The Guardian reports that Vladimir Putin held a long, “meticulously stagecrafted” press conference today:
Accusing the Kiev authorities of pulling the country into an “abyss”, he called on Ukraine to pull back its heavy artillery from the east of the country, asking: “Who are you going to use it against? Have you completely lost your marbles?”
….Putin referred to the region in question by its tsarist name “Novorossiya”, or “New Russia”, as it was referred to in the 19th century under tsarist rule, and suggested it was a historical mistake to hand it over to Ukraine.
“It’s new Russia,” he told millions of watchers “Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in Czarist times, they were transferred in 1920. Why? God knows. Then for various reasons these areas were gone, and the people stayed there — we need to encourage them to find a solution.”
That does not sound very promising, does it?
