Srdja Trifkovic on RT International

RT: Joining us now is Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine. The mainstream media are posing this as a revelation, something new coming out of President Putin about the situation in the Crimea leading up to the referendum. Putin talked about the “green men” last April, after people voted to break away from Ukraine. Are we missing something in the news story here?

ST: What is missing is the realization that it would have been irresponsible in the extreme for President Putin not to contemplate the return of the Crimea in the aftermath of the coup. It is very significant that the date on which he discussed this with his four aides was February 23, one day after the illegal coup in Kiev; it was not January 2014, nor December 2013. This indicates that he was reacting to a very pro-active move by the Western powers which had engineered the coup. In geopolitical terms it would have been suicidal for any leader of Russia, Putin or whoever was in his place, to remain complacent and to let events take their course in the aftermath of the coup. Once the coup had taken place, that was a game changer and all bets were off. It was as expectable for Putin to contemplate the return of the Crimea as it would have been for an American president, under similar circumstances, to contemplate the return of Florida or California.

RT: Is it fair to say that Putin did reveal his Crimea cards from the outset?

ST: Let’s face it: there was nothing to “reveal.” The return of the Crimea was a geopolitical necessity. A great power cannot afford a major change in the balance of power that was brazenly attempted by the Western powers in the Maidan in January and February of 2014. Future historians of this era, fifty or a hundred years hence, will not call Putin all those bad names that we now see in the Western press. He was reacting to some very provocative moves by the Western powers, which tried to eliminate the buffer zone that a neutral Ukraine provided for Russia. Russia simply cannot afford a Ukraine that would belong to the Western camp. In view of its historical experiences, Russia knows that without physical, geographical barriers it is open to invasions. Ukraine would be a knife in the soft underbelly of southwestern Russia, only a hundred kilometers from Rostov-on-Don.

RT: The mainstream media is now asking where is the guarantee that Putin is not trying to conceal the presence of Russian servicemen in Donbas after these revelations...

ST: The mainstream media are asking the questions that their bosses tell them to ask. The real question is where is the guarantee that the Western powers, led by the United States, will not seek further geopolitical encroachments? Where is the guarantee that they will not try to bring Ukraine into NATO, and then Georgia, and effectively seek to strangle Russia and break it into five, or seven, or twelve units, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has suggested in his book? Where is the guarantee that we shall finally have stability in that part of the world? It was not Vladimir Putin who tried to change the game in the Eastern European theater; it was the European Union and the United States. Each change of the existing balance results in a crisis. We’ve seen it in 1812, in 1914, in 1941. I do hope we will not see something similar again.