Your analogy is dead on Marguerite. Whenever the West chooses to ignore national sovereignty in pursuit of some allegedly noble pursuit (protecting Albanian thugs?) it concedes the moral high ground when some less than noble regime decides to do the same thing. Putin operates on the “might is right” principle and he knows that the West will do nothing to stop his ambitions as long as he doesn’t attempt to take over all of the Ukraine. As with the Georgia incident, he’s using a trumped up premise of protecting “Russian speakers” in order to invade a sovereign nation and effectively annex part of its territory into the new Russian empire.
Thank you.
I really don’t think that Russia is interested in taking back all of Ukraine. What it wants is to secure its navy base, vital for the access to the Mediterranian Sea.
As I pointed out earlier on another thread, the internal conflicts of Ukraine remain vivid since the WWII.
While the Western Ukrainians welcomed as “liberators” the nazi German troops, and collaborated with them in assassination en masse of Poles, Jews and ethnic Russians,
the Eastern Ukrainians fought bravely against the nazi occupiers and the famous battles of Kursk an Kharkov stand witness of their heroism.
This profound split between the two continue to this day. Il suffice to see the map of the last presidential election:
Timoshenko the candidate of the West 45% versus Ianukovich candidate of the East 48.5%.
Each part voted for its candidate at 80%.
The Eastern Ukrainians don’t recognize the puppet government (with a vice prime minister and five other ministers, members of a neo-nazi party) issued of Maidan revolt in Kiev, which they consider illegitimate.
More than that, one of this gov. first decisions was to forbid Russian as second official language. For regions like Crimea, Donbass and Donetsk, where Russian is spoken by more than 90% of the population, this was considered as an intolerable agression.
Putin doesn’t even need to intervene in the rest of Ukraine, which interests him moderately (except Crimea). The putschists in Kiev did the job for him.
If you want to know exactly what happened in Kiev - an organized assault on governmental offices, police and symbols of the past by armed ultra-right militias supported by Kerry, Nuland and McCain -
I invite you to watch these videos. The images are self-explanatory, even without comments:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=58b_1392877307
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1di9r5_pravy-sektor-les-neonazis-ukrainiens-moteur-de-la-revolte_news?start=81
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1diadq_maidan-kiev-des-manifestants-pacifiques_news?from_related=related.page.int.behavior-meta2.049c50b121800bd05168f00671f97288139359884