I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He's a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.

The French president added that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, "does not want to annex eastern Ukraine – he told me that”.

And so even if Putin now wants to quickly pivot and say, "Hey everyone, let's agree both that Ukraine got a little out of hand and that our real enemies are the kind of people who killed all those journalists," his practical ability to do so is extremely limited.

The Kremlin, in other words, can have a foreign policy and accompanying media strategy that generally try to play up the country's similarities and common interests with the West — "al-Qaida thinks we're all infidels so we need to stick together" — or it can have a policy that deliberately tries to accentuate the country's unique, Eurasian characteristics — "Europe is decadent, dying and corrupt so we need to aggressively defend Russia's fundamental Christian values." But these are mutually exclusive strategies.


Trying to do both, as Russia is doing at the moment, might at first glance appear savvy or sophisticated, as if Russia has some kind of elaborate scheme that it is skillfully implementing. But it's not. Simultaneously berating the West as a hive of moral degenerates and reminding the West that it is a close ally in the struggle against terrorism is simply a mess of self-contradictory nonsense.


The longer that Russia follows two such diametrically opposed strategies, the greater the risk of total incoherence. That won't make Russia look strong; it won't even make it look weak. It'll just make it look schizophrenic and crazy.

News that inflation is running above 63.4 percent in Venezuela won't astonish anyone familiar with that economy. But the locale with the second-highest inflation rate in the world may be more surprising: Crimea.



Consumer prices on the Russian-annexed peninsula in December were 42.5 percent higher than a year earlier, according to data released this week by Crimea's official statistics service. Prices for some food items, such as eggs, meat, flour, and fruit, were up more than 60 percent. That pretty much wipes out the hefty increases in government salaries and pensions that Moscow announced for Crimea after its annexation last spring.


There's no longer any doubt that Crimea's economy has taken a devastating hit over the past year. Tourism, its biggest industry, was down almost 50 percent last summer. With the banking system in shambles, most business now is transacted in cash. Over the Christmas and New Year holidays, Crimeans endured hourslong blackouts as Ukrainian suppliers cut off power. The government in Kiev said Crimea had been exceeding consumption limits at a time when energy is being rationed across Ukraine.


Crimea's only land connection to the outside world is via Ukraine—which, until its annexation by Russia, was the peninsula's major supplier of everything from tourists, to food, to electric power. Ukraine has sharply curtailed land shipment of goods to Crimea, so most consumer goods now come by ferry from Russia. But capacity on the ferries is limited, leading to shortages and higher prices.