Eastern Europe/Ukraine

[Austin]

Ukraine Crisis: Six Reasons Why U.S. Use Of Military Forces Is Unthinkable

[Austin]

Crimea 'means immeasurably more' to Russia than Falklands do to UK - Russian FM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that Crimea "means immeasurably more" to Russia than the Comoro Islands mean to France or the Falklands do to Britain.

"Whether there are any precedents in international law or not - there surely are, - everyone realizes, and I say so in all responsibility, what Crimea means to Russia, and that it means immeasurably more than the Comoros do to France or the Falklands to Britain," Lavrov told a news conference after talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Lavrov expressed hope that the West realizes that "this is indeed a case that cannot be viewed in isolation from history."

"I'm convinced that, if Kosovo is a special case, Crimea is a case no less special," Lavrov said.

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_1 ... n-FM-7994/

[Austin]

US drone intercepted in Crimean airspace - Russia's state corporation

An American scout-attack drone was intercepted in the Crimean sky, the Rostec state corporation reports. "Judging by side marking, the MQ-5B drone was part of the 66th US brigade of military intelligence with the main location in Bavaria," the report on the website of the corporation reads.

According to the report, at the beginning of March, the American brigade was relocated to the Ukrainian Kirovohrad, from where drones commit reconnaissance raids in the direction of Crimea and Russian border areas.

Earlier, they reportedly appeared in the Kherson region, in the area of the Crimean roadblock Chongar. "According to some data, the American reconnaissance brigade had 18 MQ-5B drones in its arsenal. This is the second time the American UAV is intercepted over Crimea," the report says.

"The drone was at the height of about 4 thousand meters and was practically invisible from the earth. It was possible to break the drone’s link with its American operators with the help of the EW (electronic warfare) complex Avtobaza. As a result, the device made an emergency landing and passed into the possession of the self-defense forces almost unbroken," the report says.

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_1 ... tion-2994/

[Austin]

Russia has no plans of miliatry intrusion in Ukraine - Russian FM Lavrov

Russia has "no plans of military intrusion into eastern Ukraine," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said after being asked about violent clashes between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian activists in the city of Donetsk at a press conference following talks with US State Secretary John Kerry.

Moscow is in "constant daily talks" with international leaders and was "not hiding our position," he adde. Lavrov said that Crimea was "extremely important" for Russia: "It means immeasurably more for Russia than the Falklands means for the United Kingdom or Comoros for France."

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_1 ... vrov-3711/

[Austin]

Western objection to Crimea referendum falls against many precedents

[vic]

Can Crimea be cut off from water, electricity and Gas supply by Ukraine?

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03/13 ... y-in-dark/

[svinayak]

Western objection to Crimea referendum falls against many precedents

There are many things going on. The western ability to control democracy and use media to support is diminishing. It may be temporary but it is noticable.

Russian envoy: No common vision with U.S. on Ukraine

But they are more worried about a limbo where it will create a vacuum in the middle of Europe and it will slowly erode EU dominance.

Kerry arrived in London with plans to make clear to Lavrov about the stakes that Russia faces. The U.S. wants Russia to accept something short of a full annexation of Crimea - but Kerry has not said what that might entail.

He told senators in Washington that should the Crimea vote take place and no resolution is reached, "there will be a very serious series of steps on Monday in Europe and here."

President Obama has imposed limited sanctions against unidentified Russian officials thought by the U.S. to be directly involved in destabilizing Ukraine.

BAMAFANROLLTIDE 1 hour ago
This is what happens when you have no credibility no one respects you and your leaders. America fumbled the ball in Syria and Iran and Putin knows it.

[Austin]

makes good read

Let Crimea Go!

[Avarachan]

FYI.

____________________

As far as I know, the best website in English regarding the Ukraine/Crimea/Russia situation is "Vineyard of the Saker" (vineyardsaker.blogspot.com). "Saker" is a former European military analyst. His career was ended back in the 1990's when he opposed the NATO bombing campaigns against the former Yugoslavia. (He is ethnically Russian and a devout Orthodox Christian.)

His analysis and commentary are among the finest in the world. He is especially skilled in his area of specialization, Russia/Europe/U.S. I do not agree with him on everything: for instance, I think he has an overly positive view of Shia Islam. (Personally, I am wary of Islam--both Sunni and Shia--though of course I'm aware of wonderful people who are Muslim.) However, he is very much worth reading and supporting financially. Amazingly, he writes in his spare time ... That's why his articles occasionally contain misspellings and grammatical mistakes. He simply doesn't have the time to correct them.

As an introduction to his work, I recommend his article, "Maidan snipers: who did or did not know? Everybody knew!" (http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/ ... -know.html) It is an excellent piece regarding the manipulation of the media, from someone who witnessed it first-hand in the 1990's.

Regarding the ongoing situation in the Ukraine, I recommend these two posts as background:
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/ ... rimea.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/ ... rimea.html

If you find the articles valuable, I suggest that you store them in multiple formats (paper, local hard drive, thumb drive, etc.) ... I wouldn't be shocked if his site were cyber-attacked in the near future. Recently, that's happened to sites covering the Syrian war, for instance.

[Austin]

^^^ Nice Blog , These EU and American policy maker are really stupid people they bought this crisis on themself .... but then they have a long list of history ....starting in Iraq and ending in Syria and now Ukraine.

Anther great interview with Stephen Cohen ...read it in full

The American Who Dared Make Putin’s Case

Stephen Cohen, a professor emeritus at Princeton and NYU, has found himself in strange company lately.

An academic with generally progressive beliefs married to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Nation, he has a view of events in Ukraine that urges Americans to understand Putin’s point of view.

In his article “Distorting Russia,” Cohen wrote that American “demonization” of Putin in news coverage amounts to “toxic” “media malpractice” that verges on the alarmist language of the Cold War.

Others have gone further. They have praised Putin’s robust actions and his fierce defense of the Russian national interest. Conservative icon Pat Buchanan recently wondered if comparing Putin to Hitler goes a straw too far, and unsurprisingly defended Putin’s anti-gay policies.

American Conservative writer Rod Dreher agrees with Buchanan, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani praised Putin as “what you call a leader.” Even Sarah Palin, with her famous view of the Russian mainland from her Alaskan kitchen window, seems to have considered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine an inevitability back in 2008.

But while their opinions have gone largely unremarked, Cohen has been widely derided as a Putin apologist. Yet former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, of all people, has backed him up.

Cohen says he is the real American patriot and those who are pressing President Barack Obama and the European Union to counter the Russians in Crimea are a danger to our national security.

Cohen is one of the foremost Russia scholars in the U.S.. He advised President George H.W. Bush on the USSR, has taught Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, has written eight books on modern Russian history, and has published columns in the Washington Post, Reuters, and elsewhere.

What do you think of those who have called you a Putin apologist?

My answer to the name-calling is two-fold. The reality is, among the people who attack me, I am the only American patriot. I’m a patriot of American national security. Before this began, Putin was the best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security. To quote a line I wrote many years ago, “American national security still runs through Moscow.”

The discouraging thing is we were beginning to see that in Syria in August, when Putin literally saved Obama’s presidency. When Obama was trapped and he didn’t want to attack, he couldn’t get the support of his own party, he couldn’t get Congress. Putin delivered Assad and the chemical weapons.

Putin and [Russian foreign minister] Lavrov had been in the shadows pushing Iran to open a conversation with the United States, because Obama’s been under pressure to attack Iran too. Not to mention the fact that Russia facilitates the supply of about 60 percent of the material going to NATO and American forces fighting in Afghanistan.

The trouble is, when it comes to Russia, if you say what you think you’ve got to be prepared for people to call you names. Or as they usually put it in most of the mail I get, “How much is the Kremlin paying you?” Not enough, believe me.

Have you been called a Putin apologist before?

I’ve been through this before because I’m old and this happened during the last Cold War. Back then the argument was how best to approach the Soviet Union. Should we work toward “détente,” as it was called, and what that meant was creating areas of cooperation that would buffer the conflicts in a way that nobody would resort to nuclear weapons.

Passions ran very high and in those days they basically red-baited us. So they’d say you were pro-communist, or pro-Soviet, or pro-Kremlin, or apologist. But the difference was that on our side there was an organization called the American Committee on East West Accord. It was kind of a lobby group that formed to talk to congressmen and presidents and op-ed editors.

There was Donald Kendall of Pepsi Co., and Tom Watson who was head of IBM at the time, and [the architect of America’s post-World War Two Soviet containment policy] George Kennan, who was alive and very active. So there were a lot of very eminent and conservative people involved.

It wasn’t a clear sort of left/right conservative/liberal divide, so if they were going to call me [anti-American] then were they going to call the head of IBM that too?

I began warning everyone in 1990, in the 90s when Clinton began to move NATO towards Russia, that this was going to lead to exactly what it’s led to. I’ve been writing about this not only in the Nation but in the Washington Post, and in my books, that if we keep this up, we’re like a Western Pac-man heading East, gobbling up all the way until we hit Russia’s border.

We hit Russia’s borders under Bush because the Baltic republics became NATO members. Then we had this episode in Georgia in 2008 because we crossed Russia’s red line in Georgia. We’ve crossed it in Ukraine.

I don’t understand why people don’t see this. That if you send, over a 20-year period, a military alliance which has it’s political components -- includes missile defense, includes NGOs that get money from governments but are deeply involved in politics in Russia, includes the idea of revolutions on their borders -- then eventually you’re going to come up against a red line that, unlike Obama, they’re going to act on.

Ukraine has always been the brass ring for these people. That’s what they wanted and they went a bridge too far in Ukraine. Any Russian leader who has legitimacy at home would have had to do some version of what Putin is now doing. They’d push back.

So for saying this, I’m called a Putin apologist. These people have no understanding. They don’t care about real national security.

So I’m the patriot. I’m the one who cares about American national security. And all they’re doing is the old kind of [Joseph] McCarthy-ite red baiting.

You mention that Obama should have demonstrated his “gratitude to Putin” by going to the Olympics. Why?

That wasn’t my main point, but that was just like my mother taught me: When someone does something nice for you, don’t spit in their face. Has everybody forgotten 9/11 and Boston?

I wrote that Obama should have gone to Sochi for one day, stood alongside Putin when terrorists were threatening to blow up the Olympics, to show that on international terrorism they stand shoulder to shoulder. That would have been fantastic leadership but [Obama] wound himself into a pretzel on this gay issue and he couldn’t do it.

