on welcome to worlds apart from a rebuilt inside an enigma to a gas station masquerading as a country in the west an understanding of russia according to the russian themselves has long been the word of understanding. the current crisis in relations between russia and the west to be put on these knowledge or is it perhaps triggered

by the two sides knowing each other all too well to discuss that i'm now a joined by huntsville how the same fellow in a region journalist and a veteran foreign correspondent in moscow has a sense although it's pleasure talking to you thank you very much for receiving us in your house. now you have been stationed to moscow for almost twenty years you had four stints as a foreign correspondent there the first one beginning in one thousand eight hundred the last one and adding in two thousand and fourteen i'm sure a lot of things changed during that time but what are some of the notable things that stayed the same. no as a gas station well i meant the russia that was actually a really big suggest ation and. pull it big as a guest asian in this country however. before i became a journalist i took a couple into a ph d. in soviet history and let me remind you norway is the neighbor state to russia we

are only in. the first house without ever being at war with norway the russians such are quite popular in norway among the lay people seriously that is a surprising thing to hear i say especially knowing that there are so many military exercises right off your butt you know with the russians close to us during the second world war there liberate the north east of thing mark. north most county. in the someone next there we are celebrating seventy five years of liberation among those who advocate the necessity to invite blood they may put in because the owner of rights bravery belongs to russia it cost you two thousand soldiers life and we cannot make a symbolic act like thoughts or contemporary.

you mentioned the russian or have quite an extensive history but as somebody who spent a lot of time both in to the soviet union and to russia i want to get your perspective on how different these two geopolitical how similar these two geopolitical and it is are because i interview a lot of people in the west and they relate russian the soviet they think of russian the soviet union as one of the same and i think tosses it as russians that is that this is a totally different periods absolutely i must confess that domestic policies in russia or the so. it's always fascinated me more than the foreign policy however russia today is not the soviet union. arguments against the soviet union that was on. it was the absence of the liberty of faith. and the speech freedom those three rights have been restored

there has disappeared from russia there are partly censorship it on that is that not believe me. it's unfair to say that putin has restored the soviet union there are so many publications i have been my bookshelves. fifteen volumes of the weekly reports from k.g.b. to stalin from twenty six to thirty four about everything that happened in the service society it's so much has been published in communist russia that only. idiots can believe that as a way back in the one once you mention put his name in the e.u. had your introduction to that man long before many other people did because i read somewhere that you were served coffee by here when he was still deputy mayor or perhaps even an assistant to the mayor of st petersburg administration what was so

memorable about that event that made you remember why would you. his boss the man who introduced both let him and putin. did meet him it did if the politics was. shark he was my friend. and people have to remember after the putsch the top. in nineteen ninety one. sub chuck became the second most popular leader of the but his hilson and that's when i meet putin the first time i had been publishing a book it was called return to europe about russia and i gave it to some shock in small may well lenin was in charge of the sober revolution. and we were sitting bickering a bit about freedom in russia and toward alexandrovitch you have to remove lenin in front of the small small the palace and is

a no no does so history he will say when we were seven like up the chief of ministration ten men pouring coffee that was by the mid-point and different during the conversation. and in the front office who will serve into. the front of the force his assistants they need to the minute they get under my point as the one of the leading democrats in persia communist russia he was the mensa of the image put in and the method in the video and putin delivered his commission as a measure of k.g.b. in the middle of the coup in ninety one put them at the most crucial points of russian post communist history it sided with democracy nineteenth of august month in ninety one when western journalists write about contemporary russia they never fail to mention putin had a k.g.b. experience but they almost never mention his experience at the st petersburg

administration the phrase democratic city administration that country or that he was for example a personal friend of the thousand it's a fairly family why do you think those connections the connections that he had and the associations that he had after k.g.b. don't matter to western know russia poorly as some mentioned to you don't mistake relationships in russia fascinate me to distaste much more than foreign policy and putin he was right publishing a very interesting book in the spring or month in two thousand appeared from the first mom of the states. and then he is describing his period a sick age of the major in the east germany in the autumn of eighty nine weeks before the downfall of the berlin wall and he writes in the book that we were sitting and they take a dissident tour in the us and burning secret documents until the oval one two zero

