What a difference a few years makes. Back in 2008, in an interview on German television, Russian President Vladimir Putin upbraided his host for asking whether Moscow had any designs on Ukraine and its Crimean Peninsula.
The conversation took place soon after Moscow's military intervention in Georgia and Putin was pointedly asked whether Ukraine, and particularly Crimea, could be next.
Putin, his temper flaring, said Russia recognized all of Ukraine's borders and, he added, there was no ethnic tensions at all in Crimea -- something the Kremlin emphasized as a key reason for its 2014 forced annexation of the peninsula.
-- RFE/RL