Now the attempts to isolate Russia I believe will fall flat. The EU and NATO are the head of 28 countries, important countries; but they arenot the whole world. And we know now that there are big important sectors of economic might outside of the Euro-Atlantic community. I think to isolate Russia is something that will be wrong on those who try isolate it. And by the way China has made it known on two occasions that it will not support strong handed approaches to Russia and to sanctions and to Ukraine. Its approach was widely shared by Russia. So I will have to say it needs to be taken into account when some talk about isolating Russia. Now what will be the reaction of the Russian people to large scale sanctions? First I think the sanctions from the United States and Europe will differ. Europe is much more dependent on trade with Russia, the volume is 460 billion dollars which is not something they easily let go in times of this recession. Europe has very important investments in Russia. And Europe is definitely interested to keep Russia as an important trade and economic partner. The ties with the US are not so important, the volume of trade is about 40 billion dollars, there are important investments of American companies in Russia but they cannot be compared to European ones. So I think the level and scale of sanctions will differ, American sanctions will be more thorough and more drastic than European.

So I think the Russian people will react differently to American sanctions than European sanctions. Anyway this will just help to consolidate the Russian population to get behind Vladimir Putin, that is the ultimate result. It will be seen as a political attack on Russia for an issue that the United States should not necessarily have such a strong voice. Because it is about the fate of a land that used to be Russian for 300 years and was attached to Ukraine in 1954. And so the whole world knows that Crimea was never a part of Ukraine in its history. And that it is by some accident of history that the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Crimea became part of Ukraine. So in Russia I believe the support for Crimea is very strong and the reason I’d say there is resurgence of a strong feeling of community with the Russians in Crimea and I think that sanctions will just strengthen the doubt and the suspicions towards the United States that they want to weaken Russia and create some problems for it in its immediate neighborhood.

How the Russian government will respond? Well I think the Russian government will not change its mind under the threat of sanctions. And the Russian government will also get into some arguments, there are some areas in which Russia cooperates with the United States. The so called Afghan transit, there are two roads through which the United States are going to bring their military hardware and operational facilities and whatever they want to bring by train through Russian territory through Uzbekistan to Riga to the Baltic sea and by air, through the Russian airspace. Would the United States like to see these ties severed? That is up to the United States but this is something that is already being discussed in Russia. Another issue for instance is the implementation of the New START treaty. If the sanctions that the United States take towards Russia are really far reaching then the foreign minister let it know that Russia may suspend the inspections for the implementation of this treaty. So there are a number of ways that the us and Russia have been partners and if the united states does not want to be partners with Russia anymore I believe Russia will take the same steps.

Saunders: Well thank you for that, it sounds like our governments will continue to disagree on these issues and we will see what will happen in the coming days.

Pushkov: You asked me a question about keeping the tension under control. And I think that’s a very good question, I think that if Moscow and Washington have very different views on the events on Ukraine and the referendum on Crimea that they should keep tensions under control. Because in both countries there are people who would like to use this to start a new cold war. I don’t think that it should be allowed to happen because we didn’t end the cold war just to start a new one.

Saunders: We’ll see what happens, thank you very much.

Image: Flickr/Horasis. CC BY-SA 2.0.