ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

I found it interesting that the Bloomberg article mentions the Russian government asking billionaires and large companies to see who was vulnerable to margin calls.

Some sanctions seem unavoidable, whether or not they escalate from there would depend on the Russian response. Who so far has been overreacting. So I can clearly see a series of escalating sanctions being imposed. Which would be far more damaging to Russia. And then Ukraine afterwards, probably, and sadly.

so crimea voted for secession, unsurprisingly.

i couldn't figure out where else to post this article but since we were discussing obama, russia + o's foreign policy in this thread i figure this is a good place for it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/obamas-policy-is-put-to-the-test-as-crises-challenge-caution.html

Apparantly 123% of the voters in Sevastopol voted for secession. I mean, faced with such an overwhelming desire to be part of Russia, who would not allow that?

I was kinda thinking this all might be for the best. Let the majority Russian Crimea join Russia and the rest of Ukraine will probably have an easier time bonding with the EU?

Well, that would be good, but how many people expect Putin to stop now?

Most of Eastern Ukraine is majority Russian and they could be next to push for secession. With them would go almost all the country's industry.

That said, there have been theories floated that the Kyiv government wouldn't be too fussed about Crimea going because it means hundreds of thousands of opposition voters becoming ineligible.

Crimea's resource-poor, dry and windswept, dependent on mainland Ukraine. Russia's going to have to provide a lot, so why not take more territory? They've already seized a power plant just over the line
[Removed Illegal Link]

Jeez, formatting. Okay, so they've taken this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/world/europe/russian-troops-seize-gas-plant-beyond-crimean-border-ukraine-says.html

Witn plenty more where that came from, massing in different regions along the border:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/europe/crimea-ukraine-secession-vote-referendum.html

Jesus, SV is still talking as if this was a real choice by the people of Crimea. Wow. Have you ever actually spoken to a Russian-speaking Ukrainian about this stuff?

yeah framing this as 'self-determination' in any real sense is very flawed imo.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-signs-pointed-to-crimea-independence-vote-but-polls-didnt/

Jesus, SV is still talking as if this was a real choice by the people of Crimea. Wow. Have you ever actually spoken to a Russian-speaking Ukrainian about this stuff?

Is there some sort of reason your weirdly personal attacks on his posts have been so overlooked by the mods? I mean, I could always fp, but I'm ~genuinely curious~.

nothing wrong with the 'both of the above' approach imo

Speaking of weirdly personal, "gyac", that's a pretty nice first ILX post.

welcome to ILX, gyac

gyac wrote this on thread The Smiths - Meat Is Murder poll on board I Love Music on Mar 16, 2011

I'd rank it:

Strangeways
Queen is Dead
Meat is Murder
The Smiths

myself.

The debut suffers from poor production but a lot of the stuff on there sounds better in the live recordings. Reel Around the Fountain and I Don't Owe You Anything are the only real duds and even so, they were still Smiths songs.

welcome aboard, gyac. always good to see new faces around here.

TWU i kinda admire yr own personal style of maximum abrasion to all available peronsages but doesn;t it get somewhat tiring at all at all

It's more tiring to read a million OTMs to SV's oddly Chamberlainesque posts (in which he has consistently predicted reasonable behavior from Putin that has consistently failed to happen) then to post "WTF?" about it.

well if you've worked out the difference in joules i'm not gonna question it, carry on by all means

But yes, saying that someone who is talking about that phony referendum as if it were not phony is "talking as if there was a real choice by the people of Crimea" and questioning whether this opinion was based on any input from ethnic Russians with Ukrainian passports is clearly outside the bounds of civilized conversation and I should be ashamed of myself. I am worse than Hitler.

Jesus, SV is still talking as if this was a real choice by the people of Crimea. Wow. Have you ever actually spoken to a Russian-speaking Ukrainian about this stuff?

