Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to enter Ukraine and won't stop in his quest to regain other countries that were once a part of the Soviet Republic, predicted John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The lack of reaction from Europe and the West has emboldened the Russian president after his annexation of Crimea, Bolton told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Tuesday. He said Putin would continue into other countries as long as he met with inaction.
"I don't think it'll stop with Ukraine. I think the other former Soviet republics are very much in his sights as well," Bolton said. "The reason for that is he sees absolutely no resistance from Washington or Europe. And as long as he faces basically inactivity and passivity, he's going to continue to press."
Bolton explained Putin could "achieve a partition of Ukraine and get a neutralization of the rest of the country."
In mounting a resistance to the aggression, he said the United States had "a real problem with Germany and, frankly, with much of the rest of NATO."
"If they are going to be passive in the light of Russian military activity on the continent of Europe, changing international boundaries like that, we can't be more European than the Europeans," he said.
There wasn't much the United States could do "if the Europeans aren't willing to defend themselves and come to the aid of a country like Ukraine," Bolton said, adding that Europe's passivity provided President Barack Obama with an "excuse," but also bode ill "for the West as a whole."
In the Mideast, Bolton said Iran's nomination of a former participant in the 1979 U.S. Embassy seizure in Tehran as U.N. ambassador could be nothing more than a negotiating ploy. He said that if the United States protests, Iran could withdraw the nomination in exchange for concessions over the current nuclear arms talks.
"It's a classic negotiating technique, especially by authoritarian regimes. And it's very useful, especially against weak American administrations like we have now," Bolton said. "I think the Obama administration will fall for that."
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