Posted on 05/04/2014 12:05:20 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
BERLIN - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday called for a second international conference to put an end to the crisis in Ukraine.
He said he made the proposal in telephone conversations on Sunday with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, U.S. Secretary of StateJohn Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
(Excerpt) Read more at wdaz.com ...
AND you can bet your sweet bippy that none of Europeans have any interest in even mildly irritating the Bear.
They have no stomach for it, but would expect the USA to bail them out when they could likely handle matters on their own.
Yeah, right. You’ve nailed it. /s
To use your metaphor, the Eu tried to “buy” Ukraine first. The Russians offered a much better deal. The “people” you refer to were an infinitesimal part of the Ukrainian people and were mostly Astroturf. What do you know, by the way about the EU? It is fascistic and the bureaucracy has more than its share of pedophiles. Many people in Europe would like out.
You have a cartoonish grasp of the issue.
No country has ever joined the EU that did not want to join the EU. Unlike Russia, the EU has never invaded or attacked any other country even a single time. Ukrainians want to join the EU because it offers them escape from the genocidal Putin tyranny. Ukrainians have no desire to see freedom extinguished in their country the way it has been in Russia.
Putin's Russia is far far less free and more fascist than any country in the EU.
Germany is sitting out the new Ukraine war. 0bama is on his own.
Bump
The most important of those is probably Belarus, due to its locations and the fact that it’s a de facto Russian puppet state.
~You are completely wrong. The majority of Ukrainians are Ukrainian not Russian speakers and are patriots of Ukraine, not Russia.~
I met a lot of Ukrainians and I think about 3 in 100 are speaking real Ukrainian.
More than half of them are Russian speakers, regardless how they do identify their ethnicity, less than half, mostly pretending to be Ukrainians speaks “Surjic” or a weird Russo-Ukrainian mix, a kind of their version of Spanglish. Everyone is actually able to communicate in Russian, with the exception of total village idiots.
Russian speaker, pro-Russian aren’t actually = Russian in Ukraine. The vast majority of Ukrainians identifies themselves as a separate nation from Russia, but there is a group which is not less than 20% who hate the entire idea of being a separate nation.
Considering a situation on the ground, this group may shrink or expand. Major factors are Western and Russian propaganda, actions of Kiev government and their neo-nazy pals, Russian actions and of their commie fellow travellers.
Natural gas usage in Germany is partially tied to Russia (probably around thirty-to-forty percent). Tied to that....is the fact that every single year...gas prices have gone up by five to ten percent over the last decade.
Germans sit there and realize they really put themselves into a closed room. And electrical usage over the next decade will go the same way (almost no nuke plants in a decade)....so they will buy power from Russia or the Ukraine. All of this was planned years ago, and no one said a word...even the German journalists and news media.
Why don’t they try meeting in Odessa? It’s so stupid how people who aren’t involved in what’s really going on have some meeting in a beautiful city far away from the noise of battle.
John Kerry can lead a column of Pro-Ukrainian Freedom Fighters and Putin can lead a column of Pro-Russian Christians. They can meet in the middle of the street and solve their differences.
You are right. Europe as a whole was warned, but like the shortsighted hedonists they are, they preferred the easy way out. So, the governments didn’t stand up to the envirofascists and let themselves become dependent on Russian gas. Europe has been allowed to indulge in social and economic fantasies for decades because we’ve have acted as their defense department. We can’t afford that any more, and they are going to have to grow up.
I didn’t say that ethnic Russians are a majority, but they are a significant minority and, you omit to say, a majority in certain regions. You apparently worship lines on a map, as if the relatively recent exercise in cartographic line drawing has some deep significance. What is Ukraine now is not what Ukraine has been in times past. The borders of all Central and Eastern European countries have fluctuated significantly overtime. They aren’t sacred, and Ukraine as the lines exist now includes areas that have not historically been part of the Ukraine, e.g. Crimea. As for Yanukovich, the fact is that he won. If splitting votes by two other candidates delegitimizes his election, then you must think that Lincoln’s election was illegitimate or Clinton’s (ok, I’ll give you Clinton).
As for the EU, it operates on the basis of a transnational bureaucratic conspiracy. No, it hasn’t used force, but Europe hardly has a military anyway; they have been mainly freeloading off of us militarily. But, like clever leftists everywhere, they arrange elections in which they try force repeated votes until the country gets it “right”, and then they violate the terms of the treaties defining the EU and the Euro zone to illegitimately expand the power of Brussels and the EU supranational institutions without the slightest pretense of getting consent of the governed. So, now, for example, the ECB is printing money to buy the new junk bonds of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy. If you read the foreign press, and the British press especially, you will see how little the people, as opposed to government officials, want to be in the EU.
I certainly wouldn’t hold Russia up as a beacon of freedom, but I think you haven’t kept up with the spread of the gramscian left in Europe and the power it has accumulated. Britain is not as bad as the Continent, but you would be arrested there for using a weapon to defend yourself against a burglar in your home, reading Winston Churchill’s writings about Mohammedans aloud in public, or speaking against sodomites. Moreover, Brits are hugely taxed (France, of course, is worse). In Germany, children are kidnapped by government thugs if parents homeschool. In every one of these respects Russia is better. That is not to say that Putin is wonderful. What you are missing, though, is how bad the EU is. The EU is very clearly a supranational fascist state, and Europeans are saying this, not just me. The individual countries in the EU aren’t much better, but their sovereignty is being rapidly eroded by Brussels. The main reason many poor countries want to join the EU is free money. This suits Brussels because expansion gives the supranational bureaucrats more power. Southern Europe stays in the EU because the ECB and the currency union allow those countries to loot Germans, Dutch, and other relatively financially responsible peoples. This keeps Spanish, Italian, Portugese, and Greek politicians and bureaucrats employed by allowing them to continue to buy votes with a welfare state paid for by stealing form Northern Europe.
