Bharat Rakshak

UlanBatori wrote:[I loved that quote

The Russians have been playing chess. We have been playing marbles.

Speaks so eloquently about the SD. Now it all comes down to whether the 82nd Airborne gets its orders.

The US has suspended forthcoming trade and investment talks with Russia over situation in Ukraine, according to a US official. In addition, the Pentagon announced that the US has also suspended all joint “military engagements” with Russia.

"We have suspended upcoming bilateral trade and investment engagement with the government of Russia that were part of a move toward deeper commercial and trade ties," a spokesman for the Office of the US Trade Representative said.

Earlier Monday evening, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby announced in a statement that US-Russia “military engagements,” such as military exercises and port visits, are on hold for now.

“Although the Department of Defense finds value in the military-to-military relationship with the Russian Federation we have developed over the past few years to increase transparency, build understanding, and reduce the risk of military miscalculation we have, in light of recent events in Ukraine, put on hold all military-to-military engagements between the United States and Russia,” the statement reads. “This includes exercises, bilateral meetings, port visits and planning conferences.”

Kirby said the events in Ukraine have not changed US naval movements in the region.

“Some media outlets are speculating on possible ship movements in the region,” Kirby said. “There has been no change to our military posture in Europe or the Mediterranean; our Navy units continue to conduct routine, previously planned operations and exercises with allies and partners in the region.”

“On Tuesday, the Public Chamber of Russia held a hearing on the situation in Ukraine. The event was attended by well-known Russian, Ukrainian experts, government representatives. Bombshell information caused people’s deputy of Ukraine Oleg Tsarev. According to him, began to disembark in Lviv … NATO soldiers. “In March, planned exercise line” Ukraine-Atlantic alliance. ” Until the spring is still far, but hundreds of Western troops have already started landing in Lviv. They say you should prepare for the exercises. There is information that Ukraine moved to the shores of the U.S. Navy warships. The situation is critical … “
In addition, according to Tsarev Lviv began landing of American soldiers. “In March, must undergo exercises with NATO. Contingent of troops on the documents is limited – must arrive before 1000. They already fly on airplanes. Served all that you need time to prepare for the exercise. ” It is known that in the Black Sea water entered amerikaknskih two warships – missile destroyer USS Ramage (DDG-61) and the flagship of the U.S. Sixth Fleet Mount Whitney. Aboard American ships are more than 600 U.S. “sea lions.” Motion vector of American ships suggests that they go to the Black Sea shores of Ukraine. “All this makes the situation in the country is extremely tense,” – noted Oleg Tsarev.” SOURCE

Part of this information an be verified by DEBKAfile:

“Along with US warnings to Moscow, a high alert was secretly declared Saturday by the US Mediterranean Sixth Fleet. Two US warships which had been deployed in the Black Sea to back up Russian security for the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi – the USS Taylor Frigate and the USS Mount Whitney Blue Ridge-class command ship – have moved over to the western side of the Black Sea opposite Crimea and facing the Russian navy base of Sevastopol.”

UlanBatori wrote: (Ancient Mangolian fable: The Boss
Once the organs of the human body got together to elect a Boss.
The Brain said: I am the one who does the thinking. I should be Boss.
The Eyes said: We are the ones who see everything and look ahead. We should be Bosses.
The Ears said: We are the ones who collect all the info. ... and so on.
They held the election. The Brain was elected.

Whereupon the Oiseule said: NO! I WANT TO BE BOSS! If not, I will show you how important I am.
The oiseule refused to let any pakistan pass.
After a couple of days, the stomach became bloated.
The mouth could not eat anything more.
The head started aching, the brain was hurting.
The legs felt weak.
The arms felt weak.
The eyes would not focus.
The ears started hurting.
So they all got together, and elected the Oiseule Boss.
Which goes to prove:
U don't have to be a Brain to be a Boss. U just have to be an Oiseule!)

In the days since Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into the Crimea, it has been amateur hour back in Washington.

I don’t mean Barack Obama. He’s doing pretty much everything he can, with what are a very limited set of policy options at his disposal. No, I’m talking about the people who won’t stop weighing in on Obama’s lack of “action” in the Ukraine. Indeed, the sea of foreign policy punditry – already shark-infested – has reached new lows in fear-mongering, exaggerated doom-saying and a stunning inability to place global events in any rational historical context.

This would be a useful moment for Americans to have informed reporters, scholars and leaders explaining a crisis rapidly unfolding half a world away. Instead, we’ve already got all the usual suspect arguments:

With Western powers coming to the conclusion that Ukraine has lost Crimea to Russia, the U.S. and its allies face few viable options and serious questions over future relations.

In ignoring U.S. President Barack Obama’s Friday warning to keep out of Ukraine, Russia looks to be precipitating the greatest crisis in Russian-Western relations since at least the fall of the Berlin Wall.

How events play out in the next few days may well shape the geopolitical map for years to come.

Any Western direct military action would risk a war between nuclear superpowers. Ukraine’s relatively small and underequipped forces could take action but would risk inciting a much wider Russian invasion that could overrun the country.

