The Ukraine Crisis - West VS Russia

[Linnaete]

1954: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handed Crimea over to Ukraine as a gift. Exactly how he did that kind of mystifies me. Today, the Kremlin expresses that transfer of a largely Russian ethnically-dominated oblast with a historical Tartar population to Ukraine as unconstitutional. It was a historic wrong that only peaceful annexation can correct.

2014: Protests across Ukraine expose once and for all the deep fractures along east and west, the latter of which desires a closer future with the European Union, with President Yanukovych, a well-known Moscow ally, ruling against it. Yanukovych is toppled and an acting government sits in Ukraine, condemned by the Russians as a far-right and illegitimate mob. Crimea soon becomes a hotspot.

Crimea, under effective occupation by the Russians, votes overwhelmingly in a referendum (how representative this vote majority is of Crimea's population in much debate and controversy) to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Supporters of this effective annexation argue that Crimea had no business being part of Ukraine when its ties are far closer to that of Moscow than Kiev. Putin recognises Crimea's independence from Ukraine, with Kiev decisively decrying it.

As it currently stands, one Ukrainian solder is killed in Crimea, and Kiev has authorised Ukrainian use of weapons in the politically contested region, threatening an all-out escalation in a territory that was effectively also fought over the issue of Black Sea hegemony in the titular Crimean War. Kiev has ruled the killing an act of war, rather than a crime.

Alarmed by the Russian bear flexing its muscles and uppercutting its western neighbour while skillfully moving in on Crimea as part of its sphere of influence, the West seeks to sanction Russia, condemning the Kremlin for violating international law regarding sovereignty, and for betraying the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Sanctions are being drawn up to strangle the Russian Federation, but critics belittle and mock the West, especially the EU either for such a feeble response that only paints Putin as the world's most skillful chess player checking his hapless enemies, or for its sheer hypocrisy.

So what do you guys think? Are we blowing too much hot air and just utterly feeble when it comes to one of the craftiest statesmen of our day? Do we have a justified position in condemning Russia for its actions in Ukraine, and to call for a referendum in Chechyna while we're at it? Or are you of the position that the West is utterly hypocritical on the issue of territorial integrity and supporting an illegitimate Kiev government against a Russia that is perfectly justified in what it is currently doing? Is a new Cold War brewing?

 

[CassinoChips]

Ukraine to Pull All Its Forces From Crimea, Conceding Loss
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/world/europe/crimea.html?_r=1


Yeah, Putin is so awesome and clever for taking over a region that was pretty much defenseless.

Russian War Games on Baltic Border Spark Security Fears
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...es-on-baltic-border-spark-security-fears.html
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-military-starts-aviation-exercises-northwest-125944634.html
http://allenbwest.com/2014/03/russi...unces-joint-exercises-us-uk-anyone-listening/

Just a coincidence, until Putin does something, but this is what I'm talking about. Cold-war propaganda. Putin knows everyone is watching his every move and he's playing it up just to get everyone riled up.... and the sad thing is, it's working.


I wanna know where they get their numbers from to say that from out of the early 50% of the votes counted, 95% support the secession.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/ukraine-russia-truce-crimea-referendum

People aren't questioning anything about the votes and that is quite scary. If the votes are real, and by real I mean by citizens who weren't implanted by Putin in someway, then I guess the world has to deal with it. But I personally need to see evidence that the votes weren't tampered with in anyway. :/



I think I'm pretty much done with the topic. said everything i needed to. on to more important things!

The votes are probably legit. Ethnically and politically, Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian. Not so much Ukrainian.

 

[Linnaete]

I suppose I should answer at least one of the questions I posited in the opening post. Let's go with the question of whether this is a new Cold War brewing up.

Is it a new Cold War? Well, not really, no. That label is good tabloid material because it's generally easy to understand and convey, but the current makeup of the international arena is considerably more complex than that and different in face than it had been throughout much of the latter half of last century. Heck, even the actual Cold War is told too simplistically, implying that it was a perfect dichotomy of two evenly matched sides with clashing ideologies while everyone else in the Third World (China's somewhere there. Not everyone remembers the Sino-Soviet split) stayed peripheral and invisible. Samuel Huntington wrote of a clash of civilisations, and I personally don't see two orderly camps with very different ways of ordering society about to do a re-enactment.

