It looks like Ukraine is going to give up Crimea without a fight. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/uk...hdraw-troops-crimea-officials-announce-n57001 Ukraine to Withdraw Troops From Crimea, Officials Announce Ukraine is preparing to withdraw its soldiers and their families from Crimea, officials in Kiev announced Wednesday. Speaking at a press conference, Andriy Parubiy, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Ukraine, said that “we are working on a plan to quickly and effectively transport not only military servicemen but also their families to the territory of mainland Ukraine.” Parubiy said that the ministry of foreign affairs has asked the United Nations to classify Crimea as a demilitarized zone and also called for the withdrawal of Russian troops. He also said Ukraine will hold military maneuvers with the countries that signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. He didn't elaborate. The document was signed by the U.S., Britain and Russia to guarantee Ukraine's territorial integrity when it surrendered its share of Soviet nuclear arsenals to Russia after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Ukraine has accused Russia of breaching the agreement by taking over the Crimean Peninsula. U.S defense officials were caught off guard by the announcement but quickly pointed out that U.S. and NATO forces have conducted an annual military exercise with Ukrainian forces each July for several years. Ukraine has been powerless to prevent Russian troops from taking control of Crimea, which Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed on Tuesday. A day later, masked Russian-speaking troops moved into Ukraine's naval headquarters in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, detaining the head of Ukraine's navy and seizing the facility. They faced no resistance. Earlier on Wednesday, Acting President of Ukraine Oleksander Turchinov gave the "self-proclaimed government of Crimea" a deadline 3 p.m. ET to release all hostages and stop provocations on the peninsula, according to Turchinov's website. Meanwhile, senior military officials tell NBC News that “thousands” of Russian troops staged along the Ukrainian border have raised serious concerns at the Pentagon. According to one senior official, while there’s no indication the troops are planning to enter Ukraine, they’re so close they could easily mount an invasion without warning. “It’s like they’re on a hair trigger,” the official said. From Russia, Crimea is accessible only by air or sea, so U.S. officials speculate that at some point the Russians may decide to seize a slice of Eastern Ukraine by military force to provide a “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea, Officials stress that there’s been no discernible change in the number of forces or equipment over the past several days, but their sheer presence has everyone’s attention. — Hasani Gittens, Peter Jeary and Jim Miklaszewski, with The Associated Press
My prediction. Ukraine withdraws, puts in a new govt in May, quietly trains with Poland, etc... and comes back to take Crimea. Crimea is legally part of Ukraine and it is recognized as such. Russia happened to be one of the signatories of Ukraine's territorial integrity at the time of the dissolution of the USSR. As things stand now, Russia has committed an act of military aggression against a sovereign state next door. That the majority of Russians, who are now going berserk in their chauvinistic delirium, approve of this conquest is why the world hates Russia and Russians.