Obama in particular faces some domestic calls to support Ukraine, although appetite for military involvement appears almost entirely absent. On Saturday, the Pentagon said there had been no change to its military deployments.

“For the West, it’s a very difficult position,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security at the U.S. Naval War College. “Obama effectively set down the U.S. red lines,” he said. “Putin has gone right through them.”

Russian forces without official insignia have taken control of key facilities in Ukraine’s Black Sea Crimean Peninsula over the past three days and surrounded Ukrainian military units.

The best that can now be done, some current and former officials say, is to avoid a further escalation that sees Moscow take over industrialized eastern Ukraine — also mainly Russian-speaking and far larger and more economically significant.

Washington and other NATO powers must also find a way to reassure increasingly flustered Eastern European states — particularly the former Soviet Baltics — that their defense guarantees will be honored, without escalating tensions.

The risk of missteps is high. As well as conventional forces, Russia could cut off gas supplies to Europe, which run through Ukraine, and is believed to have sophisticated cyberattack capabilities it could turn on Ukraine or the West.

“This is arguably the most dangerous situation in Europe since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968,” said one Western official on condition of anonymity. “With troops at high readiness on exercise in (Russia’s) western military district they are in a strong position.”

Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the “Prague Spring” saw a more moderate government come to power that was seen as much more open to the West. Despite Czech calls for support, Washington and its allies offered little more than criticism, reluctant to risk nuclear war following the Cuban Missile crisis six years earlier.

The current standoff is more dangerous than that over the 2008 Georgia war, where the West held back in part because the Georgian government was blamed for escalating the war through an attempt to seize the disputed region of South Ossetia.

In sending troops to Ukraine, in contrast, Moscow is seen to have unilaterally invaded a sovereign state — although there have long been Russian forces in Crimea, which leases the base for its Black Sea Fleet in Sebastopol from Ukraine.

NATO states have no legally binding alliance ties to Ukraine, although Western officials have been broadly supportive of those who ousted pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovich last week after dozens of pro-Europe protesters were shot dead.

Ukraine’s borders were also guaranteed by the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by Russia, the U.S. and the U.K., in return for giving up Soviet-era nuclear weapons left in the country after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Last week, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove told reporters the alliance had no military plans to support Ukraine if attacked.

In an article for Foreign Policy magazine Saturday, Breedlove’s predecessor said that should quickly change.

“The hope is that cooler heads will prevail,” retired Adm. James Stavridis wrote. “However, hope is not a strategy, and therefore further action should be considered. Planning is vital to laying out options to decision makers, and NATO’s military planners should have a busy weekend at least.”

NATO ambassadors held emergency talks in Brussels on Sunday with European foreign ministers set to meet Monday.

Ukraine participates in various NATO operations and has formed a consultative commission with the alliance. Officials say the commission may meet in the coming days and could request that NATO headquarters begins some contingency planning.

During the 2008 Georgia war, Washington sent warships into the Black Sea to deliver aid and diplomatic support. Two U.S. warships were deployed earlier this month to provide security support for the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Sending them toward Ukraine could be seen as provocative, however.

“Realistically, we have to assume the Crimea is in Russian hands,” the Western official said. “The challenge now is to deter Russia from taking over the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine.”

For now, the West is falling back on political and economic measures, starting with several countries pulling out of preparatory meetings for June’s Russia-hosted Group of Eight summit and recalling their ambassadors from Moscow.

NATO is seen as almost certain to cancel a range of joint meetings with Moscow and pull out of joint anti-terrorism exercises. The alliance could also decide to extend membership — or lesser ties — to both Georgia and Ukraine, although that might prove several steps too far for some member states.

More major exercises and shows of force from NATO in areas bordering Russia now appear all but inevitable, building on November’s “Steadfast Jazz” Baltic drills.

Ukraine’s military, now ordered to full combat readiness to repel a full Russian invasion, is considerably weaker than Russia’s. London-based think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies says it has some 129,950 military personnel. Russia mobilized up to 150,000 troops on Friday in its western military district in what it called a planned drill.

Ukrainian special forces or irregular units could mount hit-and-run attacks on Russian forces in the country. For now, however, they are seen holding back.

“My feeling is that if this remains just Crimea, the Ukrainians will let it go for now,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, Russia analyst at the U.S. government-funded Centre for Naval Analizes, part of the larger not-for-profit CNA Corporation.

“But if Russia looks like it’s going to take the rest of eastern Ukraine, they will fight even if it means they know they will lose.”

Some analysts explicitly compare events in Crimea with Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland, followed months later by the rest of the country and the next year by Poland, sparking World War II.

The important thing now, they argue, is to make sure Russia understands which lines — such as those around NATO Baltic members — really cannot be crossed.

“The Russian military still doesn’t really compare to ours,” said former U.S. Navy officer Christopher Harmer, now senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington DC. “But they know where they want to use it and unlike us, they have the will to do so.”

President Putin has ordered troops sent last week to a surprise military exercise in western and central Russia to return to their bases.

Putin ordered the return after a Defense Ministry report, which said the exercises have been conducted successfully, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the media.

The surprise military drills in Russia’s central and western territorial commands were launched last Wednesday.

They involved 150,000 troops, 90 aircraft, 880 armor, 80 warships and other hardware.

On Monday the last phase of the drill was witnessed by Putin, who visited the Kirillovsk military range in Leningrad region in north-western Russia.

The finale was somewhat spoilt by a heavy snow storm, which made a planned deployment of airborne troops too risky.

The self-declared Kiev authorities cannot solve any political problems and “lack both credentials and power” in the crisis-torn country, said the mayor of the Estonian capital of Tallinn.

“The self-proclaimed Ukrainian government was put into power by people with baseball bats,” Edgar Savisaar told Postimees newspaper. “It lacks both credentials and the capacity to solve the crisis in the country.”

According to him, the situation in Ukraine will begin stabilizing only after it “has a legitimate, democratically elected government at the helm.”

“Only after elementary public order is restored in Kiev and western Ukraine, we can start discussing the issue of providing the country with foreign aid, be it from the EU, US, Asia or from all sources simultaneously,” Savisaar said.

According to the mayor, the current government which is under the influence of radicals lacks the power to even hold free elections in the country – let alone solve other significant questions which are put in front of the nation's self-declared officials.

"Until the next elections [on May 25] only an integral government which consists of representatives of all Ukraine’s regions may claim any legitimacy,” said Savisaar.

The Tallinn mayor believes even the presence of defense and law enforcement agencies cannot provide stability in the country, because the nation also needs strong democracy and an integrated society.

Following a wave of violent street protests, the opposition-controlled parliament ousted President Yanukovich and appointed a new government. Ten southeastern Ukrainian regions saw massive protests against the developments in the capital. Several of them, including Crimea, announced that they would not take orders from the new government and replaced the appointed governors with elected representatives.

What is America’s problem is ensuring that Russia pays a price for violating international law and the global norm against inter-state war. The formal suspension of a G8 summit in Sochi is a good first step. If Putin’s recalcitrance grows – and if he further escalates the crisis – then that pressure can be ratcheted up.

But this crisis is Putin’s Waterloo, not ours.

Which brings us to perhaps the most bizarre element of watching the Crimean situation unfold through a US-centric lens: the iron-clad certainty of the pundit class that Putin is winning and Obama is losing. The exact opposite is true.

Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.

Russia in the case of sanctions by the United States will be forced to go into other currencies, create a cash-payment system, said Tuesday in an interview with RIA Novosti Presidential Aide Sergei Glazyev.

"We will have to go into other currencies, create a cash-payment system. We have excellent trade relations with our partners in the East and the South, and we will find a way to not only zeroed our financial dependence on the U.S., but will come out of these sanctions with great advantage for themselves, "- said the eye.

Trying to announce sanctions against Russia will turn to the collapse of the U.S. financial system, which will entail termination of U.S. dominance in the global financial system. If sanctions are applied against state structures, we will be forced to actually recognize the impossibility of return of those loans that were given to the Russian structures by U.S. banks. Indeed sanctions - a double-edged weapon, and if the United States were frozen our assets, that, accordingly, liabilities of our organizations in the U.S. will also be frozen. This means that our banks and businesses will not return U.S. Loans partners ", - said the eye.

"The Americans threaten Russia with sanctions and involve the EU in economic and trade war with Russia. Regarding the possible effects of these sanctions can say the following: most of sanctions against Russia will suffer the U.S. itself, because if we talk about trade relations with America, we did them not depend. Treasuries We keep a decent amount - more than $ 200 billion, and if the United States against us dare to apply sanctions to freeze accounts of Russian enterprises and citizens, we can no longer view America as a reliable partner and we encourage all to dump U.S. Treasuries , dump the dollar as the currency in which we can not be sure and leave the U.S. market. "

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says that while military action is not an option, Russia will face a range of diplomatic and political and economic consequences if it carries on its current course in Ukraine. "There is no pre-determined limit on the kinds of measures we will look at, envisage and entertain in order to safeguard the territorial integrity of Ukraine," he said.

09:30:

No solution on the Ukraine crisis is in sight, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is quoted by AFP as saying after talks with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

habal wrote:years of siding with the wrong team can make anyone like that. Her moral compass is too corrupted.

btw her advice should be taken seriously this time around. Let's Bomb Russia.

Austin wrote:So talk about Economy Russia and Sanctions.

US can apply sanction but Europe cannot because of its trade dependency on Russia and Vice versa

Russia has a FOREX reserves of of $ 493 Billion additionally it has about $175 Billion , In National Welfare and Reserve fund

They says they have USD $200 billion as US Tressury Bond .

May be they can dump that and go for Euro , Chinese or Indian Bonds ......How BRICS can help ??

Austin wrote:Interview with Stephen Cohen on Ukraine Crises

"The US and the EU are actually trying to dissolve the agreement on the Ukrainian crisis settlement reached between head of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition on February 21, which provides for the establishment of a national unity government, constitutional reform, surrender of illegal weapons, rescue of streets and cities from armed gangs.. It turns out that they are unable to influence those who have come to power in the Verkhovna Rada.

Unfortunately, they still depend on the armed men, who set forth conditions for the whole country," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a press conference in Tunis.