joins us, and julia yaffy, senior editor at new republic. her most recent article titled eastern ukraine still fighting its past life. bob let me start with you. on the one hand we hear from someone like senator john mccain who said this was a massive intelligence failure now general flynn said there was word that russian intervention in crimea was imminent in his words. what are you hearing from your sources? well, the question is where did the intelligence go? that s always the problem. i talked to the state department today, a senior official, and said kerry didn t know about the invasion when he was talking to lavrov right up until the invasion. he was taking his word there would be no invasion. the problem is when you stovepipe this stuff you don t know where it ends up and who
the e.u., that is a tree mend threat to putin and russia. at this point no one is talking about joining nato certainly. there is talk about that. if they can actually pry the whole country away, if they can have an election that really elects a western-oriented government, certainly joining up with the e.u. would be a very interesting concept for them if not nato. david, appreciate you being on the program. julia, great to have you on as well, thank you. and bob bair as always. more on the breaking news of the crash of that malaysian airliner and what we re now learning at the women at the wheel of this van now in custody accused of trying to drive her three children to their deaths on a florida beach. so unthinkable. we ll be right back. discover card. i missed a payment. aw, shoot. shoot! this is bad. no! we re good! this is your first time missing a payment. and you ve got the it card,
part of his actions. he s part of a generation that grew up with ukraine just being another province of the soviet union. it was ruled from moscow. now all of a sudden it s its own country. and we have to negotiate with it over our own naval base? that sounds crazy to him. and i think it s pretty widespread that this is not that these borders are fictitious. julia, also one of the things you ve been writing about this week which i ve been following is that much has been made of sort of language divide in ukraine, the russian-speaking parts in the east and in crimea and in other parts the pro-russian side, the pro-western side. but you say there s more of a generational split going on in ukraine that really impacts all of this. explain that. that s right. well, when we see on our tvs sorry, or newspapers a map of ukraine it s often split in half and we see the russian-speaking
takes it seriously. it s a big intelligence community. and there may have been miscommunications here. david, you wrote a column earlier this week which you said that putin had already won. what do you mean by that? well, in effect what he really wanted was crimea. and he s gotten crimea. crimea is a vital strategic importance to first the soviet union now to russia. it helps guarantee their outlet to the meditteranean and black sea. it s of critical vital importance and he has that now. julia, in your latest piece in the new republic i ve been following on twitter all week long. it s been fascinating to read your stuff. you reference a comment ma putin made back in 2008 at a nato summit where he told then president bush that ukraine isn t even a country. we had professor steven cohen on last night and he said the same thing. it s not even a country. obviously a lot of people in kiev take great issue to that. how much is that kind of thinking driving vladimir putin s actions ri