Putin playing chess - Obama playing marbles

This is also a pretty interesting and more nuanced view of the situation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/opinion/what-putin-really-wants.html

 

perfect... that was one of my favorite expressions when I was younger. I think it was a tag line in a movie I saw as a kid... some anti big govt liberal movie like billy jack or walking tall. back in the day when liberals were against big govt and for liberty.

 

the goal in ukraine: 1. Frack fields 2. Gmo fields 3. Prostitutes 4. the debt serf must never leave their masters (IMF/FED) the rest guy is just for the show...

 

Moscow’s weaknesses explain Crimea Crisis, not Washington’s
FRANK HARVEY
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Mar. 06 2014, 8:22 AM EST

"There is a common but seriously flawed thesis running through too many commentaries on the unfolding crisis in Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. According to this widely shared view, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Crimea was a direct product of America’s declining global influence, President Barack Obama’s weak and feckless foreign policies in places like Libya, Syria and North Korea, and a dangerous deficiency in American capabilities and resolve to credibly deter opponents.

"According to GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, “it started with Benghazi. When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression.” This interpretation of the link between contemporary U.S. foreign policy and Mr. Putin’s motivations is seriously flawed.

"Mr. Obama’s application of U.S. power and coercive diplomacy in Syria succeeded. It was virtually impossible for officials in Damascus and Moscow to know with any certainty whether U.S. officials would be able to limit the threatened air attacks to an “unbelievably small” campaign (to use Secretary of State John Kerry’s words). If the airstrikes produced no clear signs of progress, if the regime retaliated by using chemical weapons again, or if humanitarian conditions on the ground continued to deteriorate, the pressure on Washington to sustain the bombing campaign would have been significant. When Mr. Kerry suggested in a press conference that Bashar al-Assad could avoid the air strikes if he turned over “every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community,” Mr. Putin jumped at the offer, persuaded Mr. Assad to take the deal, and immediately initiated discussions leading to the UN disarmament resolution.

"Consider the evidence of U.S. power and influence in this case: ..."

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I'm nauseated by the photo-op media over Ukraine's ouster of their President. A President with close ties to Russia. Crimea holds Russia's only warm water port. Putin can not allow that to to be negotiated away to NATO by any new Ukrainian government. His only course of action is to take control of the region now, instead of risking a much larger and serious confrontation once a new government is establish and recognized.

It would be like Cuba changing government hands and the new government wanting to nullify the Cuban-American treaty of 1903 allowing us the lease of Guantanamo Naval base. That spot is too strategic to allow it to be taken by another Country - in this scenario Russia or China.

This was a no-brainer which should have been recognized light years before it ever played out. If our Military and Intelligence is that inept and limited in it's foresight , we have serious problems.

The continuous waffling of our State Dept and current Administration wasn't the cause but it sure led to an ease in Putin's decisions.

I can't believe that Ukraine's upheaval and the unfolding events were not known by both parties beforehand. Which makes the current scene nothing more than a staged drama where both sides get what they want under the guise of being tough in front of their respective voters.

Andrea Mitchell's obviously orchestrated performance with Kerry during a press briefing yesterday is a classic example.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/uk...-putin-really-denied-there-were-troops-n44391

 

You've simply confirmed the bind Putin is in, "his only course of action". Not the best position to be in.

But let's say we had "seen this coming", what should we have done differently years ago, so that we'd be in a stronger position to discourage Russian troops entering Ukraine today?

 

Up until Yanukovych's ouster, Putin had an ally in Ukraine and imo, Putin was comfortable with the arrangement -- as long as it held. The political atmosphere changed, Putin probably should have understood Yanukovych's situation earlier and intervened politically helping him to keep the peace and in turn looking like the peacemaker on the world stage. Yanukovych was power hungry and overstepped his bounds on a people who don't want to go back cold war type government, specially in central Ukraine .... it is my understanding that the region in Crimea is predominantly pro-Russian. That peninsula is basically isolated and is just as much connected to Russia.

But things are what they are..... imo, Russia will do what ever is necessary to keep Crimea. Militarily they must have a warm water port.

I don't think Putin wants to change basically anything in central Ukraine, he probably would like to see outside western money poured into it to stabilize it's faltering economy, insuring a steady flow of gas to Europe.... the prize was always Crimea, the pie gets divided.

Putin gets his base, central Ukraine embraces western money and the EU gets it's gas....everyone wins.

I think this was settled long before it happened.

 

Probably the best analysis I've seen.

 

interesting analysis.

 

"But Cherkashin’s informal office lecture demonstrated that the truth is more complicated, as it always is. The real split is generational. Unlike Cherkashin, his students were all born after 1991, in an independent Ukraine, and they see their country’s close relationship with Russia very differently than their older professor. In fact, Cherkashin’s own research confirms this division. The younger a citizen of Donetsk, the more likely she is to view herself as Ukrainian. The older she is, the more likely she is to identify as Russian. And this is the crux of it all: What we are seeing today is the reverberation of what happened more than 20 years ago. This is still the long post-Soviet transition. And this is what it’s like to wander in the desert, waiting for the old generation to die off. "

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