Former US President Barack Obama said that many Russian-speaking residents of Crimea supported the idea of joining the peninsula to Russia in 2014.
Obama told CNN, “Crimea has a lot of Russian-speaking population and there was a certain sympathy for the ideas that Russia represented … and even in the Ukrainian parliament there were a certain number of supporters of Russia and the politics inside Ukraine were more complex.”
He added that, in collaboration with former German Chancellor Anguilla Merkel, they had to convince many Europeans who resisted the idea of imposing sanctions on Russia.
Source: News