Posted on 04/11/2014 12:44:00 PM PDT by No One Special
For Yuriy Sergeyev, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, the last 72 hours of Russia's stage-managed separatist ferment in Ukraine's eastern and southern regions don't remind him of Moscow's invasion and annexation of Crimea in March. That's because the diplomat's memory goes back much further than that. "The Soviet Union organized separatist movements, and these movements organized pseudo-referenda and immediately demanded military support," Sergeyev said. "It happened in all three Baltic states in the 1930s. The Soviets also tried to do the same in Finland. They failed. It's why they launched a war and tried to occupy all of Finland."
War and occupation are very much on Sergeyev's mind today. In a wide-ranging 90-minute interview with Foreign Policy conducted at the Ukrainian mission in midtown Manhattan, he addressed what he sees as Russian President Vladimir Putin's latest conspicuous efforts to destabilize a nascent, wobbly government in Kiev and to determine Ukraine's national destiny -- with or without the consent of the Ukrainian people. "Russia is pressuring us, involving external partners, to demand from the Ukrainian government constitutional reforms and to have a federalized state," Sergeyev said. "Well, Russia has a federalized state, but the problems in Russia itself demonstrate that this solves nothing. You like such a federal status as Chechnya has? You want the federal status of any of the Caucasian republics?"
But it's unlikely that Russia is interested in a good-faith discussion about Ukraine's future. As Sergeyev readily concedes, Putin is once again marshaling the same semitransparent tradecraft of provokatsiya (which is exactly what it sounds like) that the KGB and Communist Party used to justify their domination of half of Europe in the 20th century. All the markers of forthcoming "fraternal" assistance to the supposedly embattled ethnic Russian population of Ukraine are on display...
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
Plenty more at the site. As they say, read the whole thing.
It is ironic that the Russians have a sense of their history, while asking the rest of us to ignore it. But then, the Russians know how to do irony.
Same with Obamacare.
Obamacare is a killer, pretending to be a healer
Obamacare raises costs and lowers availability and quality, pretending to make healthcare more affordable.
Obamacare is about making America a Socialist state, pretending be about healthcare.
Obamacare cares about getting your money, pretending to care about your health.
You are exactly right. There are plenty of accusations able to be thrown at Russia, what we got is a clumsy student.
BRILLIANT analogy!
Stupid to not notice Soros was unleashing chaos in Ukraine.
And the corrupt politicians who were running it.
It is not as if there were only one outside force acting on Ukraine, or as if any of those forces promoted anything that could even vaguely be classified as stability.
Sounds EXACTLY like our us federal government.
Obama is Dr. Kevorkian, pretending to be Florence Nightingale.
This article completely ignores the US involvement in the demonstrations, that led to the current situation.
Yeah, Putin is hip-deep in this, but it’s reactionary, not provocative. If that were the case, we’d already be talking about Russian tanks digging in on the Dneiper, when the chaos resulted in the fall of the government.
Remember, it wasn’t the Russians funding the Right-sector.
This is part of a much bigger geo-political game being played (instigated by the radical academics in our own government, by the way), and the Ukrainians are just the victims, like Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians, and Syrians are.
Exactly. All this happened because the State Dept. and CIA got angry that the democratically elected government opted to join Russia’s customs union rather than the EU. The liberal interventionist Hillary Clinton types are replaying the Clinton administration’s foreign policy in the former Yugoslavia: moralistic shrieking, simplistic black and white thinking and aggression masquerading as a moral crusade.
There was an election scheduled for May 25th. Why back the coup and not wait until then? Probably because the CIA types didn’t think their preferred candidates would do well. As a result of the coup, the party that won the last election has been all but destroyed.
We are also seeing the last gasp of neoconism as the older, baby boomer aged cold war conservatives go into conniptions while the younger generation of libertarian leaning conservatives scoffs.
I think a couple hundred thousand protestors in the street had something to do with it, first. And then that goon of a president starting shooting them.
Thanks No One Special.
Putin is a killer, put an end to his crap.
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