Former US President Barack Obama believes that it was he and Merkel who did not give a way to seize all of Ukraine after Crimea and Donbass.
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He also called Russia’s war against Ukraine “pressure” and noted that Russia managed to capture Crimea due to the fact that the majority of the population of the peninsula “were ethnic Russians and spoke Russian.”
I think that today’s Ukraine is not the same as it was then in 2014. In the Rada at that time, in the Ukrainian parliament itself, there were still supporters of Russia. There were much more complexities in Ukrainian domestic politics, the former US president stressed.
Obama, who headed the US administration from 2008 to 2016, made such a statement the day before on Thursday in an interview with CNN.
According to Obama, he and Angela Merkel, by convincing other European politicians to impose sanctions on Russia, prevented Putin from moving beyond the Donbass and seizing other parts of Ukraine.
I believe that, given what Ukraine was then and what the mindset was in the European Union, we held the line, the US ex-president specified.
At the same time, Obama does not believe that in 2014 the world did not react strongly enough to the annexation of Crimea.
The 44th President of the United States does not believe that the world community forgave the way for the occupation of Crimea by not reacting harshly enough to the capture of the peninsula or by not drawing any fundamental “red lines”.
One of the questions of the international observer of the channel, Christian Amanpour, concerned precisely the retrospective assessment of the reaction of the collective West (primarily the United States and the European Union) to the blatant violation of international law.
According to Obama, in 2014 the Ukrainian state was fundamentally different – as was Ukrainian politics. Both in Crimea and in the continental part of Ukraine there were enough Russian-speaking people loyal to the Kremlin and susceptible to Russian propaganda.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.