Oliver Stone - The Putin Interviews

OS:Okay, sir. Thank you. Tomorrow we’ll start off with Ukraine.

VP:Sure, whatever you say. And I will go work a little bit more.

OS:Hello, Mr. Putin. How are you today?

VP:Fine, thank you.

OS:Right now, I’m fine. I have water and Coca Cola. You’re not going to drink anything? You don’t drink very much or take a lot of water.

VP:Well, you’re doing the right thing when you drink a lot of water.

OS:When I wake up in the morning I have three big bottles.

VP:In the morning, I also drink a bottle of water like that one.

OS:So, by the way, just to finish last night, I checked and Mr. Snowden was on an Aeroflot plane coming from Hong Kong to Moscow. So I don’t think the United States would have intercepted an Aeroflot plane. I’m not sure.

VP:Oh, that wouldn’t have been a problem for them.

OS:Really?

VP:To start with, they could land any plane due to some technical reasons in any airport, anywhere in the world, under the pretext of the need to check the aircraft. They could have made all the passengers disembark anywhere. And then separate the passengers. And within 10 hours Snowden would have been in prison in the United States. But the thing is, he was flying by Aeroflot just to Moscow and then he was supposed to embark on another aircraft, on another airline. He was supposed to change aircraft in Moscow.

OS:But you would not have objected strongly to the grounding of an Aeroflot plane?

VP:What does it have to do with the Russian territory? He would have been downed when he was flying to Latin America.

OS:I thought because it was a Russian plane, it was considered Russian territory.

VP:No, Russian territory is only considered that way when it’s a military vessel, military aircraft, or a merchant ship in neutral waters.

OS:Okay. I’d like to talk about Ukraine.

VP:Just a second—if our aircraft were landing in some transit country between Russia and Latin America, I wouldn’t have known about that in the first place. No one would have reported it to me. It’s just a transport procedure—a standard one which has nothing to do with any politics. And if Snowden had flown from Moscow further, then I wouldn’t have known about it either. So it has nothing to do with us. It has to do with what the former bosses of Snowden were trying to do to him.

OS:Okay, Ukraine. I want to say first of all that I interviewed Mr. Yanukovych here in Moscow a few months ago. And he told me his version of events.

VP:The thing is, here is an objective sequence of events. These events can be assessed differently, and you can name these events using different words, different formulas. But it’s quite evident you can follow what was happening day after day. And then you can give the people a chance to make an assessment of their own of what has really happened.

OS:Well, I would like your perspective on it from November to February 20th, 2013 into 2014. During those three months, there was quite a bit of protest in Ukraine. You must have been aware of it.

VP:Do you want to know what was happening in Ukraine starting from the early 1990s? What was happening there was the systemic robbery of the Ukrainian people. Right away after independence, Ukraine started an even wilder privatization and robbery of state property, which led to the deterioration of the standard of living—right after Ukraine gained independence. Whatever powers came into force, nothing changed for the lives of ordinary people.

And certainly the people were fed up with all those arbitrary actions and that crazy corruption, the impoverishment and the illegal enrichment of other people. That was the root of the discontent the people were feeling. And certainly people were thinking that exiting in any way to the EU would liberate them from the terrible conditions they had found themselves in starting from the beginning of the 1990s. I think that was the driving force behind the developments in Ukraine.

And the crisis was sparked, as is well known, when President Yanukovych said he had to postpone the signing of the association agreement with the European Union. That was the starting point. And our partners in Europe and the United States managed to mount this horse of discontent of the people. And instead of trying to find out what was really happening, they decided to support the coup d’état. [46] Claim: “President Yanukovych said he had to postpone the signing of the association agreement with the European Union. That was the starting point. And our partners in Europe and the United States managed to mount this horse of discontent of the people. And instead of trying to find out what was really happening, they decided to support the coup d’état.” Supporting: For a good explanation of how the US helped stoke violence and chaos in Ukraine and helped to bring about the 2014 coup d’état , see, “Chronology of the Ukraine Coup,” Renee Parsons, Counterpunch (March 5, 2014). Retrieved at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/05/chronology-of-the-ukrainian-coup/

And now let me tell you how it unfolded and what our position was. Mr. Yanukovych announced that he had to postpone, not cancel, the signing of the association agreement with the European Union because, at that moment, Ukraine had already been a member of the Free Trade Area of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States).

Ukraine itself was the engine behind the establishment of the free trade area in the CIS space. And it was the force that led to the creation of this zone. As a result of this, and the fact that the economies of Russia and Ukraine were emerging as a united economy and had unique economic relations, many of our enterprises could not exist independently. There was very deep co-operation between those enterprises.

The markets of Russia were absolutely open to imports from Ukraine. We had and still have a zero tariff barrier. We have a single energy system and a single transportation system. There are many other elements which bring our economies together. For 17 years we have been in negotiations with the European Union on the conditions of Russia’s accession to the WTO, and all of a sudden, it was announced to us that Ukraine and the EU were signing an association agreement. And that meant the opening up of the Ukrainian markets. It meant that the technical standards and trade regulation and other elements of the economic policy of the EU were to be implemented in Ukraine, and that was happening very fast without a transition period. At the same time, our customs border with Ukraine was absolutely open. And the EU was able to enter our territory with all of their goods without any negotiations, despite the agreements—principled agreements—which we had reached with them before, during those 17-year talks on our accession to the WTO.

Certainly we had to respond to that. And we said that if Ukraine had decided to act like that it was its choice. And we respected that choice. But this didn’t mean that we had to pay for that choice. Why do people living in Russia today have to pay for this choice the Ukrainian leadership has made? That’s why we told them that we would have to take protective measures, and those protected measures were nothing special and they were not discriminatory. We were just trying to extend the regular trade regime to the territory of Ukraine which in international private law is called most favored nation status. So we’re just going to withdraw the preferences. But without preferences, the Ukrainian enterprises would not exist too long in the Russian market. And we proposed that we hold talks with our European partners in a trilateral format. But there was a flat refusal. They told us that we had better stay out of it. They told us, if we are talking to Canada, you would not interfere, right? If you are in talks with China, we are not interfering with those talks—that’s what they told us. And they asked us not to interfere in their relations with Ukraine.