If a country doesn't want to be part of the EU, then they just shouldn't join. Your problem and Russia's is that most Ukrainians DO want to join the EU. They want to be part of a greater whole so they can resist Russia's brutal domination. It is Russia's stupid hostility to Ukraine which has caused the Ukrainians to want to join the EU, so if you want to blame someone, blame Putin. He has caused all this. Putin is evil and Ukrainians want no part of his evil regime.
In Russia, if you are a journalist and criticize Putin, you will be murdered. The only party Putin allows to run against him in elections is the Communist Party. Putin has given Russia a choice, vote for him or return to rule by the Communist Party. When terrorists killed hundreds of children in a Russian school Putin seized the opportunity to abolish the popular election of all regional governors. When a Russian newspaper printed the Danish mohammed cartoon, Putin had the newspaper permanently shut down. Putin appointed as President of Chechnya the terrorist jihadist son of the Chechen mufti, who built in Russia the largest mosque in Europe and is establishing sharia law on Russian soil. When Putin invaded Georgia, even though Georgia has never attacked Russia in all of history, he sent muslim Chechen battalions of the Red army to exterminate and ethnically cleanse thousands of innocent Christian civilians from the Abkhazian and Ossetian parts of Georgia.
Putin's Russia is evil and genocidal and it is more evil, more fascist, more bureaucratic and less free than the EU in every imaginable way.
Yanukovich was just the latest in a line of corrupt Ukrainian politicians. Everyone knows that the reason Ukraine is broke is because of the entire political class is and has been corrupt, and it was broke when Yanukovich took power. He certainly wasn’t deposed because he was corrupt; he was deposed because he was going to take a $15 billion deal from Russia rather and a $1-2 billion deal from the EU. The organization and money to push him out came from the Obama administration, the EU, and Soros. I don’t care at all about Yanukovich or whether some other thief is “El Presidente” in Kiev. The point here, as I have said before, is that there are no “white hats” in the Ukraine and absolutely no reason for the US to being meddling. It is a European problem, and they need to solve it if there is a problem to be solved.
As for EU membership, “countries” don’t usually decide to join the EU, the political class does. Surely this can’t surprise you. That fact of decision making is even largely true for us, too. Whether it is sodomite marriage, abortion, etc., our political class forces laws on the country that are opposed by a majority of the people and/or that are unconstitutional. As much of a problem as it is here, the problem is vastly worse in the EU.
Russia has a massive Mohammedan problem that has long historical roots. I hope they find a way to deal with it. The EU, on the other hand, has historically encouraged Mohammedan immigration, especially form Turkey and North Africa. This is because Europeans were too hedonistic to have children, and they brought in Mohammedans to fill jobs (they got a lot of welfare layabouts in the process). Sharia exists all over the EU, both de jure and de facto, AND it is a crime to tell the truth about that “religion” of ignorant, animalistic murderers and pedophiles.
In sum, you exaggerate Russia’s and Putin’s flaws, and minimize the EU’s. Over the last 10 years the EU has been on a toboggan ride toward fascism. The ugliness of the EU is a little better concealed than Russia’s, and most Americans still have a mental image of “Europe” that is quaint and completely out-of-date. Our government isn’t much better. Our interventions under Obamalini have been utterly evil, whether it was encouraging the destabilization of N. Africa under the pretty name “Arab Spring”, which was really the “Muslim Brotherhood Spring”, or our funding of jihadis in Syria. Christians are being murdered and crucified by Mohammedans, often by groups that have gotten out money, and Obamalini does nothing, and the press is silent. We have out-of-control armed federal agents and local law enforcement. We even saw the very embodiment of the fascist state when Boston was put on “lock-down” by jack-booted thugs to chase down one 19 year-old Mohammedan. We had another very public example when the military was going house to house in NO “confiscating” legally owned firearms. And you think we should be wringing our hands over whether Kleptocrat A or Kleptocrat B is running Ukraine or stressing over whether Sevastapol and Sloviansk are within the jurisdiction of Russia or the EU?
Ukraine is just a convenient distraction, and many on FR have gone for it.
ROSH and GOMER!!!! Look it up if you don’t understand...
For someone who thinks this is a distraction, you sure are expending a lot of energy arguing one side's point of view.
Yes, the Ukraine is a distraction, and one with dire consequences at home, among other things. Just because something is a “distraction” doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have important consequences. Of course, if Obama decided to jump in, then it wouldn’t be a “distraction”, it would be a disaster all by itself.
Your mistake is assuming that every foreign issue has an “our side” and “our enemy’s side”. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it isn’t. There is no true “our side” in the Ukraine, unless you share the views of Obama, Soros, and EU fascism, which I don’t think you do. As for arming terrorists, we have armed them all over N. Africa and in Syria. In fact, we don’t know how far our money has gone in arming terrorists because of various things Obama has done. He has even been bringing them into our government in sensitive positions. Our government has certainly given aid and comfort to the Marxists in Venezuela and elsewhere, courtesy of Obama. Then there is the matter of Clinton giving away MIRV technology for campaign contributions and giving food, etc. to the North Koreas (do you recall the Albright visits?)
As for the EU being a military ally, smile when you say that. A few Scandinavians with ponytails, a German division or two, etc.? Until recently, Britain had a semblance of a military, but not so much any more. The EU is a defense welfare queen, and that needs to stop.
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