note that among other things, Obama's fecklessness over the Ukrainian crisis, and those in Libya, Egypt, and Syrian earlier, has basically doomed his Iran policy, to the extent he has one. [rquoter]Dictator's Handbook: Six Regrettable Lessons To Take Away From Crimea Crisis March 18, 2014 Daisy Sindelar People attend a rally called "We are together" to support the annexation of Ukraine's Crimea to Russia in Red Square in central Moscow on March 18. People attend a rally called "We are together" to support the annexation of Ukraine's Crimea to Russia in Red Square in central Moscow on March 18. The speed and ease with which Russia reclaimed its hold on the Crimean Peninsula have left much of the world reeling. But the factors that went into it were years in the making. Here are six life lessons for acquisitive future dictators and countries trying to break free of them. 1. Don't Give Up Your Nukes Twenty years ago, Ukraine was the third-largest nuclear power in the world, with 1,900 long-range and 2,400 short-range strategic warheads that had once been part of the U.S.S.R.'s Cold War arsenal. But Kyiv voluntarily handed them back to Russia in 1994, when it signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurance, trading in its nuclear weapons in exchange for sovereignty and the promise that Russia would "refrain from the threat or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine." It seemed like a good deal at the time. But many Ukrainian lawmakers are now lamenting the decision, admitting something that Pakistan and India have known for decades -- that missiles beat memoranda when it comes to keeping interlopers off your land. Or, as Verkhovna Rada lawmaker Pavlo Ryzanenko told "USA Today," "If you have nuclear weapons, people don't invade you." Fellow Budapest signatories Belarus and Kazakhstan may suddenly be ruing the day they gave up their nukes. Iran and North Korea, meanwhile, are less likely than ever to respond to global pressure to give up theirs. 2. Deals Are Meaningless See above. The Budapest Memorandum, despite being approved by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, has in no way restrained Vladimir Putin from taking over Crimea. The Russian president has argued that the memorandum no longer holds weight because the current Kyiv government arrived via "coup" and is not legitimate in Moscow's eyes. Nor has the Budapest deal prompted the Western co-signatories -- the United States and the United Kingdom -- to step in militarily against Moscow. The agreement, as its title suggests, provides assurances but stops short of actual security guarantees, which neither Washington nor London was prepared to offer in 1994 (or now). In its annexation of Crimea, in fact, Moscow has violated a number of agreements, including the UN Charter, the Charter of the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the 1997 bilateral Ukraine-Russia treaty, and its recently renewed lease agreement on the Black Sea Fleet, which provides for Russia's Crimean bases but not the influx of thousands of additional troops. (It did not violate the CFE Treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe, but only because it withdrew from the agreement in 2007, a year before its war in Georgia.) 3. Ethnic Cleansing Works Possession, as they say, is nine-tenths of the law. And if you really want to put your claim on a territory, the best way to do it is by removing the locals and establishing yourself as the new majority. The tactic was successfully used against Native Americans in the United States, against Muslims and Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and against millions of non-Slavic minorities living in Stalin's Soviet Union. More than 200,000 Tatars were forcibly expelled from Crimea in 1944 on the false pretext of Nazi collaboration. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians were sent to take their place, cementing Moscow's influence and strengthening the peninsula's loyalty to the imperial center. By the 1980s, when Tatars began to return to Crimea in what was then the Ukrainian SSR, they were the interlopers and the minority. Now, with a 97 percent referendum return, Russia can argue it has "democratic" data to back its takeover bid. After all, numbers don't lie. 4. It's Not Lying If They Believe It Both Adolf Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels were avid proponents of the "Big Lie," a falsehood so flagrant, and so consequential, that people choose to accept it rather than believe its teller capable of such underhandedness. Putin, whose KGB training and rumored plastic surgery have rendered his expression all but unreadable, has employed several Big Lies -- and innumerable little ones -- in his Crimea campaign: 1) Russians are having their rights violated; 2) He is upset by the idea of Russians having their rights violated; 3) Power in Kyiv has been seized by fascists; 4) The situation is so dire Ukrainians themselves are fleeing to Russia; 5) No Russian troops entered Ukraine; 6) "We are not considering [annexing