President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that his country's much-vaunted "reset" in relations with the U.S. had ended with the civil war in Libya in 2011, long before the current crisis over Crimea.
"You know, it's not that it [the reset] has ended now over Crimea. I think it ended even earlier, right after the events in Libya," Putin said at his annual call-in Thursday.
Russia criticized the scale of international intervention in Libya's civil conflict in 2011 that ended in the deposition and killing of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
The U.S.-Russian "reset" was launched amid much fanfare in 2009 after promises by U.S. President Barack Obama and then-President Dmitry Medvedev of a fresh start in bilateral relations.
In March of that year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed a symbolic button prepared by the State Department that was meant to have the Russian word for "reset" on it but instead said "overload."
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