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The U.S. and Europe need to stand together against Moscow in the wake of its incursion in Crimea, keeping the door open for Ukraine and other countries to join NATO, former White House officials tell NPR.

Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and a former deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration and Stephen Hadley, former National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, spoke with All Things Considered , on Friday. The two agreed that the West's diplomatic efforts should be focused on dissuading Russian President Vladimir Putin from further aggressive moves.

How Should The West Respond To Crimea?

"The key thing" is for the U.S. and Europe to "maintain maximum solidarity so that this is not just a U.S. sanctions policy and it does not give the Russians a chance to split us," Talbott ATC tells host Robert Siegel.

Europe is "properly, I think, concentrating on the banking sector, because the banking sector, if it is pressed and pressured by these sanctions, may lead powerful people around Putin to begin questioning the wisdom of what he has done and perhaps putting brakes on bad things he might do," he says.

Asked whether Ukraine should be brought into NATO or remain a sort of neutral buffer state between Europe and Russia, Talbott thinks "neither."

"It would be counterproductive, which is a word we use here in Washington to mean 'stupid,' if we were to basically make a promise to Ukraine that we couldn't keep, such as to bring them into NATO as soon as possible," he says. "That would just be provocative and it would not make the lives of the Ukrainians any better.

"Nor should we say that they are going to be forever in a security limbo as a buffer state," he says. "We should keep the question of the future of NATO, the expansion of NATO on the agenda, but we should not talk about that now."

According to Hadley, military action, either now or in the future, is impractical.

"It's very difficult once the Russians start to move, just as a matter of geography, for us to respond," he says. "So, what you need is a set of policies that will make Russia decide that such a course of action is ill-advised. "

First, he says, we must "impose real costs for what [Putin] has done until he is no longer tempted to run this play again – we saw it first in Georgia in 2008, now in the Crimea with respect to Ukraine."

Second, he says, Europe "needs to make clear that the door is open for countries of central and Eastern Europe to come into the EU."

What is Putin Thinking?

Talbott warns that "changing Vladimir Putin's mind is a loser. He is in a 'make-my-day,' 'bring-it-on' [mode]. He called Putin's move in Crimea, which represents the first time Russia has moved beyond its post-Cold War borders, an "ultimate red line."

"He has a pretension for, in some sense, a new Russian empire and that is what he is trying to build," Hadley says. "A key element of that is Russians outside of Russia's borders."

Putin, says Hadley, holds a fundamentally different view of the post-Cold War order as does the West: "We thought that at the end of the Cold War, boundaries were going to be respected, sovereignty was [to be] respected, use of force explicitly or coercively was off the table, [and] that countries could choose their own alliances."

"That's not how he sees it," Hadley says.

Instead, Putin wants to a world "in which he brings into a Russian sphere of influence countries such as Kazakhstan and Belarus, [which] he already has, and particularly Ukraine.

"With Ukraine, [Russia] has real force, without Ukraine, it is much weaker," he says.

Hadley points to Putin's speech announcing the annexation of Crimea in which the Russian leader referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union when "overnight [Russians] were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest — if not the biggest — divided nations in the world."

(As we reported earlier this week, large ethnic Russian populations in former Soviet satellite countries have made for nervousness in those border regions since the Crimea incursion and the Russian invasion of Georgia's South Ossetia region in 2008)

That sentiment – that Russian minorities were essentially orphaned by the fall of the USSR, is what informs Putin's strategy, Hadley says.

By "taking a chunk" out of countries such as Georgia, Ukraine or Moldova, "he has frozen them in this neverland between Russia and the West because the western European countries are unwilling to take into the EU or NATO a country that has a territorial dispute with Russia.

"We have got to send a message to Putin that that ploy won't work," he says. "That is why sending messages [that] the EU and NATO are open to Ukraine and Moldova and Georgia is such a terribly important signal to send."

It's been 25 years since the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska, spilling millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

The impact on wildlife was devastating. Cleanup crews poured into the nearby port town, also called Valdez, where an animal rescue center was set up.

"The chaos is incredibly difficult to describe or even imagine," says LJ Evans, a local resident who volunteered to help. "Somebody came back with the first bird — the reporters were so frantic, somebody got in a fight trying to take a picture of this poor little oiled bird."

"We were working 14-, 16-, 18-hour days there for the first month and a half," Suzanne Bishop, another rescue worker, tells LJ on a visit to StoryCorps in Fairbanks, Alaska. "We ran countless times a day from one room to the other with dog kennels stacked up high all the way down the hallway of otters."

"I had nightmares for years, because they screamed," LJ says. "I'd never heard a sound like that."

"I remember going home every night and sobbing, because it was not only terribly sad, it was very hard work," Suzanne adds.

"Then one joyous day, in this whole long stressful experience, we took all these birds that had been washed, and lined up all these kennels on the beach — 30 of them, 40 of them — each one with half a dozen birds," LJ recalls. "We opened all those crates, and they swarmed out into the water and made such an incredible noise. They either paddled or they flew, but they got the hell out of there.

"There was so much stress, so much tension for so many months," she adds. "At least for that moment, that little while, you could feel good about something that we had done."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

The photograph was taken in Yarmouk, Syria, showing thousands of desperate Palestinian refugees waiting to receive food aid. It was shared millions of times last month via social media, and on Thursday evening, it appears on a big screen in New York's Times Square in an effort to focus attention on a civil war that's now in its fourth year.

The image is epic. Thousands fill a gray canyon of rubble framed by shattered buildings. Yarmouk is a neighborhood made up of of Palestinian refugees who fled to Syria decades ago. For more than a year, Syrian government forces have held 20,000 people there under siege. The photograph documents a food distribution in January by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees.

The photo is "cinematic in its scope and grandeur, and yet, it's deeply personal," says Chris Gunness, the group's spokesman. "Etched on each small face is a very personal private story. And I think it's the combination of the epic and the miniature which partly explains it."

It's about timing, too, he says. He released the photograph as the U.N. Security Council debated a resolution last month urging Syria's government to open besieged areas for aid. The social media reaction was unexpected.

"It's been extraordinary. Within minutes of that iconic photograph being sent out, it went viral," he says.

When charges surfaced that the photograph was a fake, Gunness released a video from Yarmouk recorded at the same time.

The food distribution came after a fragile ceasefire between government forces and rebels inside Yarmouk. The video shows the magnitude of humanitarian crisis for civilians.

The Sinaloa Cartel, headquartered on Mexico's northern Pacific Coast, is constantly exploring new ways to launder its gargantuan profits. The State Department reports that Mexican trafficking organizations earn between $19 and $29 billion every year from selling marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines on the streets of American cities.

And Sinaloa is reportedly the richest, most powerful of them all, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The capture last month of the Mexican druglord Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman has cast a spotlight on the smuggling empire he built.

One key to the Sinaloa Cartel's success has been to use the global banking system to launder all this cash.

"It's very important for them to get that money into the banking system and do so with as little scrutiny as possible," says Jim Hayes, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for the New York office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. He was lead agent in the 2012 case that revealed how Sinaloa money men used HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, as their private vault.

ICE says in 2007 and 2008, the Sinaloa Cartel and a Colombian cartel wire-transferred $881 million in illegal drug proceeds into U.S. accounts.

Huge Daily Deposits

According to a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, cartel operatives would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in a single day using boxes designed to fit the exact dimensions of the teller's window at HSBC branches in Mexico.

More In The Borderland Series

Parallels

At The Border, The Drugs Go North And The Cash Goes South