ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

http://i.imgur.com/85nDLvk.jpg

I lol'd

The Admiral Kyiv made head of the Ukrainian navy yesterday has just sworn allegiance to the Republic of Crimea and told all the troops under his command to ignore any orders coming from the capital. Not sure how many will follow him.

russia didn't hesitate invading georgia even w/ meathead warking bush in office

worth noting that this was a response to georgia's invasion of south ossetia.

https://24.media.tumblr.com/90c89980510c84634ef509adf5de3a0e/tumblr_n1sjpnqwic1r6s5zro1_250.gifhttps://24.media.tumblr.com/ea0deff2a634c1f5503d88d4af298ba1/tumblr_n1sjpnqwic1r6s5zro2_250.gif

This is a bold move:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-turns-to-its-oligarchs-for-political-help.html?referrer=

Kyiv has put billionaire oligarchs in charge of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, presumably because they have enough influence behind the scenes in the East to theoretically keep some of the institutions onside.

Appointing oligarchs could go down very badly with pro-revolution, anti-corruption groups though.

Yes, they should be freely elected in totally transparent and totally fair elections.

Lots of interesting perspectives on this thread. Perhaps surprising, but when I was thinking of where to go online for well-rounded analysis I thought of ILE first, and you guys didn't let me down. The major media outlets (NY Times, WaPo, etc) have an annoying tendency to frame things in terms of US domestic politics - like everything that happens is portrayed as either a rebuff to Obama or a victory for him - as though the number of one thing on people's minds in Russia and Ukraine is what does the US president think. Personally I'm 100% A-OK with Obama's handling of this so far. I certainly don't think US needs to be out in front of EU in taking a hard line - it's their backyard.

is there gas and oil ukraine ? is taht what theyre really after

Well, no. But important gas-lines from Russia runs through Ukraine.

er yes there are: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26418664

Yes, that article is about the gas-lines. Ukraine doesn't even have enough gas for themselves.

This is bleak

http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/russian-invasion-ukraine-push-west-economic-war/441

xp q was whether there are gas fields in the Ukraine, which there most definitely are

q was on whether or not Russia was after the gas in Ukraine, so the relevant information must be that Ukraine doesn't even have gas enough for themselves. Whether or not they have some gas is not really important, they obviously don't have enough to cause the invasion.

couple days old now, but:

http://world.time.com/2014/02/28/crimea-russia-putin-night-wolves/

Because their uniforms and vehicles had no identifying markers of any kind, the troops patrolling the streets, highways and airports of the Crimea could at least plausibly have been part of irregular militia forces, which locals have been forming to defend against the revolution. Moscow was therefore able to deny any knowledge as to which troops were part of the regular movements of the Black Sea Fleet and which ones weren’t. This meant that on Friday, the only identifiably Russian force descending on the Crimea were the Night Wolves.

Since 2009, they have been one of the defining elements of Russian soft power in Eastern Europe. Their biker rallies and mass rides through countries like Ukraine, Estonia, Serbia, Romania and Bosnia serve to promote Slavic pride and Russian patriotism in Moscow’s former Soviet dominions. President Putin has often joined them on these rides, although he usually plays it safe by choosing a three-wheeler.

obv the "unidentified" troops have been now

Ukraine's position as a gas transit route is hugely important to Russia and the EU but I don't think it's directly relevant here.

The bigger issue for Russia and the US is NATO membership, which is one of the few things that Yanukovich and Tymoshenko disagreed on. The US, since Clinton, has been trying to encircle Russia with sympathetic allies with mixed success.

The suggestions that this was a US coup are daft but there has been a lot of meddling and it's not all in the services of advancing democracy.

Xps

what about the euro? I thought that was the unreast

Ties to Europe are a big factor in domestic politics, and from the Russian side, but the EU doesn't really have a stake in destabilising Ukraine to achieve them and the US, although it supports pro-EU parties, does so for other reasons I think.

walt weighs in: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/03/no_contest_ukraine_obama_putin

There's plenty of room for finger-pointing and blame casting here, but the taproot of the debacle in Ukraine was a failure to distinguish between power and interests. Power is a useful thing to have in international politics, but any serious student of foreign policy knows that the stronger side does not always win. If it did, the United States would have won in Vietnam, would have persuaded India, Pakistan, and North Korea not to test nuclear weapons, and would have Afghan President Hamid Karzai dancing to our tune. In the real world, however, weaker states often care more about the outcome than stronger states do and are therefore willing to run more risks and incur larger costs to get what they want.