Crimea]." Even in instances where such claims were demonstrably false -- as in Crimea, where Russian soldiers willingly identified themselves to journalists -- there has been no tangible downside to the lie. Cracking down on the few remaining free news outlets in Russia has only made it easier to sell this alternate narrative at home. 5. The Market Has No Morals The Sochi Olympics provided an early reminder of this, when sponsors like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Procter & Gamble refused to pressure Russia on its antigay laws out of fear of hurting their profits. With the Ukraine crisis, global governance appears equally hapless. Until the EU and U.S. sanctions on March 17, there were no bodies or governments willing to penalize Russia's actions in Crimea with more than words. Some $63 billion left Russia in 2013 alone, destined for Swiss banks, Caribbean offshore accounts, and luxury real-estate markets in London, Manhattan, and southern France. Economic struggles have compromised the ability of Western countries to act as moral standard-bearers -- they are not only dependent on Russian investment, they are potentially tied to the mafia networks that lie behind it. (Russia's Central Bank has estimated that two-thirds of the country's capital outflow are proceeds from crime, bribes, and tax fraud.) Although the Ukrainian crisis has strained Russia's $2 trillion economy -- the direct cost of annexing Crimea is estimated to be at least $3 billion -- it's not clear that sanctions will avoid a ripple effect on the EU and U.S. economies. 6. Patriotism Is Good -- Except When It's Terribly, Terribly Bad Putin has spent most of his years in power dedicated to restoring the Russian national identity -- dusting off Stalin, resurrecting the Orthodox Church, bemoaning the collapse of the Soviet Union, exercising world-stage diplomacy, and replacing Soviet cosmopolitanism with increasingly nativist tendencies. This Great Nation-building project made it easy for the Kremlin leader to argue that the Crimean takeover was not only natural, but necessary. Leaving Crimea and its people in trouble, Putin said, "would have been nothing short of betrayal." But having invoked patriotic sentiment at home, Putin then distorted it in Ukraine, seizing on the country's massive Euromaidan protests as an opportunity for scaremongering. The Russian president has alternately described the forces behind the Ukrainian "coup" that replaced President Viktor Yanukovych with a pro-Western interim government as nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites. (Ukraine has accused Russia of staging deliberate provocations to advance this train of thought.) This double-edged sword -- which works to Russia's advantage regardless -- may be wielded again as Moscow considers the fate of Russian "patriots" in eastern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.[/rquoter] http://www.rferl.mobi/a/dictators-handbook-lessons-crimea-crisis/25301587.html
LOL! Who didn't know these things as facts before the Ukraine crisis? Obama is doing a fantastic job of being the President of his country - which is a rarity. Without a doubt, Russia have crossed a huge line and Ukrainians have been done an injustice. These are actions for which Putin has to pay a price, diplomatically. Lord knows the US has accumulated enough political power by invading the sovereignty of other countries - it's time to put that political power to use. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, downgrading diploatic relations, etc. There is plenty the US can do without wasting citizens' money on fighting someone else's fight. It is not the problem of the President of the United States. Had he committed more of YOUR tax dollars to fixing other people's problems, then he would have been at fault. What he's doing right now is saying: this is F'ed up. But it's not my problem, and if I made it my problem I would be blamed for the outcome later on. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But damned if you don't = far less expensive. My only problem with this is Obama acting like he gives a ****e about the moral side of invading another country's sovereignty. He is the President of the country most notorious in the history of the world for disregarding the sovereignty of non-Americans. It's hard to make up for that, but this is a good step. The Ukrainians will suffer for this, but they can't expect someone else to come and defend them. Either they have to defend themselves better, or we have to come to an agreement that enough weaponry to invade another country is globally unacceptable.
