Posted on 02/28/2014 6:07:27 PM PST by kristinn
A day after U.S. intelligence said there would be no Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s troops started coming over the border.
On Thursday night, the best assessment from the U.S. intelligence community—and for that matter most experts observing events in Ukraine—was that Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine. Less than 24 hours later, however, there are reports from the ground of Russian troops pushing into the Ukrainian province of Crimea. It’s hardly a full-blown invasion. But it’s not quite the picture U.S. analysts were painting just a day before.
There was good reason to think Putin wouldn’t do it. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov told Secretary of State John Kerry that Russia respected the territorial integrity of the Ukraine. U.S. intelligence assessments concluded that the 150,000-man Russian military exercises announced by Putin on Wednesday were not preparations for an invasion of Ukraine because no medical units accompanied the troops. And Russian and U.S. diplomats were still working on Iran and Syrian diplomacy. All of this followed a successful Winter Olympic games for Putin’s Russia.
Yet private security contractors, working for the Russian military, seized control of two airports in Crimea on Friday. And Ukrainian border officials said that Russian cargo planes had landed inside the province, and that 10 military helicopters flew into Ukrainian airspace.
U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence on the fast moving situation in Ukraine tell The Daily Beast that analytic products from the intelligence community this week did not discount the prospect of Russian provocations and even light incursions in the Russian majority province of Crimea, the home of Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea.
Nonetheless, until Friday, no one anticipated a Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory."Nobody thought Putin was going to invade last night,” one Senate aide who works closely on the Ukraine crisis. “He has the G8 summit in Sochi coming up, no one really saw this kind of thing coming." This source also stressed that events are still moving quickly on the ground. “There is still a question about whether this is Russian troops coming across the border or Russian troops moving around the installations in Crimea.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast...
“That’s because U.S. Intelligence is targeting people domestically…”
Here’s an interesting thought experiment - question, what is a more likely military scenario that the U.S. government and its armed forces will face within the next ten years: a. a full scale conventional and/or nuclear war with another world superpower (Russia, or a future China), or b. widespread “civil unrest” within the continental United States?
You gotta give credit where credit is due - the wargamers at the the Pentagon, the public policy nutjobs in the beltway, and the paranoid radical progressives in the legislative and executive branches are indeed making preparations to wage war on their most likely future enemies.
Totally unrelated, how many billions of rounds of ammo and thousands of MRAPs has the DHS bought recently?
If Putin succeeds in annexing Crimea it will encourage others to do the same, yet I see no one in the Obama administration, including Obama, capable of intimidating Putin.
Which is more likely?
Our huge intelligence apparatus was not closely monitoring a volatile world situation
OR
our incompetent, self-absorbed, can't spell foreign policy Campaigner-in-Chief was fully informed yet didn't know how to respond.
I pray to God that we survive long enough to elect a real president in 2016 who will have the ability and the will to strike back and take the fight to the red menace and their Islamic allies.
We still have the democratic process to change D.C. There is only one way to change Moscow and that is with swift and destructive force. World War III is shaping up with America, the EU, and the free peoples of Earth against the expansionist tyrants in Russia and their puppet states of the old Soviet Bloc, China, and the Islamics.
US is too busy spying on Americans because that is the only thing that matters.
And in the US, by the tens of thousands. Open borders are marvelous. Witnessed two Russian speaking gentlemen get off a bus in downtown Houston just last weekend. Started taking pictures of downtown buildings right away. The US is a siting duck. Quack. Quack.
You don’t know your history as well as you think. I have read actual writings and debates that Lincoln had and he craftily did what was right to end slavery. Slavery was a deep evil that was being spread to the new territories. Maybe there was a better way to end it, but he knew that it was eating away at our new nation.
Caused by a youtube video, no doubt!
That’s funny Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney Predicted it years ago.
I guess Valerie Jarrett and Michelle are not as good as Obama thought they were
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