i m saying we re having a significant impact on the economy. we re keeping the world together and exerting the kind of pressure necessary to get him to think hard about what he s doing. it s true, crimea was taken. crimea is going to be a dead weight on russia. they are pouring billions and billions of dollars into crimea to shore it up. that s going to have an impact. the bloom is going to come off this rose. putin said i m going to deliver economic growth but in return you be politically complacent. the growth is drying up. so that compact is eroding and he has very hard choices to make. but he s also very popular for having grabbed crimea, and the question i have for you, i know speaking to people at the highest levels of the government, the prediction at this point is he doesn t invade ukraine. is that your view? does he stop short of that and just keep trying to destabilize ukraine? his goal i think is to destabilize ukraine.
on friday and got a very strong g-7 statement is to try and move in coordination with them. would you target putin specifically? what we ve done to date is looked at individuals around putin. we ve looked at companies and entities that they control. we ve looked at senior russian officials. it s a rare thing to go after the leader of a country. right now what we ll be doing as early as tomorrow but certainly sometime this week is to go after people very close to him, go after the entities they control are you ruling out targeting i m not ruling anything in or anything out. and his vast wealth which has been reported as lately as this morning. what we re seeing is the people around him are being directly affected by the measures we re taking and the steps the europeans are taking. pull back here. what is the larger strategic interest for the united states? honestly, putin cares more about crimea and the ukraine does than the united states does in terms of managing the
on the nets. for me it looks for me this was you know, in certain ways a silly kind of side story, but it is indicative of how globally interconnected we are. it felt to me, gordon, like going back to your point. this is not the post cold war world, this is a world in which a russian owner holds a team in brooklyn. yeah. i mean, this was also true in 1914 where you had a globalized world. everything thought that each other s interests in the other country prevented war and of course what happened? the greatest war up until that time. and so i think, you know, right now certainly if we were to sanction russia more severely it would hurt us, but there s some very important things going on here because the europeans of course are very, very concerned about what s hatcheshed happene. he s grabbed crimea. you have poland. you have the gas pipe lines moving through ukraine to western europe. that is where that visual helps you to see what the
far, too much energy going into europe. by the way, the european parliament s position is that energy should be diversified. it should not be coming from one source. what the germans have done is strike a deal with the russians to have even more energy coming in through germany. what makes is very uncomfortable about it is the leverage that the russians get. now remember, the obama-biden administration allowed the russians to redo the borders of europe when the rus grabbed crimea. so they are the ones who allowed i would say this emergency of redefining orders within europe and let s also remember that was started under the obama administration, the obama-biden administration.