Op-Ed from Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz: The Western devil wears Prada The annexation of Crimea may be problematic, but it is less problematic than the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel. Saddam Hussein has already been executed, and so has Osama bin Laden. But all is not lost for the enlightened West. There is a new devil, and his name is Vladimir Putin. He hates gay people, so the leaders of the enlightenment did not go to Sochi. Now he is occupying land, so sanctions and boycotts will be imposed upon him. The West is screaming bloody murder from wall to wall: How dare he annex territory in Crimea? The United States is the superpower responsible for the greatest amount of bloodshed since World War II, and the blood of its victims cries out from the soil of Korea and Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For years, Washington meddled in Latin America’s internal affairs as though those affairs were its own, installing and overthrowing regimes willy-nilly. Moreover, the number of people in American prisons, and their proportion of the population, is the highest in the world, and that includes China and Russia. Since 1977, 1,246 people, some of whom were innocent of the charges against them, have been executed in the United States. Eight U.S. states limit speech against homosexuality in ways that are remarkably similar to the anti-gay law Putin enacted. It is this superpower that, with its allies and vassal states, is raising an outcry against the new devil. They cry out against the occupation of the Crimean peninsula as if it were the most awful occupation on earth. They will punish Russia for it, perhaps even fight a world war for the liberation of Sebastopol. America can occupy Iraq — the war on terror and the weapons of mass destruction justify that, as everybody knows — but Russia may not invade Crimea. That is a violation of international law. Even a referendum is a violation of that law — which the West observes so meticulously, as everybody knows. But of course, the truth is as far from the world of this sanctimonious double standard as east is from west. The annexation of Crimea may be problematic, but it is less problematic than the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel. It is more democratic than Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s land-swap proposal; at least Russia asked the inhabitants under which sovereign power they wished to live, something it has never occurred to Lieberman to do. Russia’s reasons for the annexation of Crimea are also more convincing than the de facto annexation of the Israeli occupied territories. The Russians and the Israelis use the same terminology of ancestral rights and historical connection. The Israelis add reasons from the Bible, and mix in issues like sanctity and messianic belief. “Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to ... their home shores, to their home port, to Russia!” said Putin; in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about “the rock of our existence.” But while most of the inhabitants of Crimea are Russian, most inhabitants of the territories are Palestinian — such a minor, insignificant difference. Russia is also more honest than Israel: It states its intention of annexing the territory. Israel, which for all intents and purposes annexed its territories long ago, has never dared admit it. The Israeli occupation does not cry out to the world — not for sanctions and certainly not for threats of war — as the occupation of Crimea does. Netanyahu is not the devil, either in the eyes of the Americans or the Europeans, and Israel’s violations of international law are almost never mentioned. The Israeli occupation, which is more cruel than that of Crimea, is not recognized, and the West does not do a thing to truly bring it to a halt. The United States and Europe even provide it with funding and arms. This is not to say that Russia does not deserve to be criticized. The legacy of the Soviet Union is horrific, and democracy in Russia is far from real, what with Putin declaring war on the media and on free expression and with the disgraceful p***y Riot affair; there is rising corruption and, with it, the rule of the oligarchs. Putin does not speak as nobly as U.S. President Barack Obama, but then Guantanamo is run by America, not Russia. For all the pompous Western talk of justice and international law, it’s actually the Western devil who wears Prada, all the while doing far more than Russia to undermine those vaunted values.
Are you kidding me? but they are Russkies. We are Americans. don't give me any bs about double standards. How dare you try that false equivalency bs. What is that foreign newspaper you quote from.? Fox. ABC, NBC, CBS, the NYT, Houston Chronicle and the WSJ, the two John's, Kerry and McCain, all agree on what them Russkies are up to, so we have it confirmed from numerous and varied sources. America, love it or leave it. I guess you did, at least for awhile, but don't come back even to visit. USA! USA! USA!
im hearing that crimea isnt really a prize for russia, itll end up being a burden with something like a minimum of 2 billion a year to just renovate crimea and bring it electricity + water and stuff. And the sanctions too
It is a prize to the extent that Putin can use it politically to tell his people that he worked over the USA and the EU. Also, there are some that believe that there may be large oil reserves untapped in the area.