And so now I’m accused of being against gays. If I say we need a united front against international terrorism which is savaging Russia and has hit us twice, most recently in Boston, they just say, “He’s against gays”. What kind of discourse is this? These people are irresponsible. They are unpatriotic because it’s un-American to call people names like that. That kind of talk is bad for American national security.

If they really disagree with me, let them publish something that says Cohen is wrong about this and he’s wrong about that and here is the way you should look at it. That’s absolutely fine. Maybe I am wrong. But I’d like to hear why.

And if they think it was a wise policy to push NATO all the way from Berlin -- breaking a promise we made to Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch to the East -- pushing it all the way to the Russian border, then let them explain why it’s a wise policy. But they won’t tell you the truth because the true mode of describing this, in so far as they think about it, is they want to strip Russia of every national security asset it has.

Ukraine is the prize, but they’ve gone too far and now we’re in a horribly dangerous situation. Horribly dangerous. Certainly the worst of your lifetime. And if you have any kids and you have grandkids, they’re going to live with the outcome of what we’re witnessing today. And it’s the fault of the White House and the Congress and the EU.

Putin didn’t bring this on. He didn’t want it. It was the last thing he wanted. But now he’s reacting. I wasn’t alone, but I’m just speaking for myself. I warned them this would happen, but they don’t listen.

They have ideologues in positions of foreign policy making like [former U.S. ambassador to Russia] Michael McFaul. He’s an ideologist, he’s not a diplomat. If you’re going to appoint people like this to be your primary policy makers and advise the President ...

You know what Hillary Clinton said today? She equated Putin with Hitler. And she wants to be President of the United States. She’s going to have some nice conversations with him if she gets elected.

But how can you negotiate with Hitler? When Mrs. Clinton said that she disqualified herself from the Presidency. Then she goes on and says but of course we’ve got to de-escalate and negotiate. Well, then don’t call him Hitler. If you can’t connect those dots you don’t want to be President.

Even Obama said that Putin was like some spoiled kid slouching around the classroom. It’s undignified for the President of the United States to speak like that.

I don’t recall when we had Soviet leaders that anybody spoke like that about. We didn’t like Brezhnev because we didn’t like his political system, but it wasn’t personal. Nixon got along just fine with Brezhnev. They liked each other.

[Putin], by the way, is the most consequential -- consequential doesn’t mean good or bad -- most consequential leader of the 21st century. He’s been in power 14 years. He towers over everybody else. The only other leader who might be in his company is Merkel.

The last three American presidents have been foreign policy failures, war-makers. You’d think there’s a little bit of envy in here that he’s been so successful in representing the interests of his nation and our presidents have screwed it up. One failed war after another.

That’s what the Russians think, by the way. I was there in December and I was asked, why, why are they going on about Putin? Are they jealous? And I had to stop and think. I don’t know. Maybe they are.

But here’s the point: In a democracy you get out of terrible crises through discourse. There’s no discourse in this country. All you’ve got are these people saying that Putin’s delusional. I mean, this is the new thing? He’s delusional?

No. The people who are delusional are the people who says he’s Hitler. If he’s Hitler then it’s Munich. And if it’s Munich then we’ve got to go to war tomorrow, right? Can they think one foot in front of the other? No.

They’re in the grip of this crazy syndrome that Putin’s the most evil guy we’ve ever seen when all he’s done really to offend them is get Russia back on it’s feet. We loved Yeltsin because he was drunk and he said yes to everything. And then you get a sober guy and he’s going to defend Russia’s interest whether they’re right or wrong as he sees it. That’s what national leaders are supposed to do. And diplomats are supposed to sit down and sort this out.

You say this is Putin defending national interests, whether they be right or wrong. Does that preclude action on the part of the U.S. if the U.S. determines them to be wrong?

That we debate. But here’s how I open the question: Does Russia have any legitimate national interests at all on its borders? Because the tacit assumption is that it has none, not even in Crimea. Now, if that’s the position you begin with, it’s a nonstarter, because every state, even little states, put particularly great states, have those interests.

So I use this analogy, but it’s not perfect: Let’s say tomorrow that suddenly Russian power -- political, economic -- shows up in Canada, on our border, and in Mexico. Do we just say then, Oh, every people has the right to decide it’s own future? Do we say that?

And if we say that Russia should get out of Crimea, which is preposterous, what about Guantanamo? It’s a complete double standard. Whether they think this way because they’re stupid, because they’re deceitful, or because they’re just confused, I don’t know.

My main point is that we, not Putin, have managed to move the divide of the new Cold War from Berlin, where it was semi-safe, right to Russia’s borders. Maybe it’s not an iron curtain, but divided Berlin was the divide for 45 years. Now we’ve moved it right plunk to a divided Ukraine. And Ukraine was divided by God and history, not by Putin.

But do you think there’s absolutely reason to say it was wrong of Russia to intervene militarily in Ukraine?

We don’t know that Putin went into Crimea. We literally don’t know. We’re talking about “facts” that are coming out of Kiev, which is a mass of disinformation.

Do you think it might not have been Putin?

No, no, no, that’s not what I mean. We don’t know. I think I know, but I don’t know for a fact. And as a scholar I stick to what I know.

There are, it would appear, about 9,000 Russian troops milling around Crimea, on the streets, guarding buildings. There’s a naval base there. So by law, by contract, Russia has every right to be there. They have an infantry protecting it’s strategic facilities.

I think they took the troops that they’re moving around Crimea from the Crimean naval base. I don’t know that they actually sent troops across the Russian-Crimean border. So if we’re going to use the word invasion we need to be precise.

Now [Putin] did do something. He mobilized some troops he had there. There’s no doubt about that. He may have broken the terms of the contract he had with Ukraine governing troop movement at that naval base. That may be the case. But have you heard the story about the snipers?

I did.

Everybody blamed Yanukovych for the snipers that killed people in Kiev on Maidan Square. I said at the time, how can we know who killed whom? How do we know? I said let’s wait. Now, evidently, the Estonian foreign minister told the foreign minister of the European Union that those were not government Yanukoyvch snipers, they were snipers from the right-wing movement in the streets, that it was a provocation.

But I don’t know if it’s true. If this turns out to be true, can you turn the clock back? Can you say Yanukoyvch was legitimate and right? Can you bring him back to Kiev? No, that train left the station. When people such as myself say, Can we get the facts before we decide? they say, “Putin apologist!”

But the protests in Ukraine still happened, whether or not those snipers were under Yanukoyvch’s direction.

It was a very peaceful protest in November and into December. And John McCain went there and stood alongside one of the fascist leaders and put his arm around him. He didn’t know who he was. And [Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State] Victoria Nuland, we now know was plotting to overthrow the government, because we have the tape telling the American Ambassador, Here’s how we’re going to form a new government.

That’s called a coup d’etat. Yanukoyvch was elected legally. Everybody said that election was fair.

Do you see any merit in the protests?

Of course. But let me turn it around. Let’s say the tea party says that Obama has violated American law and the Constitution through Obamacare. They surround the White House. They throw fire bombs at the White House security guard. Obama flees and the tea party puts Ted Cruz in the White House. Do we say that’s democracy?

So how is it democracy in Ukraine? Why couldn’t they wait, by the way? The next presidential election was one year away. Why didn’t Washington and the EU say no? We’re democracies; that’s not how we do it. Peacefully protest all you want, but don’t throw firebombs at the policeman because if you did that in any democratic capital we’d open fire.

Look what they did in London. Look what they did in Greece. Look what we did to Occupy [Wall Street]. They weren’t even violent and we beat them up and pepper sprayed them. That’s what we do.

We believe you’ve got a right to peacefully protest. You get a permit and you go there and you can stay there until snow falls. That’s your right -- if you don’t block the traffic. But you can’t throw firebombs at policemen. That’s true in any country, in any democracy. But suddenly from our point of view it’s okay in Kiev. They’re freedom fighters.

So Yanukoyvch, who was democratic elected, flees and now you’ve got a government in Kiev with no legal legitimacy in Ukrainian or international law that we’re now being told is a paragon of virtue. And you’ve got a parliament where they scared away the majority deputies who represented the governing party. And you’ve got a parliament passing crazy laws.

[Secretary of State John] Kerry went there and tried to chill them out and I guess he did because they pulled back on some of the things they had done. Because the tail is wagging the dog.

You’ve mentioned that the American media has misrepresented several aspects of Russia, including the situation for gay people there. So how has the media misrepresented the crackdown on gay rights?

Well [the media] don’t know the history. Homosexuality was a crime in Soviet Russia. When I lived in Russia in the 70s and 80s our gay friends lived in fear of being arrested. They were not in the closet, they were in the basement.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia in 1993. After that gays began to emerge in public. Not the way it is here, but you know. Then they began to apply for permits to have gay pride marches, and cities’ governments reacted badly.

Why? Russia’s a very traditional country. All the polling we have shows that approximately 85 percent of Russians think that homosexuality is either a disease or a choice. You and I say that’s horrible. How can they be so primitive? And I can tell you how.

That’s the way people thought in the U.S. when I grew up, when I lived in Kentucky or Indiana. And even when I came to New York in the 1960s. What changed it? Enlightenment. Gays fought for their rights. It was a long struggle.

But even today we have eight or nine states with much more repressive gay laws than they have in Russia. The Russian law was a stupid law, because, first of all, legally it’s not enforceable. Secondly, it incites homophobia.

But the fact is there is no substantial popular opinion in Russia that favors gay rights. None. Nor was there any here 30 or 40 years ago. I don’t remember any Russians coming over here and telling American gays how to fight for their rights.

I grew up in the segregated South. I don’t recall any Russians coming over here and telling black folk how to get their rights. This is a universal rule. You win your rights in your own country or you never have them. All we’ve done is made it worse [for Russian gays]. As my gay friends in Russia say, “Yesterday I was a faggot; now I’m an American faggot.” It’s just made things worse for gays there. And sensible gays, politically conscious gays in Russia, will tell you that.

So you think US intervention has made things worse for gays in Russia?

I don’t think it, I know it. I can give you the names of Russian legislators who told me that they wanted to get rid of [the law] and wanted to talk to Putin. But you can’t do that when you turn it into another barricade between America and Russia. Do you think this Ukrainian thing is going to be good for Russian gays?