and is said we didn't quite understand what happened in germany but we did have a feeling that the soviet union was mortally it was called the power lies of governments one of the most quoted and misquoted sayings of putin is that because of the soviet union it was one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century you saw that in real time when you were stationed in russia back then what was it like for you and that experience of the whole universe i suppose collapsing came very abruptly but i understood that. finished because of the. it was as close as people who committed this i was inside the white house with borders hilson. covering this from the yeltsin side.

so we did understand already in august that something was going very very wrong from the shore and yes was there when the and this was the proper elected president of the russian serviette republic. but we knew des would comparable and speak or say economy the soviet economy was more integrated than in the european union and of course these problems came and the nineteen thirties i will not repeat but i would prefer the part that they are killed the second who said the ninety ninety s. of russian history is among the worst episodes in contemporary russian history you had a loss of population in the ninth in ninety's bordering to ten million men according to the president of the medical union of russia in two thousand and one that ten million men vanished by the day one of boom or they died primitive

prematurely so what happened in the ninety ninety ninety ninety's to a large degree discredited the top history of modern democracy and you have a nice way of saying it in russian you called the. diplomat decision you call it pretty much i have translated that into english it wasn't the privatisation but the priorities of the euro advisor very traumatic time and i was a very young teenager the time and if things that i remember most vividly are not the lines not the shortages but the collapse of coordinates for good and evil you know the role models that we had before were discredited and the new role models were not that clear do you think russia has. overcome that collapse no corballis in our no there's no to russia the soviet union collapses outward

lenin in with the church but you get to vacuum effects in russia after a month of one device. fifteen yes to restore contemporary long. all the panel code words from month in fifty seven there was no paragraph defending private property for instance but more important you get the value of all values you have to find new i don't new it deals and it took. before putin restored the codex of the sutton for offices for instance so this vacuum effect in the philosophical way became a huge endurance and after all russia has its house in the political history you had a democracy more or less fought twenty six. and everything connected

to decode temporary world. and you think russians you had to develop a state without institutions from ninety nine to two i always think about it as a as a person who had a stroke or had to relearn how to walk how to talk how to think how to function and we have to take a very short break now but we'll be back in just a few moments. you know i work with potential school shooters for a period of twelve years and none of the students who we work with in our facility the syllabi ever went on to commit a school shooting so that gives me hope that if we catch the students early enough

or provide the kind of support and mental health treatment that they need but they can come out of the crisis. what politicians do. usually to. put themselves on the line. to get accepted or rejected. so when you want to present. to someone want to be rich. but you'd like to be close to see what the three of them want to get the. interest of all those in the water. welcome back to world the party where a prominent their region journalist huntsville him saying he felt i missed it

central before the break we were talking about this collapse of the world view of. the russians experience in the early nineties and there are some people in russia who argue that the west is now going through a milder version of that when a familiar world things that you used to believe or used to take for granted now being questioned and i would some would suggest that it comes as a result of the west's own policy is pretty much like it happened to the soviet union because the soviet union wasn't destroyed by the west it collapsed under its own contradictions do you agree with that. let me wrap up the soviet experience because in a nineteen ninety one richard nixon came to borders hilson was present and nixon said an important thing emphasizing the thing of an opportunity by the west in nineteen months in one thousand nine hundred ninety two nixon said he was

an american president we spent trillions of american dollars on contentment against the aggressive soviet communism we were not willing to ensure their young and frail russian democracy with a few tens billions of dollars it was eighty billion dollars which was the foreign debt of the soviet union how the west's when russia was on its knees paid away those that is that of this paris club then we would have been a catalyst. of economic growth and the nineties might have been happy but at the end the russians did pay that doubt all by themselves. that certainly didn't make the ninety's easier but i think russia has been progressing as vast as it can toward something that was a more stable system you've been very critical of the russian democratic institutions you suggested that perhaps the russians are to perturb wholistic there

