It's very simple. If you are Vladimir Putin, if you are a kleptocrat and are running a kleptocratic state in which everybody is furious and fuming just below the surface, and in which basically 1,000 people have benefited from everything—from all the stealing—and 140 million people haven't, yours is an unsustainable regime. You have to come up with something to create a distraction. Putin has been testing out different ideas.
One of his first ideas, which came out about a year ago, was this idea of cracking down on the LGBT community. The thought there was that if he could somehow create this sort of conservatism, it might distract people. It didn't. He tried it out and no one was paying any attention, so he moved on to plan B and plan C and plan D. I don't know exactly where Crimea fits into the lettering of these plans, but he was looking for something to create a distraction.
The attack on the LGBT community, by the way, has not stopped. It is going on. It's just that nobody is paying attention to it right now, as people are looking at Donetsk today. But many people from that community are feeling very vulnerable. People are leaving the country, and people who aren't leaving it are feeling totally at risk. They are having to hide their lifestyles in hopes that they don't end up being persecuted and losing their jobs or possibly experiencing something worse.