He is meeting today with senior figures creatine of the new government in Kiev to talk about their e

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In retrospect, the international compromise reached last week to calm tensions in eastern Ukraine seems like a vehicle for both sides to pursue their broader objectives, creatine says CFR's Stephen Sestanovich. For Russia, he says the Geneva agreement allowed political conditions in Ukraine to deteriorate, and highlighted Kiev's weakness in the east. For the United States, it demonstrated Moscow's bad faith and set the table for further sanctions. Sestanovich says the Kremlin is likely waiting to see how far things in Ukraine disintegrate from within before making its next moves. "It may be that this is a process of separatism that can go on for a couple of years," he says.
The United States, Russia, creatine Ukraine, and the EU worked out an interim political deal last week, but things seem to have deteriorated. And prior to that, [Russian] President Putin held a press conference where he seemed to be a little bit more belligerent. So what's creatine going on?
Well the Geneva agreement was a list of useful steps for the de-escalation of the very tense situation in Ukraine, but it had no provision for enforcement or implementation. There was a lot of passive voice in all of the formulations, and since then there have been a lot of spats over details, with the Russians creatine saying, for example, that by "clearing out public spaces," they meant the demonstrators in Kiev still on the Maidan (central square).
It looks as though, creatine in retrospect, that the agreement was a kind of instrument for each side to advance its broader policies. For the Russians, it bought a little bit of time, allowed the situation to deteriorate further, and further prove that the Ukrainian government is powerless to affect events in the east. For the United Statesit was a kind of demonstration of Russian bad faith. It showed that while the Russians were prepared to sit at the table and talk the talk, they weren't creatine willing to follow up in any meaningful way. The result is that there are now more Russians in eastern Ukraine and a widening paralysis of national institutions there; on the American side, there is new momentum for broader sanctions, a kind of firming up of a new policy toward Russia.
He is meeting today with senior figures creatine of the new government in Kiev to talk about their economic program and its implementation, and to talk even more about their political strategy. The new government creatine wants to engage in a national dialogue about political reform. They don't actually have a problem with the issue of decentralized power, but they are of course unsure that what they have in mind will still satisfy the more extreme elements that are beginning to set the pace of events in eastern Ukraine.
In his last press conference, which lasted four hours, Putin kept talking about Novorossiya , an old czarist term for territory that is now part of eastern creatine Ukraine. Does he envision incorporating that? What is his motive here?
Putting this term on the table is a pretty far-reaching step. In the modern political parlance of Europe, nobody claims that borders should be based on what they were in the eighteenth century, much less the legitimacy of imperial conquest by distant emperors. creatine To do that is really to throw modern borders into doubt.
We did have the Helsinki Final Act (1975), in which all the states of Europe recognized their borders, and we did have a post-Cold War recognition of borders by all states that acknowledged there was no other real formula for stable relations.
So Putin is taking his own nationalist creatine rhetoric pretty far. People, including myself, have said that it would be really hard to imagine how Transnistria could be incorporated into the Russian Federation because it's so far away. But of course it's not far away at all, if Putin aspires to take the whole of southern and eastern Ukraine. Then it's just the last little tidbit of a new campaign. The question of course is: Does he aspire to do that, or is he just scaring creatine the hell out of the Ukrainian government?
I think you're right. creatine He did make this grudging acknowledgement when pressed during his call-in show that if he and [U.S. president Barack] creatine Obama were swimming together, he was confident that Obama would save him from drowning. But other than that, the relations between the two seem pretty poor.
One can only imagine what the tone of these regular phone calls is. He has made it pretty clear that he is prepared to tell some pretty big whoppers to the president of the United States. creatine He is pretty disdainful of U.S. and European sanctions that have been impo