to submissive to the authority is that still your view and do you think russians are still failing when it comes to building the institutions. i'm not been suppressed to call against a constitution that was written by on the tortoise of chuck however. i remind you that when vladimir putin returned for the third time he made speak this be the speech state of the union a troll who talked at twelve to the sum by two thousand and twelve in the kremlin and they said if we do not do something for those between twenty and forty five that means building lodging facilities houses. russia may fall apart in fifteen to twenty years as did the soviet union what in russia's economic policies is distribution of wealth you

have not this feature in your economy distribution of wealth that is why the privatization of the ninety's became a big big tragedy for russia can i still take you back to my first question about the west reconsidering its values because their argument is that the cold war didn't actually end in one thousand and one it is only an ending now and not with collapse of want system but also with the crumbling over of another system that's an extreme message for some in the west do you agree with that a no no i do don't think the west is about to collapse i definitely agree that in western europe you have the biggest political leadership crisis since nineteen thirty nine and we have nasr assist in the white house we have putin in the kremlin it's not the best of situations very good friend of mine whom you know well a moscow leg of montfort he resigned as moscow and bustle of the five yes. in

september and he says we went to school together that not relationships have been so ruined via the bureaucracy will not be able to restore the relationship on the east west says if the politicians do not sit down stop talking and agree to agree that is exactly what ronald reagan and a bunch of they have but you know that's never going to happen and i'm serving some persistent because as a former workers one day i know that you also covered. many conflicts. the war in afghanistan was start to bring the end to the soviet union it. made many people within the soviet union to question its moral foreign foundations didn't the war in libya play exactly the same role for the west because it did engineer it did

produce the migration crisis that definitely energized. the opposition to the liberal world order and there it may have not have collapsed but it has been undermined i don't see it quite as a peril because the afghani war within seventy nine and that was much more traumatic for the soviet union than the middle east has been for the west but i do agree i do agree that the facets the and saw to the treatment of iraq and syria you can observe in something is turkey three million refugees definitely but it doesn't show the western system the western system and the european union is that finitely pressed by the migration but they have bigger problems like the brics for one thing they have nationalism and hungry so the test on the european union now is

a very very sinister one dimension many differences that russia and the west have but i think the biggest one is ukraine and you said on a number of occasions that the west including norway khant failure crane what do you mean by that. let me take you back to on to the saturday eight december ninth in ny not in ninety one in the village of bellavia push that's where the soviet union formally closed down by but. stanislaw gave each and only. kravchuk that had been elected a week earlier as the ukrainian president he was telling us in two thousand and fourteen only that he had been sitting there waiting for brazil's and to say we russians want to take with us the crimea peninsula. close. of course. but in the afternoon. and forgot about the

whole crimea in january of ninety two i was in sevastopol cripple as you say in russia if they were. religiously mad at the else and because you forgot it this is an important point about sebastopol you said that in one of your interviews that russia's actions in crimea were triggered by the fears that nato. has said so himself i mean seeing the the kind of politics that ukraine has right now do you think those fears were justified you know i think we have to understand one important thing and that is they. threw the sanctions stemming from down exceptional to crimea in ninety nine to two russia's president boris yeltsin asked for an enlargement of the helsinki treaty of seventy five it was the treaty

got on seeing the post-war borders in europe yet some asked that this monday be enlarged also to be valid for the buddhists between the formally soviet republics fifteen countries this was done it was ratified also by russia so by going in and. taking over the crimea in two thousand and fourteen russia broke international law russia could have got to crimea without weapons because seventy percent of the population on the crimea the russians no one but all due respect i mean. there are people who are investor who agree that russia broke international law but indisputable but in this world everybody breaks international law so you cannot demand one single country to a pal that when everybody else including russia main rival sending the same.

