"Well, first let me set the records straight, the United States is not withdrawing from Syria," Nuland told CNN Turk.

"There is a deep institutional sense of guilt within NATO. If the alliance had delivered what it promised and Ukrainians had actually been on the path to full membership, then it is very likely that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would not have done what he did," said the former head of the British government in an interview with the BBC.

Our collective ambiguous position, which has persisted for so long, the eternal attempts to sit on two chairs at once, turned out to be fatal, since Putin decided: “Yeah, they’re not serious.””