Dienas grauds

“[..] At the end of the day, Vladimir Putin is going to run out of foreign reserves. He’s probably got $200 billion or so left; he will burn through those in the course of the next two years. And if the sanctions [by the United States, European Union and others over Ukraine] are still imposed at that time, he and the companies that have debt coming due — he’s running a very large fiscal deficit — are not going to be able to go to the world markets and get money to finance their government operations. [..] Putin has actually a limited window of a couple of years to continue provocative actions,we have to be very careful during this time, when he could actually lash out and be even more dangerous than he has been.”

David H. Petraeus, the retired Army general and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency