Engage Russia? No contest

This year's Munk Debates, the prestigious Canada-based annual face-off on moral and political issues of our time, is entitled "Be it resolved the West should engage, not isolate, Russia", and from what I have gleaned from the preview in the Globe and Mail, I find myself siding with Gary Kasparov rather than Vladimir Pozner.
I don't think that I am giving a preferential reading to Kasparov, a chess player-turned-politician and something of a romantic renegade figure, as compared to Pozner, the dry journalist and Putin lackey. Kasparov's arguments just seem to make more sense, and be more convincingly and cogently argued.
Kasparov argues that, although sanctions need to stepped up, they are having some effect already, that Putin's high reported approval ratings are probably fixed (just like Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi used to do), and that the separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine is largely a creation of Putin's propaganda machine rather than a deep-seated desire for independence. He essentially argues that appeasement of Putin is just not an option.
Vladimir Pozer, on the other hand, appears very tentative. He has a habit of prefacing his answers with statements like "It’s a complicated question" or "This is a tough one to answer", which has the effect of automatically weakening anything he then goes on to say. He argues that Putin is largely responding to the threat Russia feels from an expanding and encroaching NATO, that Ukraine is essentially chauvinistic and fascistic in nature, that no one knows why Boris Nemtsov was killed or by whom, and that "might means right" (yes, he says just that, in so many words). He goes on to say that, if NATO can allow Kosovo to secede from Serbia, then Russia is justified in "taking back" Crimea and eastern Ukraine, so meh! He does not extend the same logic, however, to the Chechens, who he maintains have no right to Chechnya (nor China to some disputed parts of the Russian Far East), mainly because they are not strong enough to take it, and therefore do not deserve it. Wow!
This debate portrays such a clear dichotomy between an essentially Western way of looking at things (Kasparov's) and a Russian/Eastern point of view that seems so completely alien to us. It is difficult to see how two such different viewpoints can ever find common ground.
Coincidentally, I have just finished reading H.G. Wells' "The Shape of Things to Come". Written back in the early 1930s, Wells' utopian speculative history of the next 200 years, in which all of mankind puts aside their differences and comes together under a benevolent and freedom-loving World State, looks incredibly naïve and idealistic, especially when we look at the real shape of things in the world today - marked by a whole host of apparently intractible and deteriorating political and territorial disputes, incomprehensible religious terrorist attacks, and cut-throat competition between blocs and nations - some 80 years into Wells' future history.