But things are dire for gay people in Russia. We’ve seen plenty of reports about that.

I didn’t say they were doing fine. But how is that our concern? Are we supposed to form a brigade and go there and liberate Russian gays? You win your rights whether you’re a black person or a Jew or a gay or a person of Islamic descent in this country by fighting for them. That’s the way it works in a democracy.

Why is it America’s job to go over there and sort out the gay problem when 85 percent of Russians think they should have no rights? They’ve got to struggle at home and most intelligent gays know that. That happened in this country over and over and over again.

By the way, before we get too sanctimonious, I read in the New York Times that violent acts against gays in New York City doubled in 2013 over 2012. Can we clean up our own house first?

What do you think the goal is of the people who are criticizing you?

It’s a form of censorship. I know people in American universities who think as I do and they’re afraid to speak out and I say, shame on them. There’s nothing to be afraid of in this country. Be afraid in Russia. But here, what are they going to do?

Alright, so you won’t get that great job you wanted, or you might not get the promotion. You get tainted, you become toxic, you get labeled.

They want to silence me. Calls I’m getting are threatening me. I would disregard it as silly except I’m too alone. I need others to come out of the political closet.

We are on the cusp of war with Russia. Others see now that it’s stretched too far. Even [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid, for god’s sake, said the other day, Maybe we ought to all calm down and think a little. Good for Harry Reid.

[Senator] Rand Paul said we need ask ourselves if maybe we have contributed to this debacle. And on a panel on CNN the other night, I almost fell off my stool. I say to them what I said to you, that we’ve been pushing this on the Russians and we bear a heavy responsibility. Putin’s not innocent, but we can’t get out of this unless we share some of the responsibility. And I thought, boy am I about to get flogged.

And you know what [former Representive Newt] Gingrich says? “I agree with Professor Cohen.” [Editor's note: A transcript of the show has Gingrich saying there was “a lot of accuracy" to what Professor Cohen said.] He says we have overextended, we haven’t been wise in our approach to Russia. We need to think what we’re going to be doing. And I almost wept, except I was on television. That was a lifeline to me.

You don’t think he’s just using that to have something to wave at Obama?

Yeah, you’re right. They’re bashing Obama a lot, saying he brought this on because of Syria and everything. It’s complete nonsense.

You know why I think Newt Gingrich said this? Because he’s an educated man. He’s an historian. He thinks historically. He’s smart. And he doesn’t have any presidential ambitions now. So now he’s speaking from his core.

What do you think of Pussy Riot?

Somebody did a survey. In 82 countries they would have been executed for what they did [Editor’s note: Unable to locate the survey, Cohen revises this statement to say that Pussy Riot would have faced criminal charges in many countries and the death penalty in several of them]. I don’t know what would happen if it happened in St. Patrick’s [Cathedral, New York]. About 15 years ago a young couple went into St. Patrick’s, took off their clothes and had sex in St. Patrick’s and they were arrested. I don’t know exactly what happened to them.

One of the problems in Russia is they don’t have much administrative justice where you get a suspended sentence and a fine and you have to go wash all the graffiti off the subways. They have it but they need to develop it because a lot of people should never be in prison or given prison terms instead of probation. They need to reform the judicial system.

In Russia when it happened the whole country was against them. When they went to prison the country softened up and said “Poor girls. They seemed kind of nice.” You know what they were doing before they went to prison? They would go into supermarkets, strip, lay on their back, spread their legs apart and stuff frozen chickens in their vagina.

There were people in there with their kids shopping and Russian authorities did nothing. They didn’t arrest them.

[Pussy Riot] did do something really funny. There’s a drawbridge, I forget whether it’s in Moscow or St. Petersburg. They created a penis on it, so when the drawbridge went up it became an erect penis. That’s actually pretty funny. I mean, that’s clever. [Editor's note: This prank was not done by the protest group Pussy Riot and instead by the Russian contemporary art group "Voina."]

But you go to the most sacred church in Russian that Stalin had blown up in the 30s and [they rebuilt] it. It wasn’t just “Putin’s bad!” they were singing. They cleaned the song up later when they put it on the internet. there was scatology in there too. It was bad opposition politics.

[Philip]

Events hotting up in Donetsk,referendum today,and who's selling US treasuries? Russia? (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/m ... ompatriots
Russia issues warning after fatal clashes in Ukraine city of Donetsk
Moscow declares right to 'protect compatriots' and accuses Kiev over violence between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian protesters

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine rose higher on Friday as casualties mounted from clashes between pro- and anti-Russian protesters in Donetsk and the Russian foreign ministry suggested it could intervene to protect lives.

The escalation came as the US secretary of state, John Kerry, met the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in London. Crimean residents will choose on Sunday whether to join Russia or to reinstate the constitution of 1992, under which Crimea enjoyed great autonomy from Kiev.

Donetsk, a largely Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine where many residents have close ties to Russia, declared a day of mourning on Friday after one person was killed and more than two dozen injured in a mass fight. The city has been the site of repeated standoffs between pro- and anti-Russian demonstrators.

On Friday, protesters from a pro-Russian demonstration fought with those from a rally "for a united Ukraine", resulting in the death of a 22-year-old man and injuries to a reported 26 people. Other reports said 28 people had been injured and that the young man had been stabbed to death.

Ukrainian media said pro-Russian protesters had attacked first, but the foreign ministry and Russian media reported that armed men had attacked peaceful pro-Russian demonstrators. In a statement released in response to the clashes, the foreign ministry said Kiev was not in control of the situation in the country and had failed to guarantee demonstrators' safety.

"Radical far-right gangs armed with traumatic firearms and clubs, who began to arrive in the city yesterday from other regions of the country, attacked peaceful protesters who came out on the streets to express their attitude towards the destructive position of the people who call themselves the Ukrainian government," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The statement also hinted that Russian forces could intervene in eastern Ukraine to protect Russians there, the same justification used for sending troops to occupy key facilities in Crimea.

"Russia recognises its responsibility for the lives of countrymen and fellow citizens in Ukraine and reserves the right to take people under its protection," it said.

The foreign ministry website was not working on Friday afternoon, but much of the statement was carried by Russian news agencies.

The head of Ukraine's security service wrote on his Facebook page on Friday that four people had been detained in connection with the violence in Donetsk and that "these detainments are only the beginning".

Russian troops and armoured vehicles had massed on the border with eastern Ukraine on Thursday, alarming Kiev, where the acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said in a statement that the Russian forces were "ready to intervene in Ukraine at any time".

The Russian defence ministry admitted in several statements that at least 10,000 troops had gathered in provinces along the border, but said they were there only to participate in intensive exercises. Moscow also ordered six Sukhoi-27 fighter jets and three transport planes into Belarus, located on Ukraine's northern border, to head off what the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, said was a potential Nato threat.

In response to the buildup, the German leader, Angela Merkel, warned Moscow in her strongest language yet that it risked massive political and economic damage if it refused to change course on Ukraine.

Donetsk resident Anton Nagolyuk, who was present during the clashes, said the attacks originated from the pro-Russian part of the demonstrations. The pro-Russian protesters had arrived at Lenin Square before the pro-Ukrainian ones, and police at first kept the two sides apart. The pro-Russian side threw eggs and firecrackers, and when the rally ended they started to beat pro-Ukrainian demonstrators, Nagolyuk said. The man who was killed was from the pro-Ukrainian side, he said.

"Some of the people definitely came from Russia to provoke people, but I don't know exactly how many of them there were," Nagolyuk said.

"It's true there are many Donetsk residents among the [pro-Russian demonstrators], but it seems to me the most active ones are Russian," he added.

According to Nagolyuk, many of his fellow residents fear Russia will invade their part of the country. "They were deliberately waiting for a death, an excuse to bring their troops and tanks into Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov," he said. "It seems to me almost everyone is afraid of war and Russian troops."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/m ... ail-london
Russia and west on collision course over Ukraine as talks fail in London
John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov fail to reach agreement as Crimea prepares for referendum on joining Russia

[Philip]

http://rt.com/news/un-resolution-crimea-referendum-118/
Published time: March 15, 2014 15:20

Russia has vetoed a UN Security Council’s resolution declaring the upcoming referendum on the future status of autonomous republic of Crimea invalid and urging all states not to recognize its results.

China abstained as 13 council members supported the resolution and Russia voted against.

The draft resolution noted that the Ukrainian government in Kiev has not authorized the referendum and said that it cannot be valid.

“This referendum can have no validity, and cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status of Crimea; and calls upon all States, international organizations and specialized agencies not to recognize any alteration of the status of Crimea on the basis of this referendum and to refrain from any action or dealing that might be interpreted as recognizing any such altered status,” the documents reads.

Moscow has a veto right as one of five permanent members of the Security Council.

It was “no secret that Russia would vote against the US draft resolution,” Russia’s envoy at the UN Vitaly Churkin said ahead of the voting. He added that Moscow would respect the choice of Crimeans.

“We cannot accept its basic assumption: to declare illegal the planned March 16 referendum where there residents of the Republic of Crimea should decide on their future,” Churkin said, explaining Moscow’s decision to veto the proposed document.

“The philosophy of the authors of the draft runs counter to one of the basic principles of the international law – the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Article 1 of the UN Charter,” the Russian diplomat said.

This principle was also confirmed by the 1970 UN Declaration on the Principles of International Law, and a number of other decisions by the UN General Assembly, and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, Churkin reminded.

On Sunday, the Crimeans are going to decide if they want the republic to remain a part of Ukraine or join the Russian Federation.

European nations and the US said earlier they would not recognize the outcome of the referendum and warned Russia of sanctions over its stance on Ukraine.
(62)

[member_28502]

When even Cohen says Russia is right then it's for sure Russia has a right to right things
The spreading of NATO around Rissia is like taunting a grizzly bear

[Austin]

Chinese view on Ukraine Crisis

How deep is Ukrainian crisis' impact on China's economy?
(People's Daily Online)

What is the impact of the Ukrainian crisis on the global economy? Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker believes that the risks coming from Ukraine are controllable, and their influence is limited. Many other economists hold similar views. In general, the Ukrainian crisis is neither a minor problem nor a huge event. After all, the Ukrainian economy is not big, and European energy supplies still depend on Russia, so it is not worthwhile for the U.S. to turn the Ukraine into a casus belli with Russia.

What do these concordant assessments and the responses from the external market mean to China?

First of all, the structure of China's energy imports can be improved. China relies on importing energy sources from the Middle East, whose transport corridor is the Strait of Malacca – the current limiting factor on China’s imports. If it were able to expand energy supplies from north-eastern and north western channels, it would certainly make China more secure in terms of energy and the current situation impacts on this strategy. The U.S. has begun to consider exporting its gas to Europe as a strategic response to Russian energy exports, although the White House has stated that even if the U.S approves gas supplies to Europe, this will not take effect until 2015. This gives Russia leeway in terms of finding new markets for its energy exports. From the perspective of geo-economy and market capacity, China represents an ideal prospect for Russia.

Secondly, China will have more opportunities to invest in Russia. According to data from the end of 2012, the top three foreign investors in Russia are Cyprus (USD76.74 billion), the Netherlands (USD 61.49 billion), and Luxembourg (USD 42.74 billion). China ranked fourth with investments of US 27.92 billion. China and Russia have a strong economic complementarity, China’s low-cost manufacturing and Russia’s rich natural resource represent mutual assets that can benefit each side. The relationship between Russia and Ukraine has deteriorated in recent years; in contrast, China and Russia are getting closer. Russia should repair the damage done to its interests by the situation in Ukraine, and plug any gaps if foreign investment is withdrawn. Russia has a long-term need for foreign investment which might offer an opportunity for Chinese investors

Thirdly, the arms industry is likely to profit from the situation. Ukraine was an important military-industrial base of the Soviet Union, and now occupies a prominent position in the global military industry. If the unrest continues to the extent that Ukraine joins Europe, its aerospace industry, shipbuilding industry and technology will possible expand into more countries, including China.

The article is edited and translated from 《乌克兰局势对中国经济影响几何？》, source: People's Daily Online, author: Zhang Shengjun

[Austin]

Crimea: Economic fallout of a 'yes' vote

[Philip]

Another American,Senator Ron Paul ,scathing critic of US policy in the Ukranian crisis,calls US sanctions against Russia s "an act of war",reflecting the views of BRF.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/m ... act-of-war

Ron Paul slams US on Crimea crisis and says Russia sanctions are 'an act of war'
• Paul tells Guardian change in Ukraine is US-backed coup

The former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched a scathing attack on what he calls a US-backed coup in Ukraine, insisting the Crimean people have the right to align their territory with Moscow and characterising sanctions against Russia as “an act of war”.

He also said providing economic aid to Ukraine was comparable to giving support to rebels in Syria knowing it would end up in the hands of al-Qaida.

The libertarian guru’s remarks in an interview with the Guardian are almost diametrically opposed to those of his son, the Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul, who has called for stiff penalties against Russia and declared: “If I were president, I wouldn’t let [Russian president] Vladimir Putin get away with it.”

Ron Paul, who retired from his Texas congressional seat in 2012, has always adopted a sceptical view of US foreign interventions. He said that although the US had not been involved in any military overthrow of the government in Kiev, it had facilitated a coup in the sense of “agitating” elements who wanted to usurp Ukraine’s former president, Victor Yanukovych.

“The evidence is pretty clear that the NGOs [non-governmental organisations] financed by our government have been agitating with billions of dollars, trying to get that government changed,” he said. “Our hands are not clean.”

There is broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for the movement that brought about the departure of Yanukovych, as well as criticism of Putin for Russia’s military intervention in Crimea, which many view as a prelude to annexing the territory.

A Russian-backed referendum, in which Crimeans will be asked if they want to align their government with Moscow, will take place on Sunday, although western leaders argue the poll has no legitimacy or legal basis.

Paul said Crimeans should be allowed to break away from Kiev.

“I think everyone should have right to express themselves,” he said. “It is messy, that is for sure, because two big governments are very much involved in trying to tell the Ukranians what to do.”

However he said Russia had a more justifiable basis for being involved in Crimea than the US, and no government should prevent locals on the peninsula from determining their future.

“That is our how our country was started,” he said. “It was the right of self-determination, and voting, and asking and even fighting for it, and seceding. Of course libertarians were delighted with the secession of the various countries and units of government away from the Soviet Union, so yes, we want the people to make the decisions.”

He added: “The people of Ukraine would probably have a loose-knit association, with a rather independent east and west, and an independent Crimea. It would work quite well.”

Paul, who now runs his own internet TV channel, also took issue with a $1bn aid package for Ukraine which is going through Congress.

“Now we’re getting involved with the Europeans in trying to change the government of Ukraine,” he said. “Now they want our money. It is just like when we when we go out and try and throw out [Syrian president Bashar al-] Assad, we end up working with al-Qaida. Now we’re likely to give money to Ukraine so they can pay their bills to Russia. That is the insanity of it all.”

His son, an increasingly strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination, made a similar point in the Senate on Thursday, when he voted against a bill providing aid to Ukraine.

The Kentucky senator is far more pragmatic than his father, however, and is on a mission to recast his reputation as a mainstream potential commander-in-chief. This week, he used an op-ed piece in Time magazine to exhibit his foreign policy credentials, adopting a tough stance against Moscow.

“Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a gross violation of that nation’s sovereignty and an affront to the international community,” he wrote. “His continuing occupation of Ukraine is completely unacceptable, and Russia’s president should be isolated for his actions.”

He added: “Economic sanctions and visa bans should be imposed and enforced without delay.”
Ron Paul, Rand Paul Ron Paul with his son Rand, at a 2011 presidential campaign event. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

His father took the opposite view. “I think sanctions are horrible. They’re acts of war,” he told the Guardian.

“It is based on a moral principle of theft. They want to target sanctions against 20 or 30 bad Russians who they claim have committed a crime against humanity, and therefore we’re going to freeze their assets and steal them from them.”

When it was suggested his position was opposite to that of his son, Paul replied: “Neither he nor I have ever pretended our views are identical. He still has the most libertarian views in the Senate.”

[UlanBatori]

Vodka gifts spreading outside Crimea. JoKerry to ship 1000 tons of emergency Pepto Bismol aid to UkBapzis

[Philip]

As huge pro-Russian demos take place in Dontesk,claiming that the whole Donbass region is Russian,,ore Russian reinforcements are arriving to safeguard the Russian speaking peoples of the Crimea and surrounding regions from any mischief by US sponsored mercenaries,who staged the Kiev coup.The US has also attempted to jam Russian satellites from western Ukraine says this report.

http://rt.com/news/ukraine-attacks-tele ... lites-990/
Attempt to jam Russian satellites carried out from Western Ukraine
Published time: March 14, 2014 22:21

An attempted radio-electronic attack on Russian television satellites from the territory of Western Ukraine has been recorded by the Ministry of Communications. It comes days after Ukraine blocked Russian TV channels, a move criticized by the OSCE.

Russian Ministry of Communications experts identified the exact location in Ukraine of the source of attempted jamming of Russian TV satellites’ broadcast, RIA Novosti news agency reports.

The ministry noted that “people who make such decisions” to attack Russian satellites that retransmit TV signals, “should think about the consequences,” Ria reports. The ministry did not share any details of the attack.

Earlier this week, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) criticized Kiev’s “repressive” move to halt the broadcasting of Russian TV channels after the Ukrainian media watchdog claimed that shutting down TV stations ensured “national security and sovereignty” of Ukraine.

“Banning programming without a legal basis is a form of censorship; national security concerns should not be used at the expense of media freedom,” OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatović said.

More than half of Ukraine's population speaks Russian regularly and one third say it's their native tongue. In Crimea over 90 percent of the population uses Russian on an everyday basis.

Journalist Sergey Rulev (screenshot from youtube by user Polit Navigator)

On Thursday, a number of Russian state TV channels websites suffered a large cyber-attack partially coming from Ukraine.

Russia’s Channel One website was temporarily unavailable due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Meanwhile, Russia-24 TV also said it suffered from a “massive network attack.”

According to Itar-Tass, the targeted Russian media have connected attacks to their editorial policy of covering the recent events in Ukraine.
Russian journalists not welcome?

An international media company in Kiev said it was visited by unknown people armed with knives, who threatened the employees against working with Russian TV channels, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote on Twitter.

The company, which asked for anonymity citing concerns for own safety, said it could no longer work with RT.

Intimidation and threats to journalists have lately become common practice in Ukraine with several Russian journalists coming under attack from radicals, says RT correspondent Marina Kosareva.

“We have countless of reports of journalists being attacked by those radicals that we’ve seen on Maidan Square as well,” she said.

Kosareva cited as an example an incident on March 5 with a pro-Russian journalist, Sergey Rulev who was beaten up and threatened by Ukrainian nationalists “just because he dared to interview riot police [Berkut].”

A correspondent for Russiya-24 TV channel, Artyom Kol said he was repeatedly threatened by ultra-nationalist group Right Sector who placed him on a ‘wanted list’ on February 22.

A correspondent for Rossiya-24 channel, Artyom Kol (screenshot from youtube video by user BayanTheOne)

“I have been receiving numerous threats since the Right Sector put me on the wanted list on their website offering a reward for my capture,” Kol said. “Within a few hours the message was reposted tens of thousands of times,” the journalists said, adding that he was thankful to people in Kiev who do not support radicals and offered to shelter him from them.

On a number of occasions over the last month, Russian journalists were denied entry into Ukraine. On Saturday a photo-journalist from the Russian daily Kommersant, Vasily Shaposhnikov, who was heading to Kiev, was not allowed into the country.

“At customs control they took away my passport and then I signed a paper, saying that I was banned from entering Ukraine, with no reasons specified,” said Shaposhnikov, who on Saturday morning took a flight back to Moscow.

Two days earlier, two Kommersant reporters were taken off the train going from Moscow to the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev. The official reason for not allowing them into the country was that they did not have return tickets with them and a sufficient sum of money. According to the new rules of entry, introduced December 4, each foreign citizen traveling to Ukraine must have with them around 3,000 rubles ($85) per day.

On March 7, several Russian TV crews were denied entry into Ukraine at the Donetsk airport, prompting a protest by Russia’s Foreign Ministry.

"This outrageous example of violation of freedom of the press proves the hypocrisy on the part of those, who now in Kiev try to represent themselves as democrats… Actually, this is censorship of the mass media,” the ministry’s statement reads.

British media viewpoint.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 94698.html

Ukraine crisis: Is the West trying to upset the Russians?
This is not the Cold War. Ukraine should not be forced to take sides, but the EU and US are behaving provocatively on Moscow's doorstep

Is today's referendum in Crimea legal? Kiev says no, because it violates Article 73 of Ukraine's constitution which says the state's borders can be changed only after a plebiscite of the entire nation. Moscow says yes, because Ukraine's democratically elected president was overthrown in a coup which means the constitution no longer applies. The United States and European Union say the referendum violates the UN charter and four other international agreements. But this is not about law. Make no mistake about that.

A welter of bluster, bluff and bogus arguments has been thrown up in the face of what is undoubtedly the most perilous crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. The violence between pro and anti-Russian Ukrainians yesterday will only increase the temptation for President Vladimir Putin to move troops from Crimea into eastern Ukraine. The West has boxed itself into responding with sanctions against the Moscow elite which look set to escalate. Talks ended on Friday with "no common vision".

Disturbingly, the Pentagon has its aircraft-carrier battle group in the Mediterranean while the Kremlin has moved a column of army trucks into Crimea. We feel on a conveyor to confrontation.

As usual, the West is claiming the moral high ground. The talk is of democracy and sovereignty. A swaggering Putin is portrayed as a menacing bully who seeks to cloud the issue with preposterous propaganda to persuade Russian speakers – at home, in Ukraine and in Crimea – that they are under threat from neo-Nazi Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.

Putin is certainly an unpleasant and ruthless man, but this debacle was triggered by misguided policies in the West. Last year, the EU offered a free-trade deal to Ukraine. It was part of a long-term strategy to entice the former Soviet satellite into the Western orbit, into Europe's economy and eventually into Nato.

In doing so, the EU was poking a stick at a sleeping bear. The hapless Ukrainians – who in 1994 gave up the third largest strategic nuclear arsenal in the world, bigger than those of Britain, France, and China combined – have found themselves pawns in a geopolitical game of chess. They swapped weapons for guarantees of protection by the world powers – which have proved worthless, as Iran and North Korea will note.

The Russians and the West today offer high-minded arguments about self-determination and protection of minorities. But definitions differ conveniently. And principles slip in and out of parallel. Compare and contrast the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the US war in Iraq – or Russian tanks in Chechnya and Western air strikes on Libya, the Nato bombing in Kosovo or Russia's shelling of Georgia, or the actions of both sides in the current quagmire of Syria – and the only common factor is the naked exercise of power where the interests of great nations are threatened.

Ukraine crisis: Is Russia moving in?

Over the past decade, Russia has stood by as the West has wooed her neighbours one by one into Nato, a strategic military alliance founded to confront and contain Moscow decades ago. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria are all now in Nato. Ukraine was the last prize.

But Ukraine is not just another neighbour. Its capital Kiev was the "mother of Rus cities" in the ninth century and the cradle of Russian Orthodox Christianity. Crimea has an even more particular patrimony. It was captured from the Tatars by Catherine the Great in 1783 and was part of Russia until, on a whim in 1954, it was given to Ukraine by President Khrushchev.

Moscow views attempts to seduce Ukraine from its sphere of influence much as the US might view a pro-Russian government in Mexico – or the installation of enemy missiles on a nearby island, like Cuba. Last month's coup in Kiev, said one Russian parliamentarian, "masterminded mostly by the Americans" was "an existential threat".

All this, to the Kremlin, violates its tacit understanding with Washington that, in return for supporting the US after 9/11, America would recognise Moscow's "sphere of privileged interests" in the post-Soviet space. Crimea houses Russia's only warm-water naval base. The Kremlin sees US support for anti-Russian factions in Ukraine as betrayal. Might it next support dissident protesters in Moscow?

Hawks in the West may see in that an opportunity. But it would be a hazardous tactic of triumphalism. If the West continues to take a hard line on Ukraine, it will perpetuate the loopy logic that created the crisis in the first place.

The result would be a lose-lose situation. It will undermine the chances of East-West co-operation on Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and China. It will be problematic for gas supplies to Western Europe. And it will retard the development of a Russian economy which depends on oil and gas for 70 per cent of its exports and whose manufacturing sector remains profoundly inefficient and uncompetitive.

What the US and EU should be doing is looking for a win-win outcome which allows Ukraine to act as both a buffer and a bridge between Russia and Europe.

Ukraine should not be made to choose between East and West. Its natural strength is that it faces both ways. Like Georgia, it should be kept out of Nato to allay Russian fears of creeping Western military hegemony. But its economy should be westernised, much as Poland's has been, to shed the legacy of its Soviet past, an inflexible education system, antiquated agriculture, and a corrupt political culture which indulges the population with unecological energy subsidies. Increasing exports to the West would boost the economy so that Ukraine becomes a conduit for closer mutually beneficial integration between the Russian and Europe economies.

But to achieve that the US and Europe – as well as Moscow – must have the courage to consign their Cold War mindset to the past.
Paul Vallely is visiting professor in public ethics at the University of Chester

[ramana]

Philip, The Ukrainians gave nukes which were not theirs in the first place to get Russian guarantees to land that Khrushchev gave them. Drunk Yeltsin signed all those agreements.

Key to understanding the crisis is :
Yeltsin was a Soviet.
Putin is a Russian.

Read Dostoevsky and his idea of Russia.

[Philip]

O'Bomber should read Dostoevsky himself! In fact American memories are truly short.The Russians were their allies in WW2 and Yalta in the Crimea was where the 3 Allied leaders had their historic meeting!

I think that what is happening here in the Ukranian crisis is that after a decade of being battered by Islamic ungodlies,and retreating with their tails between their legs in Iraq,Afghanistan,etc.,where the populations of western hypocrasies are tired and fed up of those "wars without end",the US in particular is trying to divert attention to its defeats in the Islamic world,by conjuring up the old familiar bogey of "the Russians are coming!"

Cold War hatred is still alive and well in the establishments of the West,esp. in Washington and London.This crisis is the second coming for tired old Cold War warriors. The bogeymen of the past are past.Ghaddaffi and Saddam got their come-uppance.Unfortunately a hat-trick failed when Russia and China stood by Assad.So a new bogeyman had to be invented (to sell US arms to frightened nations) and who fits the bill perfectly is Putin,a man who has restored not just Russia's pride-look at how magnificently the Sochi Winter games was organised despite zillions of anti-Sochi propaganda from the Western media,but has also invigorated the Russian military machine,modernising it and ambitiously expanding it ,especially its strategic nuclear deterrent.

Old anti-Soviet tricks are being rehashed and the Western media thumbing through dusty volumes of old editions for the propaganda war that has started.Unfortunately,people today have discovered that their leaders especially in the West have been lying to them for decades and are not swallowing the BS being bandided about this particular crisis despite the shrill cries from Cold War warriors. A bankrupt West can do little but obscenely flash and fart at Russia.Putin is a hard-boiled egg who knows what Russian interests are sacrosant and will protect them at any cost no matter what rantings and ravings are spewed from the White House,No.10 the Elysee Palace or from Frau-fuhrer Merkel.

[Pratyush]

My bird brain has come up with a CT. Immediately after becoming the potus. Obama, offered G2 to the Chinese. Only to be publicly rebuffed. What if all this is a signal to the Chinese, that, we mean business and will share the world amongst ourselves. PRC is acting as a bully in Western Pacific region. US is provoking a crisis situation in the Russian neighbourhood.

Perhaps the Chinese have been told of American sincerity to theG2. All wee need to see over thenext few months are the Chinese actions, on the Russian border and CARs.

[vic]

Obama is a mask used by Oil lobby in USA to forward it's interest.

[vic]

Western Europe can provide money and technology. Eastern Europe Manpower and Russia can provide the natural resources. This combination can change the world order which is now dominated by USA, China and Saudis.

[Austin]

Western Europe can provide money and technology. Eastern Europe Manpower and Russia can provide the natural resources. This combination can change the world order which is now dominated by USA, China and Saudis.

West European is not uniform ... there is Italy , Germany who do not agree with the US and similarly UK and lately France have similar foreign policy as US.

Both Russia and China have their own axe to grind against the West and specifically US ,I can infact hardly remember a foreign policy in past 20 years where Russia and US agreed on something be it Iraq , Kosovo , Sanctions , Iran , Libya etc and lately China and Russia have been co-ordinating in UN to thwart US/West attempt eg Syria or even in Ukraine where it decided to abstain.

I see more likely in future Russia and China will come more closer specially when West applies sanctions and China would then invest in the Natural Resource that it badly needs ...it already has significant Oil and Gas deal with Russia and being border nation its easier to build pipeline.

If some one wants to take on West/US ( NATO ) combined then you need to be Economically and Militarily strong ..... I see the China backed SCO and Russia backed CSTO being an effective counter balance. From what I have read even India would be joining SCO as full member

Strategically speaking both China and Russia have similar views on US/West Missile Defence Program and NATO expansion .....It would be good for Russia , India and China to prop up BRICS to be an economic counter balance to US/West instrumental tool like IMF and World Bank.

[Austin]

The U.S. has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War.

By Jack F. Matlock Jr., Published: March 15 E-mail the writer

Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the U.S.S.R. from 1987 to 1991, is the author of “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.”

One afternoon in September 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz settled in a chair across the table from Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in a New York conference room. Both were in the city for the United Nations General Assembly.

As he habitually did at the start of such meetings , Shultz handed Shevardnadze a list of reported human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze’s predecessor, Andrei Gromyko, had always received such lists grudgingly and would lecture us for interfering in Soviet internal affairs.

This time, though, Shevardnadze looked Shultz in the eye and said through his interpreter: “George, I will check this out, and if your information is correct, I will do what I can to correct the problem. But I want you to know one thing: I am not doing this because you ask me to; I am doing it because it is what my country needs to do.”

Shultz replied: “Eduard, that’s the only reason either of us should do something. Let me assure you that I will never ask you to do something that I believe is not in your country’s interest.”

They stood and shook hands. As I watched the scene, with as much emotion as amazement, it dawned on me that the Cold War was over. The job of American ambassador in Moscow was going to be a lot easier for me than it had been for my predecessors.

I thought back to that moment as talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s top diplomat this past week failed to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. It’s striking that the language being used publicly now is so much more strident than our language, public or private, was then. “It can get ugly fast if the wrong choices are made,” Kerry declared Wednesday, threatening sanctions.

I don’t believe that we are witnessing a renewal of the Cold War. The tensions between Russia and the West are based more on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and posturing for domestic audiences than on any real clash of ideologies or national interests. And the issues are far fewer and much less dangerous than those we dealt with during the Cold War.

But a failure to appreciate how the Cold War ended has had a profound impact on Russian and Western attitudes — and helps explain what we are seeing now.

The common assumption that the West forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus won the Cold War is wrong . The fact is that the Cold War ended by negotiation to the advantage of both sides.

At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies . Over the next two years, we worked more closely with the Soviets than with even some of our allies. Together, we halted the arms race, banned chemical weapons and agreed to drastically reduce nuclear weapons. I also witnessed the raising of the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the voluntary abandonment of communist ideology by the Soviet leader. Without an arms race ruining the Soviet economy and perpetuating totalitarianism, Gorbachev was freed to focus on internal reforms.

Because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened so soon afterward, people often confuse it with the end of the Cold War. But they were separate events, and the former was not an inevitable outcome of the latter.

Moreover, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into 15 separate countries was not something the United States caused or wanted. We hoped that Gorbachev would forge a voluntary union of Soviet republics, minus the three Baltic countries. Bush made this clear in August 1991 when he urged the non-Russian Soviet republics to adopt the union treaty Gorbachev had proposed and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” Russians who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union should remember that it was the elected leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who conspired with his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts to replace the U.S.S.R. with a loose and powerless “commonwealth.”

Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser.

“By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush said during his 1992 State of the Union address. That rhetoric would not have been particularly damaging on its own. But it was reinforced by actions taken under the next three presidents.

President Bill Clinton supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.

Vladi­mir Putin was elected in 2000 and initially followed a pro-Western orientation. When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he was the first foreign leader to call and offer support. He cooperated with the United States when it invaded Afghanistan, and he voluntarily removed Russian bases from Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

What did he get in return? Some meaningless praise from President George W. Bush, who then delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; invasion of Iraq without U.N. Security Council approval; overt participation in the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; and then, probing some of the firmest red lines any Russian leader would draw, talk of taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.

President Obama famously attempted a “reset” of relations with Russia, with some success: The New START treaty was an important achievement, and there was increased quiet cooperation on a number of regional issues. But then Congress’s penchant for minding other people’s business when it cannot cope with its own began to take its toll. The Magnitsky Act , which singled out Russia for human rights violations as if there were none of comparable gravity elsewhere, infuriated Russia’s rulers and confirmed with the broader public the image of the United States as an implacable enemy.

The sad fact is that the cycle of dismissive actions by the United States met by overreactions by Russia has so poisoned the relationship that the sort of quiet diplomacy used to end the Cold War was impossible when the crisis in Ukraine burst upon the world’s consciousness. It’s why 43 percent of Russians are ready to believe that Western actions are behind the crisis and that Russia is under siege.

Putin’s military occupation of Crimea has exacerbated the situation. If it leads to the incorporation of Crimea in the Russian Federation , it may well result in a period of mutual recrimination and economic sanctions reminiscent of the Cold War. In that scenario, there would be no winners, only losers: most of all Ukraine itself, which may not survive in its present form, and Russia, which would become more isolated. Russia may also see a rise in terrorist acts from anti-Russian extremists on its periphery and more resistance from neighboring governments to membership in the economic union it is promoting.

Meanwhile, the United States and Europe would lose to the extent that a resentful Russia would make it even more difficult to address global and regional issues such as the Iranian nuclear program, North Korea and the Syrian civil war, to name a few. Russian policy in these areas has not always been all the United States desired, but it has been more helpful than many Americans realize. And encouraging a more obstructive Russia is not in anyone’s interest.

[chanakyaa]

Is this how new countries will be created? Hope thugs in valley are not getting ideas..

As Crimeans make their way to the polls this Sunday, another region further in the heart of Europe is also deciding its fate in a referendum: the Italian region of Veneto, which is voting on whether to break with Rome.

Following in the footsteps of Scotland and Catalonia, Venice – the capital of the Italian region of Veneto – will be holding a referendum to form an independent republic. About 3.8 million people in the region are eligible to vote in the referendum, which runs through Friday.

[Austin]

US-sponsored UN resolution on Crimea could aggravate crisis - China

A UN Security Council resolution, calling on countries not to recognize the results of the Crimean referendum, “could currently only lead to confrontation and further aggravate the situation,” according to a statement issued Sunday by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

“This is neither in Ukraine’s interest, nor in the interest of the international community,” the statement said. It warned all sides against taking any steps that would make the Ukrainian crisis worse.

Thirteen out of fifteen members of the UN Security Council voted March 15 in favor of the resolution, saying that the referendum in Crimea is illegitimate. Russia used its right of veto to block the resolution, while China abstained.

Following the vote, Liu Jieyi, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council that China held “an objective and fair position on the Ukraine issue," as cited by Xinhua.

Liu said Beijing vows to "continue to mediate and promote dialogue so as to play a constructive role in bringing about a political solution to the crisis."

Chinese ambassador to the United Nations Liu Jieyi.(AFP Photo / John Moore)

Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, explained on Saturday why Russia exercised its veto right concerning the draft resolution on Ukraine.

“We cannot accept its basic assumption: to declare illegal the planned March 16 referendum where there residents of the Republic of Crimea should decide on their future,” Churkin said. “The philosophy of the authors of the draft runs counter to one of the basic principles of the international law – the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Article 1 of the UN Charter.”

[Philip]

Serenissima Venezia! Hail the return of the once glorious Venetian Republic.One cannot relish the return of the Venetian Doges with more delight.The vote of the Venetians to return to their republic and ditch the Italian state is intriguing just as the Crimea goes to the polls where the overwhelming majority of its citizens want to return to Russia,its motherland.

Serene’ referendum: Italian region votes on restoration of Venetian Republic
Published time: March 16, 2014

http://rt.com/news/venice-independence- ... italy-154/

As Crimeans make their way to the polls this Sunday, another region further in the heart of Europe is also deciding its fate in a referendum: the Italian region of Veneto, which is voting on whether to break with Rome.

The independence movement insists the industrial northern region’s wealth is being drained by Rome’s mismanagement of the financial crisis.

Following in the footsteps of Scotland and Catalonia, Venice – the capital of the Italian region of Veneto – will be holding a referendum to form an independent republic. About 3.8 million people in the region are eligible to vote in the referendum, which runs through Friday.

Leaders of the independence movement say they are not going to wait for Rome’s approval, and if the population votes in favor they will begin the separation process. The latest polls carried out by the independence movement show that over 60 percent of the population is in favor of becoming independent.

"If there is a majority yes vote, we have scholars drawing up a declaration of independence and there are businesses in the region who say they will begin paying taxes to local authorities instead of to Rome," Lodovico Pizzati, the spokesman for the independence movement, told the Telegraph newspaper.

The president of Veneto, Luca Zaia, who supports the independence movement, said the region is tired of the lack of respect from Rome. With the onset of the financial crisis the movement has been gathering momentum, with many people in the area perceiving Rome’s treatment of the situation as irresponsible.

“Veneto pays its taxes and would like answers from Rome. Rome has not respected the Venetians,” Zaia told Italian publication Liberoquotidiano. “The push for independence comes from the people, it is a democratic request that has come about because of Rome’s indifference.”

He went on to say that Italy was currently experiencing “a kind of ailing democracy” and had become bogged down in bureaucracy.

Gianluca Busato, a prominent Venetian businessman an advocate for independence from Rome, told RT that the Venice region is one of the biggest payers of taxes into Rome’s coffers, but gets nothing like what it shells out in return and as such Rome opposes the vote.

“I think they [the Italian government] are not so happy because Veneto is a rich region. Italy steals 20 billion of taxes that are not returned to us, and so I think the Italian government is not so happy about our will of independence,” he said.

Furthermore, advocates for the independence of the region argue that Rome is draining the northern region of its wealth through taxes in order to support the poorer South of Italy. The independence movement website claims that the region pays €20 billion more in taxes to Rome than it receives in investment and services.

Venice may also sever ties with the European Union and NATO if it gains its independence.

"Venetians not only want out of Italy, but we also want out of the euro, the EU and NATO," Raffaele Serafini, another pro-independence activist, told the Telegraph.

Members of the movement say they have been inspired by Scotland and Catalonia, who have also planned referendums for this year. Scotland will vote for its independence in September, despite statements from the British government that they will not be allowed the pound if they separate. Spain’s government has decried Catalonia’s planned referendum as illegal and in defiance of Spanish sovereignty.

Giovanni Dalla Valle, head of the Veneto independence movement, told RT that there is nothing Italy can do to stop the region from becoming independent.

“We have to fight for it [independence]. We will do it in a peaceful, diplomatic way. We do strongly believe that when the majority wants to be independent there is nothing they [the Italian government] can do,” he said to RT.

He went on to say that the established world order favors centralized governments and that is why many referendums are condemned as illegal.

Prior to joining Italy in 1866, the region of Veneto was known as “La Serenissima” – the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The Republic lost its independence when Napoleon conquered Venice in 1797.

[johneeG]

This veneto thing gave me a tubelight moment. So, heres a theory: is it possible that the world(particularly Oirope) is somehow returning to the pre-world war 1 scenario i.e. around 1860 period and rapidly going back in time?

From 1864, Tanzimat reforms were applied on Ottoman Syria, carving out the provinces (vilayets) of Aleppo, Zor, Beirut and Damascus Vilayet; Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon was created, as well, and soon after the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem was given a separate status.

Link

The Crimean War (pronounced /kraɪˈmiːən/ or /krɨˈmiːən/) (October 1853 – February 1856)[7][8]:7 was a conflict in which Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. While neutral, the Austrian Empire also played a role in stopping the Russians.

The immediate issue involved the rights of Christians in the Holy Land, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Catholics, while Russia promoted those of the Orthodox. The longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the unwillingness of Britain and France to allow Russia to gain territory and power at Ottoman expense. Russia lost and the Ottomans gained a twenty-year respite from Russian pressure. The Christians were granted a degree of official equality and the Orthodox gained control of the Christian churches in dispute.[9]:415 Russia survived, gained a new appreciation for its religious diversity, and launched a reform program with far-reaching consequences.[10]

Russia and the Ottoman Empire went to war in October 1853 over Russia's rights to protect Orthodox Christians. Russia gained the upper hand after destroying the Ottoman fleet at the Black Sea port of Sinope; to stop Russia's conquest, France and Britain entered in March 1854. Most of the fighting took place for control of the Black Sea, with land battles on the Crimean peninsula in southern Russia. The Russians held their great fortress at Sevastopol for over a year. After it fell, a peace was arranged at Paris in March 1856. The religion issue had already been resolved. The main results were that the Black Sea was neutralised—Russia would not have any warships there—and the two vassals Wallachia and Moldavia became largely independent under nominal Ottoman rule.

There were smaller campaigns in eastern Anatolia, Caucasus, the Baltic Sea, the Pacific Ocean and the White Sea. In Russia, this war is also known as the "Eastern War" (Russian: Восточная война, Vostochnaya Voina).

The war transformed the region. Because of battles, population exchanges, and nationalist movements incited by the war, the present-day states of Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and regions such as Crimea and the Caucasus all changed in small or large ways due to this conflict.[11]

The Crimean War is notorious for logistical, medical and tactical failure on both sides. The naval side saw both a successful Allied campaign which eliminated most of the ships of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea, and a successful blockade by the Royal Navy in the Baltic. It was one of the first "modern" wars because it saw the first use of major technologies, such as railways and telegraphs.[12](Preface) It is also famous for the work of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, who pioneered contrasting modern medical practices while treating the wounded. The war was one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and photographs

Link

Venetia remained under Austrian control until the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, when the Kingdom of Italy joined on the Prussian side and was promised Venetia in exchange for its assistance. Austria offered to sell Venetia to Italy, but the Italians refused, seeing it as a dishonourable act. This caused another southern front for Austria, the Third Italian War of Independence.

Once the wars ended, the Treaty of Vienna ceded the region to neutral France, but left the fortresses under Austrian control for a time. Following protests, the Austrians left and the French ceded it to Italy on 20 October. A controversial referendum – where only 30% of the adult population voted, and did so under heavy Italian pressure[11] there was a 99.99% majority for Italy[12][13][14] – was held on 21–22 October and ratified the handover. In an effort to Italianize the population, Venetian language was not officially recognised and public servants were recruited from other regions.

Due to uneven economic development reducing many to poverty, the 19th century and the first half of the 20th became a period of emigration. Millions of Venetians left their homes and their native land to seek opportunities in other parts of the world.

Link

It seems to me that Amirkhan is just getting engaged in the Oiropean conflicts. In 1860 period, it was western Oirope(brits & franks) which was doing its own bidding using its colonial prowess. Since, the western Oirope does not have any colonies any more and are not powerful by themselves, Amirkhan seems to be doing the heavylifting. It seems to me that Amirkhan is the cats paw of western Oirope.

[Philip]

Europe is now populated not by the people's of proud monarchies that existed at the tine if WW1,but by Euro-Peons who determine its future from their desks at Brussels.! The E-Peons with their equivalent of a crony-capitalist "planned economy",need more taxpayers and tax money to feed the greed of the bankers and their associate wankers,and foot the bill of running the Euro-Peon babudom empire at Brussels.

[Philip]

Crimea celebrates an historic return to Russia!

Pro-Russian Crimeans celebrate landslide vote for return to motherland
Exit polls of 93% backing union plausible in Sevastopol, while outside those opposed appear resigned to an exit from Ukraine
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/m ... ia-ukraine

Shaun Walker in Sevastopol and Harriet Salem in Backhisarai
The Guardian, Sunday 16 March 2014 20.03 GMT

A girl holding a Russian flag stands outside a booth inside a polling station in Bachchisaray, Ukraine, on Sunday. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe

With Soviet-era music blaring from loudspeakers and the Russian tricolour everywhere, the overwhelming feeling in Sevastopol was that the city was finally "going home" after a 23-year stay in Ukraine.

The home of the Russian Black Sea fleet, and a bastion of pro-Russian support in Crimea, there was barely a dissenting voice in the port during Sunday's referendum, which most of the world considers illegitimate but here is seen as a just exercise in self-determination.

Exit polls said 93% of Crimeans had voted for union with Russia, with a turnout of 83%. Given the absence of recognised election observers, it was impossible to verify how honestly the ballots were counted, but in Sevastopol at least, such figures did not seem implausible.

"Today is the greatest day of my life; we are returning to mother Russia," said Ludmila Balatskaya, 72, a former deputy in the city government, as she sat on a bench beneath a flag of Sevastopol in a polling station.

"I was just a little girl when they just informed us that Crimea was now Ukraine. Everything fell down around me. We are Russia, we have always been Russian people in our souls here in Crimea, but today that becomes a practical reality again" she said, tears in her eyes.

"We have been waiting for this day for 23 years," said Raisa Basova, who was born in Vladivostok but has lived for several decades in Sevastopol. "They said if we didn't take these blue [Ukrainian] passports, we wouldn't get our miserly pensions … Finally now we are going home."

Voter after voter placed into the transparent urns their ballot papers with box No 1 ticked, favouring union with Russia. Of dozens questioned, nobody said they had voted for option two: increased autonomy as part of Ukraine.

With the Crimea question seen as a foregone conclusion, attention in Sevastopol was already moving to eastern Ukraine, and locals were debating whether they would travel to the cities of Kharkov and Donetsk to offer "support" to pro-Russian dissenters in those cities.

Gennady Basov, chair of the Sevastopol division of the Russian Block party, said joining Russia would give the city and region "protection from the neo-Nazis and fascists in Kiev". His organisation has set up a number of roadblocks manned by armed irregulars on the outskirts of town. At one, on the road to Yalta, masked men with Kalashnikovs searched every car entering the city. Most of those inside the vehicles did not mind.

"This is the best thing that could happen," said one older man as his car was searched, adding that the men were protecting him and others from neo-Nazis.

Across Sevastopol, billboards warn of the "fascist" threat from Kiev and offer voters the stark choice of a bright and prosperous Crimea inside Russia or a Ukrainian Crimea filled with swastikas and barbed wire.

Everyone here speaks of the awful "provocations" that radical groups from Kiev have apparently been carrying out in the region, but when asked to name them, a group of local self-defence volunteers in Sevastopol could only recall an incident when a few people had arrived on bicycles and waved Ukrainian flags.

"We escorted them to the railway station and put them on the train back to Kiev," said one volunteer.

In contrast to Sevastopol there were no celebrations, balloons or music in Bakhchisarai, a town with a large Tatar population. Cars circled through the central streets beeping their horns and waving Russian flags. Many of the city's Tatar and Ukrainian population stayed at home watching television. Polling stations were half empty with only ethnic Russians turning out to vote.

"I did not vote because what I want is not an option on the ballot paper," said one Tatar woman who did not want to be named. "I want to be Ukrainian and have rights."

Bakhchisarai's Ukrainians are also anxious. "My parents are Ukrainian and I cannot betray them," said Ana, 53, adding in a hushed voice: "I am afraid to say to people that I am against the Russian occupation. Around 80% will vote for Russia today and I hope that this will not hurt us who do not.

"We don't want corruption and bribery, Putin style. It would be good to have European standards here. People don't understand that when they vote for Russia it is a step backwards not a step forwards."

In the village of Pionerskoe – where 98% of the 3,000 residents are Tatars –the polling station did not open after village leaders met this week and decided the vote should not go ahead.

"The referendum is illegal and that's why we don't want to take part," said Dzhalil Ibrahimov, a member of Mejlis, the Tatar council that represents Crimea's Muslim minority.

"The Crimean Tatar have no future with Russia. We want to live in a free democratic country, Ukraine. Our future is with Europe. If it will be war then we will fight; we will not go to the Russian side," said Ibrahimov. "This is a referendum under the guns of Russians, Cossacks and Chechens."

The polling station in the neighbouring Tatar village, Tekhteoljam, also did not open. The women there say they are scared about the security situation in coming days. "Now we are in isolation, we are worried that there will be violence or war," said Rimma Morozova, holding up a Ukrainian flag. "We don't see any value in this referendum, they have already decided for us. So why should we vote?"

Not all Tatars are opposed to Russia, and of those who are, many say they may leave or stay quiet rather than fight. But some are belligerent. "We will fight to the last drop of blood. We have only one motherland and nowhere to step back to. There is a cemetery and if we need to we will join our fathers there," said Emir Bakirov, 41. "Glory to Ukraine. Glory to God."

No major international organisations are monitoring the vote, but a motley assortment of observers from 23 countries have arrived of their own accord. Six gave a press conference in Simferopol on Saturday – a mixture of anti-western ideologues and European far-right politicians, which is odd given the pro-Russian rhetoric in Crimea is that the referendum is necessary to avoid rule from "fascists" in Kiev.

Belá Kovács, an MEP from the far-right Hungarian party Jobbik, said everything he had seen on Saturday conformed to international standards and he expected the vote to be free and fair. Kovacs said there were no British observers. The BNP's Nick Griffin "really wanted to come, but we persuaded him not to", he said.

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, told the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Sunday that Moscow thought the vote was legitimate and that the hope in the peninsula was that Crimea would be part of Russia by the end of the week.

The remaining Ukrainian military installations on the peninsula, where soldiers are barricaded in by Russian troops and local defence forces, should be vacated immediately, Crimea's de facto leader Sergei Aksyonov told the Guardian on Saturday.

He also said the rouble could be introduced as soon as Tuesday, with a six-month dual-currency transition period. There have been contradictory statements about whether banks and other Ukrainian assets would be nationalised, and queues have formed at a number of banks in recent days as withdrawals were limited. But most people here are not worried.

"Russian money is the strongest in the world, much better than the euro or the dollar," said Vladimir, a 23-year-old off-duty police officer in Sevastopol. "Russia is a mighty nation and we know that they will be there to support us."

As dusk fell on Sunday, there was no doubt about the result. An hour and a half before the polls closed and the first results were announced, a celebration began on Simferopol's main square. People waved Russian flags, and from the stage, the Crimean politician Olga Kovitidi sang a pop song backed by a clarinet ensemble, before shrieking into the microphone: "We have won! Congratulations on the victory! We will be together with Russia!"

Meanwhile in other parts of eastern Ukraine,in the Donbass region,activists are preventing the Ukranian military from moving towards the Russian border,as they are in al likelihood the next part of Ukraine to rejoin Russia after the Crimean vote.

Defensive blockade: Activists stop Kiev’s military trucks heading to Russian border
Published time: March 16, 2014

Activists in eastern Ukraine in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions are blocking columns of heavy military equipment heading from Kiev to the border with Russia.

Late Thursday activists from the Donbass people's militia blocked the way of columns with about 20 trucks carrying heavy military equipment near Donetsk heading to the Russian border, a local activist and former officer of the Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry told RT.

“At about 5pm [1500 GMT], local activists called me,” said Sergey Rzhavsky. “They reported that a column [with military equipment] was situated near the town of Volovaha from the side of the Valeryanovka settlement. We, the Donbass People’s Self-Defense Units of Pavel Gubarev [the local governor, currently arrested in Kiev] promptly headed there. We saw about 20 heavy trucks there with some carrying airborne combat vehicles.”

According to Rzhavsky, the activists engaged in negotiations with the troops that lasted about an hour or two. During the negotiations, the activists found out that the trucks were heading to a polygon situated near the border with Russia for some military training, he said.

“Since we do not want fratricidal carnage, we suggested the military to refrain from using force. We were unmasked, without any means of self-defense. We asked them to turn around and leave, because the military equipment was really heavy and if the columns passed the city it would escalate tensions, [and evoke] shock and panic,” he said.

The activists and the troops, who called their superiors for guidance, came to a compromise, and the Kiev troops decided to turn around, Rzhavsky told RT.

“There were no conflicts. A lot of people gathered. They stopped and offered their help and moral support, they just wanted to express their views.”

Rzhavsky added that he knows of 58 airborne combat vehicles which are moving through the Donetsk and Lugansk regions and are heading for the eastern border.

Spontaneous protests erupted in Kharkov, Donetsk and Lugansk regions against the transportation of the military equipment toward the border with Russia. Residents of Lugansk also stopped a train, carrying heavy military equipment, which was headed for the border Thursday.

According to local residents the arrival of the train with airborne combat vehicles and tanks to the Lugansk railway station during twilight caused a stir among the people, Interfax reported. Locals from the nearby villages gathered at the spot and started to prevent the disembarkation of the equipment.

In response to questions about the purpose of the transportation, the Ukrainian troops said that they’ve arrived to Lugansk to fulfill a task which is only known to their commander, as cited by Interfax.

Having received no clear answer, the residents using a locomotive dragged part of the train to a standstill despite the troops’ protests, and barricaded the rails with scrap metal.

Most of the soldiers calmly reacted to the actions of local residents and did not initiate any conflict. Moreover, they stressed that they will not use any violence against civilians.

However, seven young people dressed in uniforms of the Ukrainian armed forces, but without shoulder straps, armed with Kalashnikov rifles with silencers, began to force the unit commander to “obey orders“ to disperse locals and dismantle the barricades.

Reportedly, a scuffle occurred as the unidentified men threatened the residents saying they "betrayed Ukraine." The troops’ commander who defended the civilians was injured in the fight.

Following the incident the residents set up a 24-hour patrol at the spot, guarding the military equipment preventing its further movement.

“Currently there is an escalation of different kind of extremist organizations in our region” he said, adding, “We don’t want the same developments as in Kiev.”

“All that is happening is a provocation of the extremist organizations that are attempting to undermine the situation in the region,” Rzhavsky said.

He added that the people in eastern Ukraine are not against the country’s army, but they are calling for the politicians to sit down at the negotiating table.

“We don’t want a fratricidal war,” Rzhavsky said, adding that many in eastern Ukraine support the currently ongoing Crimea referendum on either becoming an integral part of Russia or staying within Ukraine under the conditions of broad autonomy.

[member_28502]

Code: Select all

“Since we do not want fratricidal carnage, we suggested the military to refrain from using force. We were unmasked, without any means of self-defense. We asked them to turn around and leave, because the military equipment was really heavy and if the columns passed the city it would escalate tensions, [and evoke] shock and panic,” he said.

Brothers of karma zonv

[Muppalla]

This is the first time in several decades a country has expanded its area. Botched orange revolution in Ukraine.

[Philip]

Watch the EU tremble as future fissiparious tendencies in Scotland,Spain (Catalunya),Venice and the Baltic states rattle the windows of the Euro-Peon babus in Brussels.

[Prem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/busin ... .html?_r=0
Crimea Through a Game-Theory Lens

While military and political frictions made the biggest headlines, the Cold War couldn’t be well understood without using economic theory — specifically, game theory, which analyzes the strategic logic of threats, credibility and conflict.It’s worth viewing the crisis in Ukraine through the prism of game theory, too, as applied on several fronts:
NUCLEAR DETERRENCE From the standpoint of game theory as developed by Thomas C. Schelling, a 2005 Nobel laureate in economic science, the conflict can be seen as a case study in nuclear deterrence. That’s because, after the Soviet Union split into many pieces in the 1990s, a newly independent Ukraine gave up its portion of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal. In part, it did so in exchange for a memorandum supporting its territorial integrity, signed by both Russia and the United States.Eliminating its nuclear weapons may have seemed a good deal for Ukraine at the time, and it can be argued that the world became a safer place. Yet if Ukraine were a nuclear power today, it would surely have a far greater ability to deter Russian military action. ( Lesson for Iran: India new this in 98 when Mithaiwala declared this as downpayment for Insurance)

TIPPING POINTS Long before Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept, Mr. Schelling created an elegant model of tipping points in his groundbreaking work “Micromotives and Macrobehavior.” The theory applies to war, as well as to marketing, neighborhood segregation and other domestic issues. In this case, the idea of negotiated settlements to political conflicts may be fraying, and the trouble in Crimea may disturb it further, moving the world toward a very dangerous tipping point.First, some background: With notable exceptions in the former Yugoslavia and in disputed territories in parts of Russia and places like Georgia, the shift to new governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union was mostly peaceful. Borders were redrawn in an orderly way, and political deals were made by leaders assessing their rational self-interest.In a recent blog post, Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist, noted that for the last 25 years the world has seen less violent conflict than might have been expected, given local conditions. Lately, though, peaceful settlements have been harder to find. This change may just reflect random noise in the data, but a more disturbing alternative is that conflict is now more likely.Why? The point from game theory is this: The more peacefully that disputes are resolved, the more that peaceful resolution is expected. That expectation, in turn, makes peace easier to achieve and maintain. But the reverse is also true: As peaceful settlement becomes less common, trust declines, international norms shift and conflict becomes more likely. So there is an unfavorable tipping point.In the formal terminology of game theory, there are “multiple equilibria” (peaceful expectations versus expectations of conflict), and each event in a conflict raises the risk that peaceful situations can unravel. We’ve seen this periodically in history, as in the time leading up to World War I. There is a significant possibility that we are seeing a tipping point away from peaceful conflict resolution now.

MARKET DETERRENCE A more reassuring kind of deterrence has to do with the response of Russian markets to the crisis. Russia is a far more globalized economy than it was during the Soviet era. On the first market day after the Crimean takeover, the reaction was a plunging ruble, and a decline in the Russian stock market of more than 10 percent. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to protect the ruble’s value. Such market reactions penalize Russian decision makers, who also know that a broader conflict would endanger Russia’s oil and gas revenue, which makes up about 70 percent of its export income.In this case, market forces provide a relatively safe form of deterrence. Unlike governmental sanctions, market-led penalties limit the risk of direct political retaliation, making it harder for the Russian government to turn falling market prices into a story of victimization by outside powers.
CREDIBILITY AND CONSEQUENCES How much credibility will the United States lose if it doesn’t respond forcefully to Russian action? This, too, is a problem of game theory.A commitment by a sovereign state is credible only when that state’s self-interest dictates honoring it. Previous American pledges to help or protect Ukraine were not all that credible to begin with, given the greater power and historical influence of Russia in the region. Failing to protect Crimea therefore doesn’t automatically lead to a big shift in the world’s perception of American willingness to honor commitments where the nation’s loyalties and interests are more certain. Daryl G. Press, a professor of government at Dartmouth, articulates a general version of that argument in his book “Calculating Credibility.”Still, there may be a net loss of credibility, perhaps a serious one, when the world is uncertain where American self-interest lies. For instance, how dedicated is the United States to protecting various disputed small Asian islands from Chinese domination or conquest? How much does America care about the de facto independence of Taiwan these days, or about limiting China’s influence in the South China Sea? The answers may not be obvious, especially in a diverse democracy like ours.But for strategists in China and elsewhere in Asia seeking clues to American behavior, it’s possible that the effectiveness of the United States response on Crimea will matter a great deal. For actual deterrence, the United States would mainly need to create negative consequences for Russia, not just engage in posturing.In any case, it is unlikely that Russia will happily reverse course and hand back Crimea, and so we may well see some careful calculations on how negative those longer-term consequences will be. In this sense, economics — through the medium of game theory — is again earning its moniker as the dismal science.

[Prem]

It is dawning on many heads that next logical step for Russia after sanctions by WEST will be Eastern Ukraine to seal the deal and let the wound heal. Rest of Ukraine will be left at like wet pigeon in rain at the old open air station with No gain and Train to Destination Pain .
Lesson for them i that end result of Pakiness is BD and Talibanian only.

[ramana]

Yes escalation ladder would be Eastern Ukraine if the game theory template is used.
Yet none of this humbug game theory would have been used if there were no color revolution. The Ukraine gov was losing its support anyway and could have lost the election. However that was no sufficient for those who unleashed the color rabble.

[Satya_anveshi]

wow...13 out of 15 are puppets of west in security council? I wish there was pukistan in security council and it would have been funny if they voted against Crimea's "self determination" referendum.

[Gerard]

ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly (with end of term date):
Argentina (2014)
Australia (2014)
Chad (2015)
Chile (2015)
Jordan (2015)
Lithuania (2015)
Luxembourg (2014)
Nigeria (2015)
Republic of Korea (2014)
Rwanda (2014)

[member_28502]

To stop the push of NATO borders, Putin has to make Ukraine a land locked country.

Also on the Baltic sea side he has to put some fear again in little bugs like Lithuania and Latvia.
Finland used to be neutral.

Some History
The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–56

http://tinyurl.com/owv584k