Barack Obama: I Was Worried About Triggering Further Russian Invasion if I Armed and Trained Ukraine

President Barack Obama on Wednesday said he was cautious about arming and training Ukraine because he was concerned that Russia would invade further.

The former president discussed Russia and Ukraine in an interview with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.

Obama dismissed questions about whether he regretted not doing more to defend Ukraine, as the late Sen. John McCain urged his administration to do, when Putin was moving into eastern parts of Ukraine.

“I actually don’t because the circumstances were different,” he replied.

Obama said arming and training Ukrainians at that time could have triggered Russia to invade further.

“We were also concerned about making sure that we did not give an excuse for a further incursion, and a lot of the arguments back then had to do with arming Ukraine which in turn could have provided those kinds of excuses and you had issues of training,” he said.

Obama provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine but resisted sending arms such as anti-tank Javelins and other weapons.

Obama struggled through questions about Russian and Ukraine, admitting the current state was “a tragedy of historic proportions”

The former president blamed Europe for not responding more forcefully to Putin’s decision to annex Crimea in 2014 when he was president.

“I have been encouraged by the European reaction because in 2014 I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways we would have wanted to see,” he said.

Obama said that Putin had changed completely from when he was president.

“I don’t know that the person I knew is the same as the person who is now leading this charge,” he said.

Obama also expressed surprise that Putin significantly escalated the war.

“For him to bet the farm in this way, I would not have necessarily predicted from him five years ago,” he said.

Obama said the populations of Crimea and even Ukraine were more sympathetic to Russia, which made it different than the current invasion.

He struggled to explain the conflict, but noted that Putin had taken advantage of a “toxic mix” of the struggles over globalization, the collision of cultures, and harnessed an “entho-nationalist mythology.”

Obama warned that democracies had “gotten flabby and confused and feckless” around the stakes of “things we tend to take for granted.”

He scolded democracies for their “complacency” urging them to do more to “fight” to defend themselves.

“We forgot that post World War II fifty year stretch, 60 year stretch, that the anomaly right?” Obama said, reminding the world that it suffered through “millennia” of violent war and strife.

Obama also criticized the growth of “misinformation” and “disinformation” spread by the use of smartphones worldwide.

He defined “disinformation” as “a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.”

“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” Obama said, before adding a mix of regulation and industry standards are needed to address the issue.