Curious as to whether you have actually spent any time in Ukraine. Pretending the poll wasn't flawed is stupid. Pretending that a substantial number of Crimeans haven't always wanted to unite with Russia, even before the government 85% of them voted for was removed from office, is stupid. I am doing neither.

The poll was more than merely flawed, and a "substantial number" doesn't mean an overwhelming majority. You know that, right?

"any time in Ukraine" -- a couple of days, fairly recently, but no more than that. Cancelled a business trip set for two weeks ago.

don't engage honestly and rationally w/ evil lunatics sv, you come off like neville chamberlain

interesting 538 piece on polling in crimea - http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-signs-pointed-to-crimea-independence-vote-but-polls-didnt/

Interesting article, balls, where did you find it?

Why does it matter if the majority is 'overwhelming'?

The propaganda was certainly a factor. TV channels spent a huge amount of time playing up the far right links of the government and reminding people of the atrocities committed under Bandera. 40% of Crimeans thinking Ukraine and Russia should merge sounds feasible. You would expect more to think that Crimea alone should join Russia and more still now that an almost universally hated political leadership has taken power from a broadly popular one. That almost certainly wouldn't add up to 90+% but it forms a body of opinion that can't be handwaved away.

Obviously this is only anecdotal but of the Crimean interviews I've heard (mostly on BBC + Al-J) since the referendum, supporter interviews (who, for i guess obvious reasons*, outnumber referendum detractors in interviews like 3:1) are super outspoken + enthusiastic. One particularly memorable interviewee said that he identifies as Russian - not because of any affinity to the political entity, but because he identifies so strongly with Russian literature. I could def relate. Of non-supporters, they almost to a man explained that they refrained from voting because they thought it wouldn't matter. Some insinuated this was because the vote was stacked, but others said plainly that they could just tell which way the population was trending and it wasn't worth getting involved.

(*sorry, obvious reasons being that ppl who didn't support the referendum obv have plenty of good safety reasons to keep their mouths shut and not do interviews atm imo)

Good timeline, for events Nov. 21--March 8, anyway. Good framework/points of departure for further studies too: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/08/us-ukraine-crisis-timeline-idUSBREA270PO20140308

SV, can the difference between 40% and 90% be handwaved away? Because that it what it appears to me that you are doing.

You do get that it isn't the same polling-question, and that some pretty dramatic things happened between those two numbers? Also, fraud and supression, obviously, nobody is doubting that?

i haven't crunched the numbers, but if turnout was 83% as claimed then that would have to include a healthy chunk of crimea's ethnolinguistic minorities—mostly ukrainian speakers and tatars—who collectively make up something like 40+% of those living in Crimea. and a 97% "yes" vote would imply that even a majority of voters from those groups voted "yes." that seems, to put it mildly, highly unlikely. especially since international news groups report that most tatars sat out the vote because they think it's illegitimate. that would mean a very sizable chunk of ukrainian-speaking folks voted "yes."

anyway there are good reasons to discount the result as a fabrication even if you don't buy the most obvious reason, which is that the vote was carried out under implicit military threat with few international observers etc.

putin and his cronies are so profoundly cynical that they make my jaw drop sometimes*. esp. their references to kosovo as analogical to and thus legitimating the crimea secession. i have a bad memory, but not so bad as to have forgotten how bitterly the russian government was opposed to kosovo breaking away from serbia.

(*yeah, i guess it's not really any more cynical than arguing without good evidence that a poor, militarily decimated state was stockpiling chemical weapons that were an immediate threat to US security. but, you know.)

So it looks like annexation is going through. With the first round of sanctions looking like a joke, I guess the question is whether there's any appetite in Washington/Berlin/etc for a more serious second round.

Bizarre in an asynchronous way to hear the world community seriously discuss whether we should just let Putin have Crimea or if it might lead to further Russian annexations.

