Thursday - March 06, 2014

And Its Over, Over There?

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine (Reuters) - Crimea’s parliament voted to join Russia on Thursday and its Moscow-backed government set a referendum on the decision in 10 days’ time in a dramatic escalation of the crisis over the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula.

The sudden acceleration of moves to bring Crimea, which has an ethnic Russian majority and has effectively been seized by Russian forces, formally under Moscow’s rule came as European Union leaders held an emergency summit groping for ways to pressure Russia to back down and accept mediation.

U.S. President Barack Obama took the first steps to punish Russians and Ukrainians involved in what he called “threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine”, ordering the freezing of their U.S. assets and a ban on travel to the United States.

The names on the blacklist were not immediately made public but a U.S. official said they did not include Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Seriously? Is that the best you can do Barry? Geex, what a dweeb. And they never saw this coming. That’s the real head shaker here. Maybe it’s time we flushed the State Department and started all over again.

In the long run though, I expect the blame for all of this will fall on the EU. If they’d let Ukraine join, this probably would not have happened. On the other hand, Putin has all of Europe’s nuts in the wringer; Russia supplies a huge amount of their natural gas, and he has his hand on the valve and he’s already shown that he’s not afraid to twist his wrist when they get uppity or step out of line. And with the US essentially replacing the military for most of these countries for 60+ years, they’ve all enjoyed the well padded benefits of Socialism’s wealth redistribution while hardly spending a cent on defense. And now they’ve got nothing to stop the bear when he gets cranky. On the third hand, Ukraine is a complicated situation. The USSR moved huge populations of ethnic Russians to all her satellite nations, and those folks have been there for generations. Some have assimilated, many have not. But when a newly independent Ukraine broke away from the dying Soviet mega-state, one of the first things they did was ban Russian as an official language. Problem was, they couldn’t get all those imported people to “go home”, since after several generations Ukraine was their home. So now they’re third class people, pushed down to the bottom of society, enclaved and isolated. With all the brewing resentment that entails. This will not turn out good.

My take: at best, if calmer heads can keep too many bullets from flying, Ukraine will be split into West Ukraine and The Crimean. At best West Ukraine will have river access to the Black Sea, which will become nearly their private lake. It’s not like they haven’t been trying for this for nearly 200 years, right Britain? 

Posted by Drew458     on 03/06/2014 at 11:50 AM   
Filed Under: • International •  
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