Unfortunately, U.S. leaders have repeatedly lost sight of this fact since the end of the Cold War. Because the United States is so powerful and so secure, it can meddle in lots of places without putting its own security at risk. United States officials tend to think they have the answer to every problem, and they reflexively assume that helping other societies become more like us is always the "right thing to do." Because we've become accustomed to our self-appointed role as Leader of the Free World, Washington is quick to proclaim redlines and issue high-minded demands, convinced that others will do its bidding -- if it barks loudly enough.

Unfortunately, America's remarkably favorable geopolitical position also means that the outcome of many global disputes don't matter all that much to Washington, and still less to the American people. The result is a paradox: primacy allows the United States to interfere in lots of global disputes, but many of the issues it gets involved in are of secondary importance and not worth much risk, blood, or treasure. Why? Because the United States will be fine no matter how things turn out. It has the power to act almost anywhere, but its vital interests are rarely fully engaged.

That is certainly the case in Ukraine, a country whose entire economy is about the size of Kentucky's. Last year, total U.S. trade with Ukraine was a measly $3 billion, less than the city budget of Philadelphia and about .00018 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP). Ukraine's political system has been a mess ever since independence in 1991 and its economy is nearly bankrupt and needs massive outside assistance. It would be nice if Ukraine developed effective political institutions, but neither the security nor prosperity of the United States depend on that happening, either now or in the foreseeable future. Put simply: Ukraine is not an arena on which America's future depends in the slightest.

Since 1992, the U.S. approach to Russia and Eastern Europe has been guided by the assumption that Western-style democracy was the wave of the future and that the United States could extend its reach eastward and offer security guarantees to almost anyone who wanted them, but without ever facing a serious backlash.

Tbrr, I would say that US policy both within Russia and wrt its neighbors hasn't been about extending democracy, it has been about limiting the ability of Russia to pose a threat to the US again. Perhaps understandably given the context most of them grew up in, a lot of politicians and security officials are convinced Russia could somehow regain its Soviet might and challenge the US head to head again.

It's not going to happen but the focus / obsession with Eastern Europe central asia throughout the Clinton years has been convincingly argued to have led to not enough attention was paid to threats from the middle East, the rise of Chinese power in Africa, the estrangement of Latin America, etc.

Weird grammar going on there.

in addition to the institutionalised framework of Cold War understanding, I'm wondering how much this sort of annexation triggers basic responses derived from understanding of late 19thC/WW1 balance of power and WW2 causes.

feels like the interpretation of the strategic value of the Crimea is still likely to based on that period of history.

idk whether Russia controlling the Crimea and the Black Sea is still that big a deal - it probably is, right? also if the response is beset by military teaching of that period of history, it's understandable: the manner of the trigger - the fabrication of incidents requiring a defence force and the deniability of the initial occupying forces has a childish duplicity that's characteristic of that period, esp with Hitler's annexations.

it's going to make any military strategists jumpy as hell even if S Walt's modern interpretation of the value of Ukraine to the US is correct.

President Barack Obama said on Monday that Russia violated international law with its military intervention in Ukraine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLNqTbBu-zo

A couple of links:

Fascinating (and prescient) Charles King piece on Sevastopol from 2009:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2009/05/01/city-on-the-edge/

Interesting analysis of current situation by Anatol Lievin:

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/03/02/why-obama-shouldnt-fall-for-putins-ukrainian-folly/ideas/nexus/

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/03/if-you-want-to-be-truly-pessimistic-about-the-ukraine-crisiss-geopolitical-consequences/

Environmentalists vs American conservatives aspect---Among other arguments, Ukraine situation will also encourage some that the US should be doing more fracking and selling of energy abroad, so Europe can get energy from US and not Russia

More re seeing this through US eyes... seems a bit simplistic-

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116840/mitt-romney-and-russia-putin-and-ukraine

I strongly recommend these older articles on Ukrainian gas infrastructure by Jérôme Guillet at the OilDrum, for those curious about this facet of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. He wrote a PhD dissertation on the subject and is a Paris based energy trader.

