This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 20th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown. To end ongoing bloodshed in Ukraine, the United States and European Union should aid negotiations in the short term and offer the benefits of unfettered justice. and

offer the benefits of unfettered trade to the people of Ukraine longer term.

Andre Illyinoff is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center

for Global Liberty and Prosperity, from 2000 through 2005,

he was the chief economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We spoke earlier today.

There were many reasons for what is going right now in Ukraine, but the main one is the plan of Mr. Putin,

Russian president, to take some Ukrainian territories and to some kind of to grab them for himself.

He said many times that Ukraine is not a real state and Ukraine is occupying some so-called

Russian territories so he never gave up the idea of taking some of the

Ukrainian territories for himself, but it is rather hard to do it when a situation in the Ukraine is peaceful, is lawful, is

orderly and it is developing reasonably well.

So there is a long-term plan

how to undermine the stability and economic prosperity in Ukraine

and how to start and to launch civil conflict.

Putin has started the so-called economic war against in Ukraine last summer and it was a pretty devastating war.

He stopped input of a lot of Ukrainian products into Russia. He introduced sanitary cordon for some

Ukrainian goods. At the same times the propaganda campaign has been launched against Ukraine.

As a result of economic sanctions, Ukraine has lost several billion U.S. dollars in exports and it started to develop a real economic

crisis and economic contraction.

Later he introduced additional political pressure on Yunukovic,

...