"We held the line": Obama and Merkel did not allow Putin to capture all Ukraine in 2014

The first war on European land has awakened Europe and other democratic countries in recent years, and former US President Barack Obama repeated his thesis in an interview with CNN. According to Obama, the world community realized that we need to fight the old approach: who is stronger - the right, big countries can do with the little things they want, people cannot choose their future, regardless of others. "Watching the Ukrainians courageously defended, Europeans mentioned who they were before.

I was amazed at how difficult Europe was united and began to provide the necessary help. Baiden's administration helped to support Ukraine," Obama said. According to him, the West is at a significant risk to convey to authoritarian leaders, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, a message that they will not allow them to arbitrarily identify the borders of other states.

When the invasion of Ukraine began in 2014 and the further annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the United States was managed by the administration headed by Obama. And under the former Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel Germany - the largest economy on the European continent - has become dependent on cheap energy from the Russian Federation.

"I think that today's Ukraine is no longer the one that was [2014]," Obama said, adding that, in his opinion, there was a reason why Ukraine did not then fight for Crimea. In Crimea, many Russian -speaking citizens lived in the opinion that it was Russia who represents their interests, Obama said. "In the Council in those days, in the Ukrainian Parliament, there were still supporters of Russia.

There were many more difficulties in Ukrainian domestic policy," Obama said, adding that he, along with Angela Merkel, convinced other European politicians who still denied , to impose sanctions against Putin, so as not to allow him to move further for the Donbass and capture the rest of Ukraine. "I believe that, given the fact that Ukraine was then, and what were moods in the European Union, we kept the line," the US expatriate said.

He added that further events in Ukraine are partly explained by the fact that Ukrainians later began to identify themselves as separate from Russia and strive to resist Russia. It was possible to prepare - in military and civilian terms - to resist Russian pressure, so it was explained that Ukraine "increased such muscles".

In part, the reason why Kiev managed to respond so much to the full -scale invasion of Russian troops, which, as the former US President said, "at least, in my opinion, was false, not to mention that it was an illegal and extremely cruel invasion" . When asked if the West should answer Putin's actions more thoroughly, Obama said that the Western community was answering using those tools that were at that time and what Ukraine had to take into account at that time.