Russia is not the old USSR. Vladimir Putin is not Vladimir Lenin. There's no Brezhnev Doctrine going around either, nor is there an actual ideology that Moscow desires to spread beyond its borders. This is a Russia that has the superficial aspects of democracy, but is really more of a control freak clique rule by a select few people and assorted kleptocrats. It's a hyper-nationalistic regime that would like nothing more than to strut around and dream dreams of a pompish Russia that can once again startle the world by merely sneezing. Peace, bread and land this ain't.

We've now a much more globally interconnected world where the sight of any tiny anomaly sends the stock market screaming into an unremitting frenzy. Russia is at least fully part of the world economy now, and not this recluse empire that wanted to collectivise, do five year plans and generally do things its own way. I would like to think that Putin isn't an idiot and knows where the lines are, otherwise he risks eventually pitting his country slowly into the shitter because Moscow like practically everyone else is significantly reliant on western trade. As much as they hate the EU as a political entity and NATO for creeping up to its front garden, Russia can't escape having to need them as trade partners. And that's me assuming that Putin is generally rational in behaviour.

But of course the media will keep banging on about this being a new Cold War. They do it with China the moment the words "US" and "trade deficit" are uttered. They're certainly doing it with Russia, and somewhere you can almost hear Mitt Romney saying "Ha, Obama! I told you so! Your pretentious multilateral foreign policy is being laughed at by Putin and we really needed someone like I dunno, ME to be the new Ronald Reagan Cold War warrior to be the man!". And if the rhetoric is regurgitated loudly and often enough, our leaders will delude themselves into thinking that it IS a new Cold War, before damagingly reverting back to old Cold War paradigmatic ways of thinking and seeing international relations. I suppose if there is ever to be a happy ending for the West at the end of this and everyone in Eastern Europe is suddenly happy and cheerful again, the West will continuously pat itself on the back again, even though realistically we'll have done nothing. Just as we patted our back at the end of the Cold War for "winning" it, even though when you think about it, we did jack shit.

There's honestly nothing substantial we can do. Our sanctions so far may hurt Russia a little, but they've still the oil and gas money. So far the Kremlin has laughed at the EU sanction attempts, and Brussels knows that to tighten them any more substantially and economies like Germany as well as countries that have considerable Russian debt money like Greece and Cyprus may end up hurting more than Russia itself. On the other hand, I have also read that the Russian economy is far more fragile than we usually think it is, so I'm open to the idea that perhaps these sanctions can work. Time will tell. What else have we tried? Banning them from the G8? Oh God, no! No! That's as awful as banning Moscow from participating in a global cricket game. Oh, what's that? We might consider not having Russia host the 2018 World Cup? After Sochi, that will definitely make Putin squirm!

In the meantime I don't know how credible our response to Russia can be so long as we're mysteriously a-okay with the current coup administration in Kiev without at least questioning it.

Well, we know your stance.

You're going to have to tell me now. What did you think my stance is/was?

I think the exercise of trying to argue against the Crimean secession on the grounds that its indigenous Tartar population was brutally cut down under Stalin in favour of Russian sojourners-turned-settlers is kind of futile at this point. There's the simple fact that most territories in the world would come under the ultimate question of who legitimately should get to decide which ethnic-national-political entity this strip of land should belong to. Crimea as it currently stands is culturally and linguistically much more aligned with Moscow than it is with Kiev, so my general gut reaction, as opposed to the conventions of international law, is that I find it hard to genuinely get riled up about a probable transfer of sovereignty of Crimea.

I just look at our leaders here in Britain and I see them generally keen to do all they can to punish Russia for Crimea, and yet...all I can think about are those remote islands near Argentina way down in the south west that we fought a war for in 1982. I know there are very visible differences between the two scenarios, but I don't find it very credible to bang on about how Russia has no right to Crimea so long as the Falkland Islands remain under Britain. Who are we in that regard to tell the Crimeans that they can't ever go back to Russia?