Obama is enabling the Russian president’s impending intervention
and will make himself and the United States look utterly foolish
when that happens. Just like in Syria."
Posted on 02/22/2014 1:52:17 PM PST by No One Special
Given the actions of the Rada in Ukraine and the flight of the regime leadership to Harkiv, it is evident that (a) the Russian financial assistance that barely kept the country aloft financially will end, and (b) Russia will engage in economic warfare against the country (even if it does not engage in armed warfare). Thus, Ukraine faces economic collapse.
This is something that the west-the EU and the US-and international organizations-notably the IMF-can prevent. It’s only a matter of money. Emergency economic assistance is imperative.
Concerned about the cost? Don’t be penny-wise, and pound foolish.
And one hopes that after its bitter experience in the past, that Europe has contingency plans in place to respond to a Russian cutoff of gas. Not just gas going through Ukraine, but through Nordstream as well. For Russia is blaming Europe for what is happening in Ukraine. A full cutoff would cut against Gazprom’s interests (and hence the interests of the Russian power structures which feed off it), but the stakes in Ukraine are big enough for Putin that he could well consider that a price worth paying if he believes it will stampede the Europeans into abandoning the opposition-or, I should say, the new government in Ukraine.
Putin is playing for keeps, and this setback to his schemes will only enrage him and steel his resolve to prevail. He will pull economic levers to do so. The west should pull the economic levers of its own.
our leaders are pulling the lever
The EU has some interest. But if I understand correctly, they offered Ukraine a crappy deal during negotiations, which was why the fleeing President turned to Russia, instead.
The EU has some interest. We have ZERO interest, at this point. Pour more money into distant countries to support stupid revolutionaries? I don’t think so.
Nothing we can do till they decide what they’re going to do.
and even then maybe the best route is to gain tactical information
The EU has more money than any other economic force on the planet. Russia relies on Ukraine for food and for allowing that gas to be exported through Ukraine for revenues from other European countries to Russia. Yanukovich is finished and gone, and with him, any Russian hope of conquering Ukraine. Ukrainians just won over the world by allowing those huge numbers of captured police to live, refusing to vandalize Yanukovich’s palace, etc.
Pony up stupid American tax payers. I don't like this "professor".
Putin will have his way, if not in the short run, then later.
Ukraine will remain in the Russian orbit or there will be world war.
You may be familiar with that quote by Washington.
"Yanukovich is finished and gone, and with him, any Russian hope of conquering Ukraine. "
The Ukraine will remain within the Russian sphere of influence...a defacto province...until Russia is no more.
The Russians have invested too much to walk away. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it.
Like, Holodomor - 13 million starved to death, millions died in Siberian Gulags, totalitarian control...? Brave Ukrainians showed world how to deal with communist occupation.
No, not like that. The Russians do not associate their new, "modern" state with the horrors of the past.
But they do remember the 1 mil Red Army soldiers they lost defending the Ukraine from the Nazis...and the collaborators in the west. And they remember the other 1/2 dozen wars they fought to keep out the French, English, Germans and Ottoman Turks. Hell, they even fought the Prussians, Poles and Austro-Hungarians over it.
Each time they prevailed at great cost.
They also remember the 20-25% of their annual budget being poured into Ukraine for at least 50 years under the USSR.
Most of that money went to the east and the south/Crimea.
The Russians would likely be satisfied to maintain control over just that, but the Russians in Ukraine are likely to want the whole country...foolishly.
It's a powder keg upon which sits a cauldron of blood.
I don’t know how many Red Army soldiers the Soviets lost “defending”, as you say, Ukraine. I know that we only recently learned that many Soviet WWII casualties were from the NKVD shooting retreating Red Army soldiers. And we have known for a long time about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which allowed the Soviets to occupy and cleanse that part of today’s Ukraine that was then and historically Poland. Just a couple of small corrections.
Zero will sell them down the river. As he will the anti communists in Venezuela
Time to apply Ukrainian Maidan to Zero and his puppeteers.
GO SARAH! Sweep the RATS into dustbin of history!
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