Yesterday, 3 Ukrainian parliament members (Svoboda party, eg the neofascist leaning one) just beat up the head of Ukraine's State TV station in his office and forced him to resign for part of Putin's speech on annexing Crimea. Ironically the main perpetrator is also the deputy head of Ukraine's parliamentary committee on freedom of speech. http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...hief-pro-russian-miroshnichenko-panteleymonov
thanks BrObama! [rquoter]Thanks For Being So Cool About Everything COMMENTARY • Opinion • ISSUE 50•11 • Mar 20, 2014 By Vladimir Putin Facebook0 Twitter0 Google Plus0 As you know, the last few weeks have been kind of crazy around here. Last month, protests in Ukraine ousted the country’s Kremlin-allied president and ignited a wave of Ukrainian nationalism that threatened to destabilize Russia’s economic and military interests in the region. Of course, I couldn’t simply stand by and let that happen, so I intervened and ordered a forceful takeover of the strategically important peninsula of Crimea—a territory with historical ties to Russia that our nation had long desired. It’s certainly no easy task to forcefully annex an entire province against another country’s will, so I just wanted to thank you—the government of the United States, the nations of western Europe, and really the entire world population as a whole—for being super cool about all of this. Seriously, you guys have been amazing. All of you. I really appreciate it. To be honest, I was really dreading a whole big fight over this thing. When you first condemned the seizure of Crimea as patently illegal and in breach of the Ukrainian constitution—which it absolutely was, by the way—I feared for the worst. But then everybody stopped short of doing anything to actually prevent what was essentially a state-sponsored landgrab, and I just thought, “Wow, these guys are a pretty laid-back and easygoing bunch!” It really was a huge load off when you let everything slide like that. Believe me, I know it must have been hard to stand idly by and do nothing as a foreign military invaded one of your allies, or just sit back and watch while we set up a complete farce of a referendum—a referendum supervised by heavily armed members of the Russian military, mind you—and used it as grounds for backdoor annexation. It also couldn’t have been easy to keep your cool when we sent commandos to raid the Ukrainian naval headquarters in Crimea. But you didn’t really make much of a fuss over any of it, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. It made my job way, way easier. I totally owe you one, no question about that. Now, of course I get that you in the international community had to issue some sort of response. After all, you had to at least look like you were trying to fight for the people of Ukraine as we rolled armed vehicles into their country, made it clear that any dissent would be punished, and essentially rendered an entire people totally and utterly powerless in the face of a bigger, stronger country’s national interests. I totally get that. But I’m just relieved that you decided on a response as harmless as humanly possible, with no real and tangible repercussions on myself or my government. You really have no idea how much stress that lifted off my shoulders. It was a real lifesaver. I also understand that moving forward, you’ll feel pressure to call a lot of high-profile NATO meetings, make statements to the UN, suspend this summer’s G8 summit, that sort of thing. I also get that all that kind of stuff is just a formal procedure you have to follow, because really, at this point you’ve laid your cards on the table. So I just want to thank you ahead of time—honestly, from the bottom of my heart—for ensuring that I can just concentrate on doing whatever I want in any formerly Soviet region that is of geopolitical, military, or economic value to Russia without having to worry one iota about suffering any consequences. Thanks for making that 100-percent clear to me. There is one thing I want to say though, and I feel a little silly admitting this, but there was actually a moment earlier when I did feel a little dread. For one unnerving second there, I thought you imposed sanctions on Russia’s broad national economy, but then I saw the sanctions were just directed at a few of my advisers and some bank I don’t care about. Boy, talk about a major relief! Really, this whole thing has gone so smoothly that my only real regret is that I just wish I had known earlier that you guys were this mellow about hostile military takeovers. It makes me wonder what took me so long to get around to this. But you know, I really shouldn’t have been surprised, given how cool you were with my longstanding record of handling opposition political groups or independent-minded journalists, all those gay rights protests that cropped up last year, or even that whole ordeal in 2004 when we tried to take over separatist regions of Georgia by force. Just knowing I’m free to do things my own way—that I can fully ignore any domestic or international laws and any basic principles of human rights—just takes away a ton of the stress involved in making these big decisions. And, by the way, if you ever need me to play along and act like these little Crimea sanctions and rhetorical warnings are in the least bit threatening, or feign anger by instituting entry bans on U.S. lawmakers and officials, or issue a few sternly worded responses to the international community’s condemnations, I’m completely down with that. I get the back-and-forth charade we’re playing here—the one that says you’re actually considering some real action against me. Seriously, going along with that kind of ruse is the least I can do, given all you’ve done for me. I just hope you’ll all continue being so nice and accommodating moving forward—especially with what I’ve got planned for the rest of Ukraine over the next few months.[/rquoter]
Maintaining control of their warm water port and access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean is worth the cost to Russia.
yes of course thats well known and very feminine - not a bunch of beer drinking tom boys like we have here in America
Crimea is the trade off for a non-puppet Ukraine..... sounds fair enough if you are not a Tartar and Basso is a lame poster on par with your grandma's Fw:Fw: Fw:
