Basically, he's saying Putin had no burning motivation to go into Crimea because......because......I don't know.
The fact is that Putin did go into Crimea, and he went into Crimea unprovoked, without any attack on Russian interests or even imminent threat of attack on Russian interests. No, the timeline to go in was not completely of his choosing, but his invasion of Crimea was a "now or never" moment for Putin and he carped the diem out of it.
Contrary to what some might think, Putin did not start the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. Nor is there any indication that he was behind Yanukovych cracking down on the protests, thus escalating them in their intensity. Euromaidan was indeed a legitimate protest started by Ukrainians about issues concerning Ukrainians. It was not Russia nor the US who caused them to happen.
But they did happen. And it also happened that events came to a head at the same time the Olympics were being held several hundred miles away in Sochi, Russia. At that point, however, the crisis in Ukraine was essentially an internal matter. Even when Yanukovych packed up and left the country--leaving Ukrainians to scramble to put together an interim government until elections could be held--it was still more or less an internal Ukrainian matter.
But because there was something of a power vacuum in that immediate time period after Yanukovych choppered out, and because the Ukrainian military at that point was in such powerless shape to fight back any type of invasion, Putin knew he had an unbelievably unparalleled chance to claim Crimea for Mother Russia without a bloody fight. So literally days after Yanukovych had fled, he moved in. And there was little that the severely weakened Ukrainian government could do other than to verbally denounce the invasion.
Had Russia invaded Crimea at a time where the Ukrainian government was far better equipped to respond, it wouldn't have been the bloodless takeover that it was.
So Kissinger wishes to minimize Putin's actions over Crimea. And Parry wishes to minimize Putin's actions over Crimea. This puts Parry in a bit of a spot, given that he made his name eons ago by reporting on subversive neo-conservative machinations in Iran Contra, and yet Kissinger is essentially the archetype for modern day neo-conservatives.
So embarrassingly, they are on the same page, and this is Parry's attempt at damage control by trying to frame it as if this is some sort of isolated moment of clarity for Kissinger while in fact this is Kissinger being Kissinger, always apologizing for the ruthless strongman. Even worse for Parry is that it's not as much Parry repeating what Kissinger's said just recently, but Kissinger embracing what Parry's already said long before.
From Parry's column dated August 18th of this year:
http://www.rogerannis.com/robert-parry-the-powerful-group-think-on-ukraine/
As the crisis deepened early this year, Putin was focused on the Sochi Winter Olympics, particularly the threat of terrorist attacks on the games. No evidence has been presented that Putin was secretly trying to foment the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, all the evidence is that Putin was trying to protect the status quo, support the elected president and avert a worse crisis.
There was no Russian “invasion,” as the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets claimed. The Russian troops were already in Crimea assigned to Russia’s historic naval base at Sebastopol. Putin agreed to Crimea’s annexation partly out of fear that the naval base would otherwise fall into NATO’s hands and pose a strategic threat to Russia.
Congratulations, Robert Parry. You've now become material for Henry Kissinger to use as talking points.
To famously quote another R. Parry, "Oops."
