The fundamental value of the Ukraine crisis: some hard truths about how the world is, was and probably ever will be

The fundamental value of the Ukraine crisis: some hard truths about how the world is, was and probably ever will be. Such as: “Weakness invites aggression: Russia saw an opening to take what they have wanted… All they needed was for the time to be ripe. Kiev in chaos, NATO weak and thin, and the USA led by the C-team.” Is that “c” for “climate change”?

Bonfire of the Absurdities: After 35 year career writing software for IBM mainframes, am now self-employed contractor thinking of joining a union and striking for higher wages. Cured morbid fear of heights when I learned to look at them as lengths standing on end. Uncompromising in refusal to accept browser cookies. Amateur investor who has accumulated a small fortune in the market after starting out years ago with a large one. For recreation, I run, hike, kayak and play tennis but will not consider synchronized swimming under any circumstances.

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  • My thoughts on some possibilities as to why the troops are massing:

    1. To protect Russain investments.

    As I mentioned in the previous post, Russians managed to get a lot of hatred stirred up. In their pursuits of the aforesaid "much bigger role in the world" they spread their power throughout Asia and eastern Europe. Most of Siberia is not Russain. Most of the native people there are of the yellow race, related to a greater or lesser degree to the Mongolians and Tibetans. Siberia was connquered over the reign of several czars.

    The USSR ruling eastern Europe is a much more recent spreading of cheer that the Russians engaged in.

    Consequently, there is a lot of emotion ranging from distrust to outright hatred of Russians from Estonia to Poland to Chechnya and Georgia. I would imagine that the western Ukraine is also in that fold. Since this is basically a mob uprising, with not much hope that Ukraine itself can control it, Russia would be wise to be concerned about their investments in Ukraine.

    2. To bring order and protect people who may not support the protests, or openly support close ties with Russia.

    As with any country with two (or more), differing cultures, there is always the potential for someone pursuing a split. As history will clearly show, this can get mighty ugly. For every clean break such as Czechoslovakia, there are India/Pakistan, Yugoslavia, East Timor, Sudan, Biafra, you get the picture. In the Bosnia/Serbia war, the violence was initiated by Bosnia. They decided that the best way to affirm their independence would be to get rid of all Serbians in their "country". So some Bosnians would go and torch the houses of Serbians. Serbia reacted in a way that was to be expected from someone who lived under Ottoman rule for several centuries. Yes, there were "atrocities" committed (as opposed to all those atrocity-free wars in human history (sarcasm)). But Serbia's main crime was winning a war.

    But I digress, somewhat.

    There is always that possibilityiin Ukraine, considering the way support for the EU vs support for Russia splits up in the population. There is also the possibility that it's solely to keep things under control and keep them from spilling outside of Ukraine.

    Imagine some sort of conflict in Mexico, maybe some rival drug cartels battling it out in Mexicali, Ciudad Juarez, and/or Tijuana. I mean full scale battling - guns, bombs, artillery, buildings being destroyed, bridges blown up, etc. And also imagine we had a real president, say, someone like Reagan. What would this real president do? Wouldn't he be right to send some soldiers to the border? And wouldn't some long-time, dyed-in-the-wool America-haters make a plausible-sounding argument that "there goes the US, looking to annex more of Mexico just like they illegally annexed Texas, Arizona, California, etc?

    A few random thoughts:

    My mother, who was born in eastern Ukraine, and did not learn Russian until she was in her 20's, always believed that Ukraine is part of Russia, and is better off being part of Russia. She would get into arguments with the "samostiyniks" (separatists), who would start her off by expressing their outrage that she had her kids speaking Russian instead of Ukrainian.

    It's easy to rip Russia. We're used to it here. We've been doing it for many decades. And while there is no question Putin is a de facto czar, we should also keep in mind that Russia has never been more free than it is now. Never, in the full sense of the word. To expect Russia to turn into a Jeffersonian republic within a decade of the fall of the USSR would be hypocritical.

    We all rightly stand up for the founding fathers when some moron starts arguing that everything they did, said, and wrote is invalid because they owned slaves. We argue that turning a culture around is not so easy. If the founders insisted on instant freedom there would not have been a USA.

    Well, why do we expect Russia to turn into a libertarian paradise overnight when they have at least a 1000-year history of totalitarianism and tyranny?

    Ukraine and Belorussia have about an equal case for being separate countries as do the Confederate States of America. They have a weaker case than do the Buryats, Yakuts, or the Tuvans, who are all part of Russia, but are much more different culturally.

    While Russia has never been more free, can we say the same about us?

  • Here’s another hard truth: if you listen to major media sources, you will still have no idea of what is really going on.

    Full disclosure: I am 3/8 Russian and 3/8 Ukrainian, or so. My father, though born in Russia, spoke a dialect of Russian that more closely resembles Ukrainian than the Russian spoken in St. Petersburg or Moscow. I was born in USA, but when speaking Russian with recent immigrants, because I speak with no foreign accent, they think I am from the Krasnodar area.

    To say that “Russia saw an opening to take what they have wanted” is a half-truth, and borders on what one may hear from the MSM. That is not to say that they do not have aspirations to play a much bigger role in the world – just that this case does not fall in that category.

    Historically, Crimea was part of Russia for much longer than it was part of Ukraine. For that matter, it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for a longer period of time. One could argue that Turkey has a stronger claim on Crimea than does Ukraine. The majority of people in Crimea speak Russian, and would just as well be part of Russia. Note that there were no reports of any public protests after the parliament of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia. From Wikipedia:
    “On 19 February 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast [a political subdivision somewhere between what we would call a state and county] from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The transfer of the Crimean Oblast to Ukraine has been described as a "symbolic gesture," marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming a part of the Russian Empire. The General Secretary of the Communist Party in Soviet Union was at the time the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev.”
    This transfer meant little to nothing in real life, considering that the entirety of the USSR (RSFSR, Ukraine, Uzbek SSR, Moldavian SSR, etc.) was ruled absolutely by the Kremlin.

