"One of the jokes in the Soviet Union was the question of what countries the Soviet Union shares its borders with, and the answer is whatever they choose to," he said. "It's a very serious identity crisis that we are seeing now in Russia in political circles."

Yakobashvili said a common misconception about Putin is that he wants to re-create the Soviet Union. He said Putin instead has a plan to create a "Russian World" that would reach through the former Soviet borders and further to unite ethnic Russians.

"What Putin has done is challenge the borders and automatically challenging the international system," he said. "In his own mind, Georgia was not a country. It was more of a restaurant than a country. In his understanding, Ukraine is not even a nation. He has a plan. There is a new idea that is a very compelling idea that is called 'Russian World' without borders and they are very, very effective in promoting this new notion."

Yakoboshvili said the Russian state-run media is responsible for the widely held idea among its citizens that Putin is seeking out and killing so-called fascists in Ukraine. Corum echoed Yakobashvili's sentiment of the effective propaganda machine during his presentation.