Crystal Ball time: The Crimea will emerge as State Federated with the Ukraine and with Russia. Obama and Kerry will claim full credit and the MSM will give it to them.
Yeltsin should have sent in the tanks and started a bloodbath.
Illegal blah blah blah. Everything good is illegal. Putin sending in troops to invade and annex, never illegal.
The law in the hands of scum is inevitably an ass.
Winning the Nobel Prize disqualifies Gorbachev from any intellectual debate. Let him join Obama, Carter and Gore to save the planet somewhere else.
Gorbachev was/is just another Communist liberals are trying to rewrite history about in order to take credit away from Ronald Reagan for ending the Cold War.
Russia may have decided to just take the part of Ukraine it cares about and cut the rest lose totally. Russia’s leaders may see this as a hard choice that will pay off in the future by settling questions and disputes about borders and identity that have been unresolved since the USSR collapsed. This can make a lot sense when you think about it from their perspective. Russia may feel it cannot have large numbers of people who consider themselves Russians in countries on its borders in part because it will draw Russia into intrigue in these countries that it now realizes it can’t win often enough to justify the trouble. They may see gobbling up parts of Ukraine as cutting their losses.
If that’s the case, the way to head this off would have to involve serious concessions. Russia has already decided it can survive whatever sanctions might be coming if this is indeed their course of action. Escalation by those opposed may result in moves in Central Asia, as Russia feels it has less to lose.
We have to understand that world historical forces live in our own time as much as in others. The ideologies and even the personalities are flitting above the waves of those forces. Time won’t stop because Hillary or Obama or Kerry gives some lame speech.
These jokers couldn’t even write a bill to give Ukraine’s new government a measly one billion dollars without trying to sneak a measure in blowing a huge amount of the IMF’s emergency money. Shameful. And then McCain has the nerve to shill for this bill? Why not just submit a clean bill without pork stuffed in if this was so important?
Russia saves a cool $15 billion by unloading this Turkey onto us. So any damage we inflict on their economy has to be measured starting $15 billion in the hole.
If that bill pases, we’re in one billion. We need to keep track of how much this costs.
Oh and I’m not stupid. I understand that the IMF “reform” may be a cover for mobilizing resources to attack Russia financially. That needs to be discussed first because I do not trust these clowns to not blow up our economy in the process. More than it has already, I mean.
Gorby needs to be careful, lest his life of comfort may be relocated to Siberia for the balance of his pension years.
I get a sense of “good cop, bad cop” going on.