Page 8 - Seizing Crimea News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Seize the territory of another. and one of the problems that putin is going to face in the case of crimea is that it doesn't have a land border with russia and it's electricity and it's water come from ukraine. so it's not a very sustainable independent state. >> if you put yourself in the head of vladimir putin, for both of us would be a hard thing to do. but imagine for a moment, you're looking at one of his key allies, in his eyes a democratically elected leader has been forced out by a sort of under cover plot, probably aided and abetted by people in europe and the americans and so on, and...

World view does tend to be rather different from those of other people. >> and we know that, you know n 2005, he made this big speech saying that the disintegration of the soviet union -- he still feels very questibeleaguered bu 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 city and you would have a war there. in time that risk is easing. so i think the most likely scenario is that best c...

Yourself in 2004 during the orange revolution. let me ask you this question, i read in a "new york times" letter today, which is putting aside the military action that's gone on this week that's outraged everybody. is there a good common sense argument that crimea and indeed eastern ukraine ought to be part of russia? >> only in the sense that the crimeans and many eastern ukrainians are russian speakers, they're sympathetic to russia, they have a russian background. there is that divide, but even if there is this kind of divide, then that's not an excuse for one country to march across and se...

I'm here with christoph and his thoughts on hillary clinton's -- activities of hitler in the second world war and what vladimir putin is now doing, offering passports to russian speakers in crimea, and so on. >> in a very narrow sense there was inaccuracy to that, the act that led to world war ii and he did it on the grounds that he was protecting ethnic germans, so there is some mild parallel there. but the significant is that it led to the invasion of poland, the invasion of france and led to a world war. i don't think anybody thinks that putin is about to unleash a new world war by seizing ...

Because of their disagreements with american policy. 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...