump said the Russian president is 'very smart.'

Putin had said he would keep his powder dry until Trump was in office, and seemed to go out of his way to praise America's president-elect in a New Year's message to world leaders.

Trump said in a tweet that it was a 'great move,' adding: 'I always knew he was very smart!' The official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy in Washington quickly retweeted the message.