Ukraine vs Russia: Tales of pipelines and dependence (December 2, 2006)
Russian gas and European energy security (April 30, 2007)
Russian gas and European energy security - a reprise (August 24, 2008)
Ukraine-Russia gas spat: some background and context (January 3, 2009)
Some predictions on the forthcoming Russian-Ukrainian gas 'crisis' (November 17, 2009)

sanpaku, i've thought this at times over the years, and not really about ukraine, could you show off your blogroll/reading list? you always have the shit.

goole otm, i'd like to see it too!

Gazprom took the opportunity to casually mention they're finalising a 30-year energy supply deal with China.

http://m.government.ru/en/news/10886

That Walt piece seems like a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking to me. "The real question, however, is why Obama and his advisors thought the United States and the European Union could help engineer the ouster of a democratically elected and pro-Russian leader in Ukraine and expect Vladimir Putin to go along with it?" What evidence does Walt attest that Obama "engineered" the ouster of Yanukovych? Seems highly unlikely to me. Walt will need to point to something more substantive than distributing cookies to protesters. The fact is that Obama did take a fairly hands-off approach to the protests, and his number one goal was to reduce the tensions and promote a peaceful resolution. This is in contrast to the pro-democracy cheerleading that characterized the administration of his predecessor:

While George W. Bush was inspired by the Orange Revolution of 2004 and weeks later vowed in his second inaugural address to promote democracy, Barack Obama has approached the revolution of 2014 with a more clinical detachment aimed at avoiding instability. Rather than an opportunity to spread freedom in a part of the world long plagued by corruption and oppression, Mr. Obama sees Ukraine’s crisis as a problem to be managed, ideally with a minimum of violence or geopolitical upheaval...

After winning re-election in 2004, Mr. Bush decided to broaden his ambition by setting a "freedom agenda" for his second term. Even as he and his aides were working on his inaugural address, images of Ukrainian protesters wearing orange scarves and resisting a corrupt election exhilarated the West Wing. In January 2005, Mr. Bush declared it his policy to support democracy "in every nation" with "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." ... As the latest Ukraine protests got underway, Mr. Obama personally evinced little of the enthusiasm of Mr. Bush, but his administration has been heavily involved in seeking a settlement. Taking the lead has been Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who called Mr. Yanukovych nine times since November, and Secretary of State John Kerry, who has reached out to Russia repeatedly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/world/europe/wary-stance-from-obama.html

The 'smoking gun' for theorists who want to believe it was a US coup tends to be the leaked conversation between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26079957

Although things turned out more or less as they planned they would, there isn't much evidence that it wasn't a case of two people wildly overestimating their importance in the situation. Obama has been OK here. There is a case for saying he should have been banging heads together in the opposition to ensure a less contentious transition government but the EU tried that and nobody paid any attention.

I haven't read the whole transcript but my understanding is that call pertained to working out the details of a proposed power-sharing agreement with the opposition - not the "coup" that ended up taking place.

That's probably true - it was deliberately leaked without context. I don't think anyone really expected the negotiated agreements to collapse as quickly as they did.

To get conspiracy-minded about things, it seems much more likely to me that if anyone engineered Yanukovych's decision to flee it was Putin. He probably figured he had more to gain from a disorderly breakdown to talks that could give him a pretext for his Crimea move than to allow any kind of negotiated settlement that might lead to a stronger central government in Kiev.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26442381 Come on! :(

The fact is that Obama did take a fairly hands-off approach to the protests, and his number one goal was to reduce the tensions and promote a peaceful resolution. This is in contrast to the pro-democracy cheerleading that characterized the administration of his predecessor.

yes, I think this is very much true--just witness the different responses to the protests by Obama and John McCain (who admittedly has much less to lose as he is not deciding American foreign policy). McCain took the "freedom fighters! yaaaay!" approach. Obama's was more: "don't kill your own people, guy."

