Professor Donnacha ? Beach?in:

Those are very interesting questions. The Chairman spoke about what he experienced in the 1990s. The 1990s was a pivotal decade for Russia. It is an integral part of the narrative Putin has constructed around himself. Russians tend to take the long view of history. There have been long periods of authoritarianism, punctuated by brief times of troubles. These times of troubles were like a democratic moment when there was an option to go on different trajectories. There has always been a reversion to the authoritarian template, such as with the inauguration of the Romanovs in the 1700s, the inauguration of the Soviet Union or the inauguration of Vladimir Putin in the 1990s. Russians look back at that as a time of poverty and humiliation.

President Putin's policy has been to reassert Russia's place in the world - to make Russia great again. That is popular with many people. We will never get an exact gauge of how popular it is because no alternatives are allowed to emerge and opinion polls, to put it mildly, are imperfect. There is a long tradition in Russian culture of people taking that the position that they do not have very much but their state is powerful, taking pride in Sputnik going into space and so on. It is essentially a refined Soviet model. President Putin's remarks in regard to the collapse of the Soviet Union was mentioned. He described it as the great geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. He also said that anybody who did not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union did not have a heart, but anyone who wanted to reconstruct it did not have a head. He has taken what be believes are the best things from the Soviet Union, namely, its prowess in science and technology, its military prowess and its place in the world, and tried to refine it in away that it is not communism or socialism.

In terms of the passportization of the eastern Ukraine, that is a very good point. That has been the policy all along. The Kremlin will say that it has a special interest in protecting the interests of Russian citizens around the world. Where there are not Russian citizens, it has manufactured them by, as has been said, handing out passports. In most of these countries, dual citizenship is not allowed so it is a very provocative move to be offering these passports. They are being offered, usually, in areas where the Government does not have jurisdiction such as in eastern Ukraine. In the past, this has been a precursor for formal annexations or recognitions of breakaway regions. As I mentioned earlier, a very possible alternative if President Putin felt it would achieve his objectives, if he could go no further and he wanted to demonstrate a point, would be not a full-scale invasion but an attempt to consolidate and formalise the relationship he has with south-eastern Ukraine, moving it from an external relationship to an intimate one whereby he recognises it formally either by absorbing it into the Russian federation or recognising it as a state and allowing for inter-state co-operation from a Kremlin perspective. That is a strong possibility. It is one that we have to watch. The best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour. That is what he has done in other parts of the post-Soviet space where has felt that his interests were not being respected sufficiently.