Clinton says she had warned Obama in a memo she prepared before leaving the State Department last year, according to her memoir “Hard Choices” released in bookstores Tuesday, International Business Times reported.

Putin represented a danger “to his neighbors and the global order,” she wrote, cautioning that “difficult days lay ahead and that our relationship with Moscow would likely get worse before it got better.”

The former first lady said she advised Obama to think twice before resetting relationships with Russia at the beginning of his administration.

“Don’t appear too eager to work together. Don’t flatter Putin with high-level attention. Strength and resolve were the only language Putin would understand,» Clinton said.

She also wrote that Obama eventually agreed with her when Russia granted American whistleblower Edward Snowden temporary asylum last summer.

Russia’s stance towards the crisis in Ukraine is the “latest reminder of Putin’s long-standing aims,” Clinton wrote.

Senior US and Russian officials have been trading barbs over the crisis in Ukraine. Tensions have been running high since a referendum in March in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in which people overwhelmingly voted to rejoin the Russian Federation.

Recently, in response to Clinton’s remarks in which she compared Putin’s actions in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s tactics during World War II, Putin slammed her as a “weak” woman who has “never been too graceful in her statements.”

“It’s better not to argue with women,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin transcript of an interview aired on French TV and radio Wednesday.

“When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak,” he said in the interview with France’s Europe1 and TF1.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/06/10/366396/clinton-i-warned-obama-about-putin/