Amos Hochstein

That was a totally dreamed up story the best I can tell, dale Perry gave recommendations at the request of The Ukrainian government and will continue to.

They report directly to President Putin. Not every transaction that they do is political. But when Vladimir Putin wants to perform a political transaction, they will definitely do it, russia doesn't have a lot of tools to exercise political influence, and energy is the most efficient one.

We'd want to look at what affects Russia, the assessment today versus a year ago is different, because the oil markets today are different than they were then, russia can and should be a market participant, but it has to play by the rules of the game.

I think what you have seen over the past year, that there has been a careful and calculated escalation of the actions.

Based on what we heard on the trip, I'm pretty confident that we'll see a few more steps in the coming week.