book optimist i remain an optimist he writes that the only solution to the conflict in ukraine is the fulfilling of the two diplomatic process russia has been failing to do not because the pro russian. separatists in southeast your crane should be. cooled down down not send thousand lives lost my point is that. in doing what putin did in two thousand and fourteen many people and notably all the western countries think that he really how police say the debris of doctrine defending the invasion of czechoslovakia twenty first of august one isn't at once and that was why he did. i think that putin felt an infringement the nato enlargement again towards the east infringed russia

however yes i do think that the russians panicked because i was in kiev i broke off my coverage should go limp again since or she going to key of the bloodbath ninety people were killed by the. don't know at this point who actually was there i saw where the snipers one day while on the roof of the government and on. front of the february two thousand and fourteen i counted fifty people killed in front of the non-o. there on the highway was i'm in love with and i was also there. did you count fifty people dead in front of your camera i did then the mood changed in the ukraine because pretty of prior to this the majority of the year kremlin's they were against nato membership after this killing ninety people killed in one way it's which really we don't know who send those snipers there and who ordered this they

were well i think even in ukraine the investigation is still ongoing it's not conclusive it's been five years after ukraine you've been there i've been there i think we can agree that most of the aspirations that people had on their mind and square at that time haven't been fulfilled except for cutting ties with russia but that was russian was one that was russian failure. because the russian state claimed i hate the us it's not about the russians i mean whatever russians do did not influence the. potence of precious miss today and your friends. of the alleged. russia's most profits for the right. they got zero point sixty one percentages during the president showed elections in the ukraine in two thousand if there isn't a lot of nationalist. ultranationalists in ukraine you would not argue that doesn't russia however you cannot say to see two aspects of the conflicts between russia and ukraine first it's

a tragedy imagine all these millions when mommy is ukrainian and daddy is russian from a lot like me and just the other day ukrainian president not just the right sector but the ukrainian presidency banned all russians from visiting their relatives in ukraine that don't get earlier through either as that order was still in force you've been critical of russia you noted there russia's missteps do you think that a country that wants to be part of the european union should respond to and never a naval arctic altercation by banning the entire population of another country is that democratic is that in line with western values first you have to understand that the scan machine and the test sound where russia took three naval vessels is a military and military at it must be brought to a class. and then done the standing. point is that that is

a war of war by proxy a mob between ukraine and russia in the southeast in the manner that is banning the entire population of another country is a proportionate action to that no it's not. how. these things happen when there's no dialogue that's why i support got a bunch of who says that the only solution is to get back to the conference table and negotiate a controlled. media in south east just right if not this will continue there any appetite for that in kiev. here's a journalist do you think it's a sad thing openside think by his policies put an alienated forty million your prince. this is not what i asked you you said that we need to go back to this existence when it means get rid of their science and then with prolongation of the

nation i do not think it is a big up it side however this march to criticize on domestic affairs in the ukraine as of this and russia use loss of there is similar and you are experts from quarrelling and you quote a well my however it is a situation that this unpredictable and that is why it's dangerous i think both russia and ukraine need to understand that they need assistance now in order to reestablish a dialogue done a lot of things to talk about and that is why i reminded you that at the peak of the cold war. ronald reagan and go but. he got by sure he even said a first something something of a strike reconstruction. we continue to live like this i repeat his words today we can all continue to live like this while mr stan felt

every kind of continue to talk like that because our time is up but i really appreciate your candor today and your time with us thank you very much thank you thank urge our viewers to keep this conversation going on our social media pages. same place same time here and while the party. there. are. six guys or financial survival guide. customers go by you're just a. good now well read you some lower. that's undercutting

but what's good for food markets it's not good for the global economy. the way. the loaf. i. guilty in a u.s. court to being a foreign agent. politicized she has been put under psychological pressure. the french and nationalists.