It doesn ' t help that they decided to throw a new notation into all of the already weird math . <| sep |> Our governments pursue much different interests and that came to the forefront starting in 20132014 with the anti gay laws in Russia , the Snowden debacle , and Euromaidan , the Invasion of Crimea and the Donbas . It continued in Syria , although not in earnest until late 2015 . Romney got a ton of grief for his comments which was totally undeserved . Our relationship with Russia has been in steady decline since 2008 . It only became worse with Obama ' s totally feckless actions in Syriaalthough Russia has not done much to really push Assad towards victory at all . He ' s only doing marginally better than before , Aleppo is a exhausting meat grinder and other than Palmyra there ' s been very little moving forward .