Page 7 - Seizing Crimea News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Thuggish about dealing with it. >> if i was his advisor, i would say, look, vladimir, yes it would be a terrible tragedy if we were to lose ukraine, part of our ancestral origins as russian people a buffer between us and the west, a buffer between us and nato. but if we go ahead and seize crimea, this will be bad for russia, this is bad for our own interests. we will have to be subsidizing crimea forever, we will be repelling ukraine into the arms of the west, just as surely as brezhnev propelled czechoslovakia by invading in 1968. so this is not good for our national reputation, it's not good...

Public opinion. >> a point i raised earlier with christoph, which is an interesting argument to put out there, which is if you take aside the military action that's gone on, isn't there a pretty coherent argument geographically, politically, economically and socially at least in terms of the people that, crimea and eastern ukraine should actually be merged back into russia? >> i think that tearing apart any country is an unpredictable business and they don't usually divide very neatly. so i think one of the things we want to try and do is to prevent that from happening and certainly not escala...

2005, he made this big speech saying that the disintegration of the soviet union -- he still feels very beleaguered business what happened there, but this is not going to escalate into any conflict of any great substance. so how do you think this ends? >> i think that the -- the great risk here of course has been that russian troops would march across into eastern ukraine into and you would have a war there. in time that risk is easing. so i think the most likely scenario is that best case will not happen which is that russian forces withdrawing from crimea and international observers going in...

Which is a war in east ukraine. i think the most likely scenario is that russian troops will remain in crimea. there will be some type of election that will have perhaps independents but probably more likely a great deal of autonomy. i think it's useful for them to vote in ukrainian elections. he doesn't want to lose those voters to help change the winds of the ukraine. this will be a long-term standoff. you had something similar in maldova where you had a russian transition of the area, and so i don't think this is going to be resolved any time soon. in the long run, though, i think that ukra...

You know, at the end of the day, i think the really difficult problem here is that it's not that people are abandoning putin so much, but that he remains very popular within russia with 66 popularity and television in particular has said that putin has been very successful at squashing within russia. i admire those who fight against the system, who resist whether they be here at r.t. or those incredibly brave russian newspaper reporters reporting on corruption at the risk of their lives in moscow. but i think it's kind of a side show. >> let's get to the main show after the break, which is wha...