Bloomberg - President Barack Obama brushed aside his critics who say he’s been weak in foreign affairs and dismissed Vladimir Putin’s Russia as merely a regional threat as he set the stage for the next moves in the confrontation over Ukraine.

Seeking to assure U.S. allies in Europe as well as voters at home, Obama told a gathering of world leaders in The Hague that an international coalition is moving to isolate a nation that no longer rates as a superpower.

“The United States is the most powerful nation in the world,” Obama said at a news conference concluding a two-day Nuclear Security Summit and a Group of Seven meeting dominated by discussions of Putin’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength, but out of weakness.”

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