>> “Putin will take Ukraine.”
> There is no indication that Putin has ever wanted to “take Ukraine”.
You know I love you, LJ, but here I must disagree. Ukraine has always been Russia’s buffer against Europe and to some extent the Ottoman Empire. Stuff like that don’t melt away any time soon. Putin is a man of his training.
-SB
The problem with Ukraine (pinging caww who knows more than anyone about it due to massive reserach some years ago) is that Ukraine was not suppoed to be able to join the EU due to some (agreement/something or other) that the countries bordering RU were supposed to remain neutral, like a buffer (caww, correct me if I got it wrong). So Ukraine demanded to be able to join the EU, egged on and financed by Soros/dirty US money involving Bitem, McCain, Victoria Nuland and others.
Before the Euro-Maidan “protests” (people were paid to “protest”), Ukraine started being very repressive towards RU speaking people in Ukraine, of which there are many, restricting them in many ways, one I remember is kids in schools were forbidden to speak RU or use their RU names. There was much more.
The Svoboda Party and its paramilitary wing Pravi Sektor were highly involved; this is an openly neo-Nazi party, and they used ff killings of “protestors” and blamed on Russian separatists, that is just one example of what went down.
So this is a very complex issue. Crimea is a whole nother thing, also more than meets the eye.