Exactly my point.
The President was loud and clear yesterday, warning Putin that invasion of Ukraine would be a “grave mistake” and warning Russia to stay out of Ukraine.
The Russians immediately backed down,announcing they’d invade Ukraine at their leisure.
The President’s authority and masterful handling of Putin is once again on display.
“The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”
A statement like that was enough to make the Russians quake in their boots. For you see, in the future, there will be affirmation of some future costs.
Just ask Bashir Assad about those affirmations.
shrug Just because it wasn’t an immediate change doesn’t mean that it wasn’t clearly coming.
I’m sure Putin was quaking in his boots upon hearing that…unfortunately he was quaking as a result of his laughter.
No it’s not. None of the SSRs have been reabsorbed by Russia and most of them are American puppets, Uzbekistan and company taking part in the extraordinary rendition programme and allowing transit of military equipment for Afghanistan, not to mention the drugs they move at the same time. The western SSRs are mostly now EU or NATO-aligned. The Baltic states and post-coup Ukraine, for example. Putin’s actions in Georgia were supported by the Council of Europe, and there have been no other acts of aggression at all.
Seems to me Yanukovych was a typical Ukrainian kleptocrat who had no real interest in the EU or Russia except as pawns to play off each other while embezzling billions for himself, and doing nothing about the corrupt oligarchs who seem to wield most of the real power. Only thing I can’t figure out is how he got his money frozen by the Swiss. That was stupid.
They weren’t dumb, they were lying to you as an excuse for their own anti-democratic practices. How many countries did the Soviets invade or subvert between 1945 and 1990? Here is the list: Afghanistan. That is the end of the list. Even that was only after the Americans had recruited the local crazies to raid over the border into the Soviet Union. America, on the other hand, between invasions and CIA backed coups a la Pinochet practiced their expansionism into dozens of countries.
The same pattern continues today, Russia occasionally active inside it’s own borders, and now in the Ukraine, while the Americans continue to slaughter the innocent across all continents.
I think you’re forgetting a coupla countries…hint: one starts with a C and another one with an H.
And if you expand your list, say, to 1939 and 1990, then the list will be chock full of countries that start with P, L, L, E, F, R…
Hungary?
“Halt! Or… I’ll affirm that you’re not halting!”
You are saying that someone shoot or say they’ll shoot or what?
Well that is not really how it is. It is: “Don’t do this! Or… I’ll start talks with this other group of people on whether we can all agree that there should be some consequences for what you did!”
So your point has nothing to do with the fact that terrorism is a more serious threat to the United States than Romney, and Obama was correct to point that out?
That fact has nothing to do with whether Putin takes tough talk from the US seriously. They are totally different issues, so either you’re trying to throw out ridiculous arguments that would get you laughed off of political combat TV shows like the McLaughlin Group, or you have no point.
I don’t doubt it at all, Putin is interested in Russian prestige and Russian resurgence, if annexing a few statelets on its borders is what it requires, then he’ll do that.
They served as peacekeepers who actively provoked the Georgians into attacking the Russians so they could have carte blanche in occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
I’m gonna be a little alarmist, but it’s things like this which lead to large conflicts, if he’s allowed to do what he wants in the Ukraine, without serious repercussions then it gives him the green light to maybe unite fellow Russians living ‘abroad’ back into Russia proper.
Hey, Romney saved the Sochi Olympics so he knows a thing or two.
So, what kind of military force can Ukraine bring to bear if they choose to fight? From what I’ve read before(although it’s outdated), they inherited a pretty big portion of the old Red Army’s equipment, didn’t they?
What is Putin winning?
While they have a lot of equipment, what’s more relevant is what kind of control Kiev has over their armed forces. In this situation it’s wrong to speak of “Ukraine” as there is no such thing as a unified Ukraine going up against Russia. For example, some previously Ukrainian forces in Crimea have switched sides, and eastern Ukraine slowly seems to be waking up from their indifference lately.
So if the current government chooses to fight, the relevant question is how many will actually follow orders? They don’t appear to be able to control their henchmen in Kiev, so it’s difficult to know whether the armed forces will listen.
He did not campaign on stopping negotiations with Europe and abandoning the EU discussions. There’s a reason people flipped out so insanely when he did that several years after being elected and not you know, when he was actually elected. He was seen as Russian leaning but not a tool of Russia, that evolved into a view of him as irredeemably corrupt and a pure puppet of Russia. There’s more nuance than you want to accept here, Ukrainians elected someone who wasn’t anti Russian, but that doesn’t mean they were all expecting him to do what he did. The Russian speaking population of Ukraine isn’t enough to have elected Yanukovych by itself.
Most likely the relatively small Russian force in Crimea would be slaughtered if the Ukrainian military decided to expel them. But that would mean absolute, 100% open war with Russia which is harder to predict.
Russia could not easily roll into Ukraine like they did Georgia, and it would be massively expensive. Russia is a loud and large country and has a legitimate military but they aren’t the Soviet Union and would be hard pressed to engage in the kind of military adventurism the Soviets did.
However, this is lose/lose for Ukraine, because in an open war with Russia Ukraine itself is also going to basically disintegrate into partisan/ethnic factions and however ugly it’d be for Russia (and it would be), it’ll basically be the end of Ukraine as a state and the beginning of Ukraine as an dystopian wasteland.