Here’s the dirty little secret of the foreign-policy pundit/expert orgy on what to do about Crimea: the US has at its disposal very few levers with which to change Russia’s behavior, at least in the near-term. We can cancel multilateral summits and military training (already done); we can deny visas to Russian officials (just beginning); we can even ramp up bilateral economic sanctions and try to build support among key European allies for a larger, more invasive sanctions regime (under discussion).
But as our long effort to bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear ambition reminds us, such steps will take time and diplomatic effort to bring results. They won’t offer the guarantee of a satisfactory result, and they could produce significant economic backlash for US companies - and, more directly, US allies.
In the end, we’re stuck arguing over policy responses that largely dance around the margins, and a situation in which Europe’s actions likely matter more than America’s.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/14/us-foreign-policy-crimea-obama-response

Interesting that financial markets are rising on this news. There seems to be relief that Putin said in his speech that he doesn't want any more of Ukraine, which assurance the markets are apparently taking at face value.

I don't see why the US can't annex Ontario

i bet some of the western oil country would be happy to leave ottawa's hold (tho maybe not to come under obama's). i doubt a referendum of canadians anywhere of "would you like to become american?" would get out of single digits. among quebecois i doubt it would get over a rounding error.

No, short term nothing can be done about Russia. But long term, it will have consequences. By taking Crimea he has secured 100% that Ukraine will be oriented towards the west, and the quest for dropping the dependency on Russian gas will intensify.

But then Russia can sell it to China, so...

just knew putin would bring up kosovo sooner or later and the precedent it set is one reason alot of ppl argued against kosovo sovereignty at the time. there's a huge difference in causus belli but putin regards that as a joke, as does the rest of the world after the last ten years (if not two hundred). could someone (ie sv obv) who's more familiar w/ ukraine's demographics tell us what crimea's removal means for the future? total 'i haven't thought about the ukraine since they gave up their nukes' here but my very shallow understanding is there was a somewhat tenuous balance between eu-sympathetic west and ru-sympathetic east - does this kind of extreme gerrymandering of crimea shift that balance toward the west? if putin really does stop w/ crimea is this arguably a win-win situation? putin gets his show of power, western ukraine is shed a nuisance region, eastern ukraine has concrete demonstration of what happens if their interests are run over and threat of secession, america gets to see putin and russia continue to self-marginalize themselves (i mean does anyone think there are any real advantages to be gained from this long term? it's a pretty empty victory. i'm reminded of dan snyder.), europe keeps pipelining oil and dirty money, everyone knows where everyone stands. i'm almost definitely wrong but tell me where and why. i just keep thinking that this kind of reminds me of the construction of the berlin wall, something that was a 'crisis' in the moment but secretly was welcomed by both sides cuz it resolved continuing nuisances for both sides. i know nti had that op-ed saying 'this must not be a new berlin wall' but really would that be so bad?

anyhow, fun story on one of the bond villain clowns notionally targeted by us sanctions - http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117053/vladislav-surkov-responds-sanctions-will-miss-tupac-shakur

I think you are broadly correct in that there will be people in Kyiv if not welcoming the course of events then definitely seeing an upside. In terms of population Crimea isn't huge (not more than 5% of total) but is so heavily weighted towards the Party Of The Regions (85 - 90 per cent support) that it gives a kicking to their chances of winning future elections. It doesn't mean Tymoshenko is unassailable but it gives her a real head start when the margins are so close.

She will need to keep East more or less on board, will have to deal with Russia (EU isn't going to supply gas or make up list trade) but I reckon she's going to be pretty confident of doing that.

*Lost trade*

Apparantly, fracking-gas from the US will be able to be delivered to Europe from 2015. Perhaps Ukraine can get some of that?

Meanwhile, Ukraine commander reports some of the self-designated self-defense groups gave a deadline for getting out of Crimea or joining the Russian military:

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-crimea-ukraine-troops-20140318,0,1415462.story#axzz2wGyC1mlz

And now the exchange of deadly fire begins (with some beating and robbery of Ukraine soldiers as well) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26637296