Posted on 03/06/2014 5:11:38 AM PST by Texas Fossil
Edited on 03/06/2014 5:53:54 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Thanks for the addition of text. Considered including it all, but did not request permission before.
I don’t feel like I was “wringing my hands” to post the article.
Possibly because the consequences will bite further into the future than next weekend.
We agree on that point. And we have done some really stupid things too that have come home to haunt us.
“Which country interferes more in the internal affairs of foreign countries, Russia or the United States?”
We have troops in more than 150 countries and over 150,000 troops in those countries. Russia does not.
Maybe we should have thought about that before electing a Marxist twice?
Who is the "we" to which you refer?
What is your plan to oust Putin out of Crimea?
The west is largely Catholic, the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian, the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other will lead to civil war or breakup.
Yeah! Lets jump in and show them that they had better join the EU and tell Putin to go home.
The mistakes were made in 1936, when those two nations could have stopped Hitler at absolutely no cost save the expense of fuel to move a few divisions eastward into the Rhineland.
Regardless of the best path to take relative to Russia and Ukraine today, your post was one of the most preposterous ever written on Free Republic.
Had Neville not guaranteed the whole of Eastern Europe, it would have been Stalin versus Hitler, Bolshevism and Nazism destroying each other. Chamberlain in 1939, as today’s war party, forgot that a leader’s responsibility is to his own people.
I do agree that the time to act was in response to the Rhineland provocation. That’s on Stanley Baldwin and the French, not on the much-maligned Chamberlain who I think deserves a lot better than he gets today as the symbol of the one and only lesson the war party seems to want to take from history.
France was a distant second to Russia in Hitler’s mind. I wish our conservative politicians would take heed to the commonsense lesson of history that if there’s going to be a war, it’s best to be the last power to enter when the rest of the world is weakened and exhausted. Today’s “tough on defense” politicians seem to have their heart set on our nation to be in on every war all over the globe, ensuring that if a real threat ever did arise, we’d be broke and bled when the crisis arose.
I had no idea it was that many countries.
This is about Ukraine, not the entire world. That said, I don’t fully agree with all our foreign commitments abroad either, but that’s not the point.
Which country interferes more in the internal affairs of Ukraine, Russia or the United States?
Being the primary homeland of a particular ethnic group does not give you carte blanche to invade and occupy territories where your ethnicity is the majority.
23 January, 09:44
Russia outraged at foreign interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs – Putin’s aide
The Russian President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov says Kiev is capable of finding on its own the best solutions for bringing the situation back to normal in and restoring peace to Ukraine. Peskov said that the obvious external interference in the processes under way in Kiev are clearly deplorable and arouse Moscow’s indignation.
“It’s hard to comprehend why foreign ambassadors in Kiev should tell the Ukrainian authorities where these should withdraw their Interior Ministry troops and police from, what they should do next etc. In other words, we see these kinds of outside instructions as something altogether incomprehensible. Of course, we can’t approve of it and feel intense indignation about it,” Peskov said in an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily. The interview has been posted on the daily’s website.
According to Peskov, Moscow is certain that Ukraine’s leaders are perfectly aware of what they should do. Ukraine is Russia’s partner; Russian-Ukrainian cooperation is multifaceted, the two countries have large-scale and long-term cooperation. There is absolutely no way Russia and Ukraine can avoid being partners, the official said.
Dmitry Peskov further said that Moscow doesn’t see it right to interfere in the internal affairs of fraternal Ukraine in any way. This is inadmissible, so Russia will never do that. Any decisions by Kiev are sovereign and made by Ukrainian leaders in the framework of democratic processes. So, we see any interference, any attempts to bring political pressure to bear through the use of political management instruments as inadmissible, the Russian President’s press secretary stressed.
What right do we have to interfere? Except for the little treaty.
The United States and Britain “reaffirmed” their commitment to protect Ukraine’s borders in exchange for the nation giving up its nuclear weapons in a little-known agreement known as the “Budapest Memorandum signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1994.
The Daily Mail notes reports “if Russia has invaded Ukraine then it would be difficult for the US and Britain to avoid going to war.”
Sir Tony Brenton, who served as a British ambassador from 2004 to 2008, said war is certainly on the table if it’s determined that the Budapest Memorandum is “legally binding.”
http://www.cafemom.com/group/99198/forums/read/19691256/Bill_Clinton_signed_a_treaty_Ukraine_War
March 1, 2014
Does the 1994 ‘Budapest Memorandum’ obligate the US to intervene in Ukraine?
There’s been a lot of loose talk about a 1994 “treaty” that obligates the US to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine. As Financial Times reports, this is vastly overstating the reality of our agreement with Ukraine, which in no way says the US must come to Ukraine’s defense militarily.
Ukraine’s new prime minister invoked 20-year-old international agreement as he appealed for western powers to help him resist Russian attempts to assert itself in the south of the country.
Arseniy Yatseniuk called upon the members of the UN Security Council to help preserve Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” hours after armed pro-Russian separatists in Crimea took over the local parliament calling for unification with Moscow.
His words are a deliberate echo of the so-called Budapest Memorandum, signed as part of the deal that saw Ukraine give up its nuclear weapons in 1994.
According to the agreement, the US, UK and Russia all agreed to protect the sovereignty and “territorial agreement” of Ukraine, meaning any Russian support for an attempt to declare Crimean independence would be in violation of their international obligations.
The three powers committed to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”.
Significantly, the wording suggests Russia’s insistence that Ukraine forgo an EU trade deal may have already breached the terms of the agreement.
The signatories agreed to “refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind”.
Western diplomats are now scouring the text to check whether they are obliged to intervene in the country to prevent it from breaking up if Russia does so first.
John Lough, associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, the foreign policy think-tank, said: “While this does not legally oblige the UK and other western powers to intervene, they might feel morally obliged to.”
He added: “Russia has already violated the spirit and letter of this agreement through the economic pressure applied to Ukraine in the run-up to the Vilnius Summit,” a reference to the November meeting when then president Viktor Yanukovich declined to sign the EU deal.
Crimea & the rest of eastern Ukraine appreciate your support as they move toward determining their own future!
Let them. And leave the rest of them alone.
That is probably what is going to happen any way.
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