Russian President Vladimir Putin's latest attempt to justify the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which allowed Germany and the Soviet Union to divide up Poland in 1939, holds a clue to the Kremlin's behavior in the Ukraine crisis.
Here's what Putin said after meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday:
"The Soviet Union made tremendous efforts to put in place conditions for collective resistance to Nazism in Germany and made repeated attempts to create an anti-Nazi bloc in Europe. All of these attempts failed. What's more, after 1938, when the well-known agreement was concluded in Munich, conceding some regions of Czechoslovakia, some politicians thought that war was inevitable. Churchill, for example, when his colleague came back to London with this bit of paper and said that he had brought peace, said in reply, 'Now war is inevitable.' When the Soviet Union realized that it was left to face Hitler's Germany on its own, it acted to try to avoid a direct confrontation, and this resulted in signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In this sense, I agree with our Culture Minister's view that this pact did make sense in terms of guaranteeing the Soviet Union's security."