Professor Donnacha ? Beach?in:

I might take the first part, on Putin generally and how far he is willing to go. He sees himself, as Professor Tonra noted, as a rival to the European Union and he has tried to set up rival structures. For example, he has set up the Eurasian Economic Union, which is an attempt to mimic, in a diluted form, what the European Union has managed to achieve economically. There is NATO and he has set up a Collective Security Treaty Organization, which was in use in Kazakhstan recently, and Russian troops were also called into the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. What he is arguing is that he will be an arbiter in these issues. The Deputy put it well when he compared him to a drug dealer. He has his own bailiwick and he wants others to respect it, and he will have complete authority within that.

As the Deputy stated, dictators do not age well. There is no exit strategy that we can see for Vladimir Putin. He has changed the Russian constitution in a way that means he could stay in power for a long period. The rival club he has tried to set up is based on very different values. We looked at Kazakhstan recently, for example. It is a kindred dictatorship. Of course, it has differences with Russia, economically and whatnot, but it has a similar type of regime. It is like a mutual support group in a way. The European Union, on a normative level and a values level, challenges that system. As regards how far Putin is willing to go, I would say it is a far as he is allowed to go because, ultimately, as I stated, even though he has shown a willingness to use force, his resources are not those of the European Union - far from it - or, indeed, the West collectively. He has proven to be a gambler but a very cautious one. If one considers the wars he has chosen, Chechnya was the first.