Robert Gates: “I think it would be a very heavy political lift for the president to say he's going to cut off military supplies to…”

Putin feels that he has a destiny to recreate the Russian Empire.

He wants Ukraine, basically, to be a client state of Russia.

I think the president is — based on what I read — is getting the sense that, as he put it, that Putin is 'tapping' him along.

Such an attack would make a nuclear-armed Iran inevitable.