From the article:
"In March, Putin annexed Crimea" tries to hide an awful lot of what Putin did before then, doesn't it? It's not like some town annexing a neighboring subdivision or something. Russia invaded, using unmarked uniforms. To reduce that all down to a sterile "Putin annexed Crimea" is telling, it seems to me.
And how could the Ukranian government "seize" Ukranian territory?!? There was never any move by any Ukranian government to seize the port. The lease was recently extended for crying out loud. (And, he brings up history without the recognized fact that Crimea is and was Ukranian territory.) It's an apology for Putin, not a full and balanced discussion of the positions of both sides.
A counterpoint from Remnick at the NewYorker (from March 1):
Emphasis added.
Yup.
Ukraine is not part of Russia nor part of some new Soviet-esque Union. It's an independent country. Putin has no say about who or how it has relations with its other neighbors. He doesn't have to like it, but that's the way it is.
Changing borders by force as "well, it was theirs before" or "well, he moved some native speakers in there, so he has claim to the area" cannot be tolerated without serious consequences.
Putin thought he could get what he wanted with just some grumbling from Europe and the US. He miscalculated.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
If any professional “intelligence” existed in Washington, Putin’s reaction was foreseeable. Decades of NATO expansion to Russia’s border, and a failed 2008 US proposal to “fast-track” Ukraine into NATO, convinced him that the new US-backed Kiev government intended to seize all of Ukraine, including Russia’s historical province of Crimea, the site of its most important naval base. In March, Putin annexed Crimea.
"In March, Putin annexed Crimea" tries to hide an awful lot of what Putin did before then, doesn't it? It's not like some town annexing a neighboring subdivision or something. Russia invaded, using unmarked uniforms. To reduce that all down to a sterile "Putin annexed Crimea" is telling, it seems to me.
And how could the Ukranian government "seize" Ukranian territory?!? There was never any move by any Ukranian government to seize the port. The lease was recently extended for crying out loud. (And, he brings up history without the recognized fact that Crimea is and was Ukranian territory.) It's an apology for Putin, not a full and balanced discussion of the positions of both sides.
A counterpoint from Remnick at the NewYorker (from March 1):
In a recent Letter from Sochi, I tried to describe Putin’s motivations: his resentment of Western triumphalism and American power, after 1991; his paranoia that Washington is somehow behind every event in the world that he finds threatening, including the recent events in Kiev; his confidence that the U.S. and Europe are nonetheless weak, unlikely to respond to his swagger because they need his help in Syria and Iran; his increasingly vivid nationalist-conservative ideology, which relies, not least, on the elevation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been so brutally suppressed during most of the Soviet period, as a quasi-state religion supplying the government with its moral force.
Obama and Putin spoke on the phone today for an hour and a half. The White House and Kremlin accounts of the call add up to what was clearly the equivalent of an angry standoff: lectures, counter-lectures, intimations of threats, intimations of counter-threats. But the leverage, for now, is all with Moscow.
The legislators in the Russian parliament today parroted those features of modern Putinism. In order to justify the invasion of the Crimean peninsula, they repeatedly cited the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” in Kiev helping Russia’s enemies. They repeatedly echoed the need to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin’s rhetoric about Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the fall of the Soviet Union, in December, 1991.
Emphasis added.
Yup.
Ukraine is not part of Russia nor part of some new Soviet-esque Union. It's an independent country. Putin has no say about who or how it has relations with its other neighbors. He doesn't have to like it, but that's the way it is.
Changing borders by force as "well, it was theirs before" or "well, he moved some native speakers in there, so he has claim to the area" cannot be tolerated without serious consequences.
Putin thought he could get what he wanted with just some grumbling from Europe and the US. He miscalculated.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.