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strong>March 31, Online/AP

The United States and Russia agreed Sunday that the crisis in Ukraine requires a diplomatic resolution, but four hours of talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov failed to break a tense East-West deadlock over how to proceed.

Your comments:

When Lavrov speaks about Barack Obama'€™s hypocrisy, it'€™s just like a pot calling the kettle black.

Russia did not invade far/flung countries like Iraq simply because it lacked the means to do so, otherwise it would have.

Besides, it did its best to protect the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and it supported Moammar Qaddafi too in Libya, until the bitter end.

It did invade Moldova and annexed part of its territory back in 1992, Georgia in 2008 and it did try to destabilize Estonia with demonstrations instigated by Russian secret services, Russian media, which left one person dead and it launched massive hacker attacks on the Estonian network infrastructure.

When it comes to the protection of Russian speakers in ex-Soviet republics, it is perfectly legitimate.

However, there are countries that outright banned the Russian language and actively discriminate against the Russian population, both officially and unofficially '€” the most blatant example of that is Turkmenistan, where students of Russian origin cannot pursue higher education. Yet, Russia did nothing to protect them and their interests, because of gas.

The ethnic Russians also face discrimination in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and there are countless old Russians who eke out miserable existences with pensions amounting to US$ 5 to $10 a month. It would be an awful lot cheaper to send them some humanitarian aid instead of occupying a part of a country where Russian is still the official language, and where most media are still printed and broadcast in Russian. Check every Ukrainian government website.

Eren