although politically he's dead weight now, Yanukovitch's role in all this is interesting to me. we still don't have a clear picture of why he fled Kyiv. was he under immediate physical threat? did all but the inner ring of security refuse to protect him? did he just figure, more broadly, that he could better rally his base from a position in eastern Ukraine? did Putin offer him immunity and/or support if he left Kyiv? (as o. nate suggests below).

and what is his position now? even if he is ethnically (and linguistically) Russian, he is still a Ukranian citizen and current/former/? head of state of Ukraine. what does it mean that he's openly colluding with another government, that he seems to be supporting a de facto invasion of Ukrainian territory by this other government? by any standard, I think, that's treason, no?

see - that's what is weird to me. why would the pro-democracy cheerleader support the ppl deposing the ostensibly democratically elected government? this destroy a democratically elected government to save democracy paradigm is so bizarre. pro-democratic opponents of government need to establish reforms + not precedence for coup d'etat

agreed that yanukovitch seems like the most interesting player in the conflict xp (well putin obv super fascinating but maybe not especially here)

i think the simple answer unfortunately is that the people who replaced yanukovitch are thought to be more "pro-western" (=neoliberal). which a lot of western (and other) minds have taken to be one and the same thing as more "democratic," in the formulation whose hypocrisy you point out.

on the other hand it's true that Yanukovitch (and most of his predecessors) betrayed the public trust to a truly egregious extent.

it's pretty clear to me that obama did not and could not have engineered yanukovitch's overthrow or even the protest movement. that's rather condescending to the ukrainians, for one thing. money from wealthy americans with an interest in the ukraine is not (always!) the same thing as state dept./oval office policy.

He would presumably argue that as elected head of state he had the right to call on external assistance to resist an antidemocratic coup but that's almost academic now. He will probably remain in Russia. Putin said today that he had told him his career in politics is over (and probably enjoyed that greatly).

He claims he was shot at and had to leave for his safety and the safety of his family. The way the security apparatus and high-ranking politicians melted away overnight is still extraordinary though. A charitable reading might be that they left to avoid civil war breaking out the next day but I suspect they knew there wasn't a sufficient appetite in Kyiv to defend them from a full armed insurrection. Once he was gone he was gone. The Party Of The Regions threw him under the bus almost immediately. There was no real prospect of regrouping. Xps

i can't really shake the desire to watch both parts of Ivan the Terrible this week. the "scene" you describe (of Putin telling Yanukovitch that his days in politics are over) sounds like something Eisenstein could have put in those films. of course in the film Yanukovitch's head would roll a few scenes later.

see - that's what is weird to me. why would the pro-democracy cheerleader support the ppl deposing the ostensibly democratically elected government? this destroy a democratically elected government to save democracy paradigm is so bizarre. pro-democratic opponents of government need to establish reforms + not precedence for coup d'etat

― Mordy , 4. marts 2014 22:44 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Once Yanukovitch shot and killed scores of his own people, he sort of lost the status of 'democratically elected', don't you think?

money from wealthy americans with an interest in the ukraine is not (always!) the same thing as state dept./oval office policy.

seeing as how this is a country whose wealthy citizens do dictate policy you can see how they might suspect the same is true of the US (and not be entirely wrong, at least in a broad sense)

xp to Frederik:

J0rdan S. wrote this on thread pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.) on board I Love Music on Oct 24, 2013

one of the rites of passage of 2013 ilx is learning to never argue with mordy

Once Yanukovitch shot and killed scores of his own people, he sort of lost the status of 'democratically elected', don't you think?

― Frederik B, Tuesday, March 4, 2014 5:14 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, he didn't. he may have lost legitimacy in the eyes of many if not most ukrainians, but he was still democratically elected. you can't change that retrospectively, whether you believe he should have gone or not.

of course, he was democratically elected in an election in which one crook was running against another crook, but if that invalidated elections the US would be missing a few presidents.

i imagine there are at least a few democratically elected leaders who've gunned down their own people over the years.

http://iaspace.pbworks.com/f/richard%20nixon.jpg

you rang?