    Furthermore, there was no invasion of Crimea by Russia. After the USSR broke up, Russia and Ukraine signed a treaty allowing Russia to keep a naval presence in Crimea – a part of its navy that was already there. The treaty spells out all sorts of details about how many ships, sailors, artillery and the caliber thereof, etc. Russia has always been in compliance with the terms of the treaty. It’s easy to take a picture of a naval ship sailing in the Black Sea and caption it with some reference to an “invasion”. But that is either an outright lie, or a reflection of the prejudices of the editor.
    As for the “revolution”: As far as I know, this is not some kind of battle against tyranny (yes, technically all gov’t is tyranny, to a greater or lesser degree. In this case I mean that in the commonly accepted definition of the word). The gov’t of Ukraine was as democratically elected as any western gov’t, and there was no pretense about Yanukovich wanting to maintain close ties with Russia. He was elected because the majority of the citizens WANT close ties with Russia. For Chrissakes, they’re the same people! Russia’s birthplace is Kiev! They are as different as residents of Alabama are from residents of Connecticut, probably less so. The language difference between Ukrainian and Russian is about the same as the difference between the English spoken in Alabama vs Connecticut.
    Ukraine is not a homogenous society in the Japanese or Polish sense. It might more closely resemble Cyprus. The western part is close to half or maybe more Catholic, and the eastern half is 95% Russian Orthodox. The west culturally feels more a part of Europe, and the east, more Russian/Slavic. Hopefully, it would more closely resemble Canada than Cyprus.
    An aside: this is about the same difference you will find in the former Yugoslavia. The Croats and the Serbs are essentially the same people. The only significant difference is that the Croats don’t go to Catholic church, and the Serbs don’t go to Eastern Orthodox church. We can only hope that if Ukraine should split apart someday, that it would follow in Czechoslovakia’s footsteps. I believe that the only blood that was shed when the Czech Rep. and Slovakia split up was a paper cut on a secretary’s finger when she was sealing envelopes with copies of the agreement.
    Back in Ukraine: there’s some pressure, from within or from the EU – that I don’t know – to join the EU. Somebody decided this would be a great idea. Maybe the EU thinks they can horn in on some Russian oil money, but that’s purely my own speculation at this point. All the utes, especially in western Ukraine, think this is peachy keen. Free cell phones for all! We’re all going to be rich, with 32 hour workweeks and 8 weeks vacay per! Yay!
    But here’s the problem. Ukraine is just a few steps behind Greece, Spain, etc. on the train to bankruptcy. Putin, who of course is not a fan of the EU, reminds Yanukovich of how his bread is buttered, and that is mainly with Russian oil money. Yanukovich does some quick arithmetic, compares the financial status of Russia vs the EU, and says “uhhh, never mind on that EU thingie, I’m going with the Russians” (read: the money). The kiddies go “What? no new cell phones? Well fuck that, we’re going to go occupy Kiev!” And I don’t use the word “occupy” by accident.
    Because that is pretty much what you’ve got in Ukraine. With the slight, minor difference that in the Ukrainian case, the occupiers actually forced the gov’t into submission. But in essence, it’s still a mob uprising. There is no George Washington, no Thomas Jefferson, no Ghandi, no Simon Bolivar, no ML King, not even a Robspierre, or a half-drunk Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank.
    So now we have a country on the verge of absolute chaos, with a Russia-hating mob running around (which hatred is very much of the Russians’ own creation, but that’s another subject), and Russia has a ton of investments in it. Furthermore, with the majority of the people wanting no part of any protests or revolution, and wanting to remain closely tied with Russia, Putin is simply moving in to bring some order and protect the country at a time when the country is utterly incapable of doing so.

    • Thanks for a really good insider's perspective. I never understood the invasion piece since the Russian navy always has had access to Sevastopol and the Black Sea. I do wonder about the troops massing. Is that to restore order and/or reinstall Yanukovich?

      This may not be Hungary or Czechoslovakia but it looks like them.

      • The post below should have been a reply to yours.

        Another thought: if you have not read Sowell's "Black Rednecks/White Liberals", do so. It's a real eye-opener about the nuances of our subcultures. And our subcultures, especially the north vs south, are analogous in many ways to the Russia-Ukraine relationship.

  • So, the IMF is planning to bail out Ukraine, and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are working together to make sure we are going to double our contribution to the IMF!
    Fortunately (For now) crybaby Boehner is against it, but "Uncle" Mitch wants to help Harry get Boehner to change his mind.

    http://www.redstate.com/diary/dhorowitz3/2014/03/13/imf-bailout-exposes-schism-party/

    http://www.redstate.com/2014/03/13/mcconnell-prepared-cut-backroom-deal-imf-bailout/

  • Remember, ukraine had just 6000 combat-ready soldiers and started with the same technology as Russian federation back in 1991, they are poorer, their politicians and bureaucrats are even more corrupt. ukraine have lower living standards than Cuba...

    Now these bureaucrats and politicians are demanding that others shoulders the costs of defending the trainwreck they call a country, thought they are not just sure what to call for exactly. What they didn´t learn from the events of Benghazi, Greece or Spain (where people are starving right now) is that you serving liberalism doesn´t automatically means liberalism serves you.

    What really gets my interest is that populations in crimea had militias, smuggled rifles, uniforms and even armored cars and had retired Spetsnaz guys as advisors.

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