No need for a “land bridge.” Crimea is less than a mile from mainland Russia.
A bridge is in the works. If you look at satellite photos, you see that some preliminary soil preparation has been done. The project is stalled, no doubt it will be unstalled soon. No doubt the Vladivostok LNG terminal and South Stream pipeline will be accelerated as well.
Russia has gamed this to the death, believe that. We can stop this process at any time by having a truce — Ukraine becomes decentralized and no NATO/EU. Otherwise Russia will continue to cause problems for us. This is the offer they are making.
Watch how Crimea’s economy get pumped up as enticement.
BTW, Russia’s strategy will be to occupy any areas before we do. Attempting to “send troops” to Ukraine will likely provoke preemptive sizing of parts Eastern Ukraine, ala Crimea. If we are ready for that, fine. But understand that is what NATO troops in UKraine will cause.
Russian knows that no one dares fire first, so its a classic cult of the offensive motivated strategy. They will leave most of Ukraine alone, they don’t want the poor Western area where the people hate them anyway. The EU will be saddled with that turkey.
All this could have avoided by waiting for the next election on May 25th to rid of Yanukovych.
Good job State Dept.
If we want to have a real democracy in a country like Ukraine , we have to accept a long term battle against Russian backed parties, who will always have support from a large number of Ukrainians, both for cultural reasons and purely political(ie the opposition will always accept Russian help in some form). We can’t throw a tantrum and knock over the chessboard when Russia wins an exchange. Remember, this Yanukovych clown already got booted out of office once, no doubt it could happen again. The reason he came back is because the faction that we backed were worse.
We got to up our game and get our pawns to do at least as good of a job as a corrupt “ex” communist stooge or we will lose elections. If that happens, wait till the next election, don’t try to bring down a legitimate government that won the election by “protests.” Imagine if that happened in America today? No matter who did it, large numbers of people would not accept the gov’t as legitimate. We can just pretend that Ukraine doesn’t work the same way. The irony of “pro-”democracy” forces behaving like this is apparent to everyone but our leaders.