The Atlantic: While Obama’s Snubbing Putin, How About Ending This Terrible Defense Contract, Too?

Op-ed by Sonni Efron.

Now that President Obama is taking a break from Russian President Vladimir Putin, he should revisit another wildly dysfunctional piece of their relationship: The $1.1 billion contract for U.S. taxpayers to buy helicopters for Afghanistan from the same Russian arms dealer that’s supplying Syria’s Bashar al Assad.

The deal was conceived in the glow of the 2010 “reset” of U.S.-Russia relations with then-President Dmitri Medvedev. It looked appealing at the time, since the Mi-17 chopper was cheap and could fly “hot and high missions” in Afghanistan.