Putin's Counter Revolution

[alice malice]

It's a complicated problem. There are no good choices here, but Putin needs
to be punished. He's got what he wanted, now he has to pay for it.
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:54 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de <javascript:;>> wrote:
>
>> When Putin spoke of 'chaos' in Kiev and Ukraine as a whole, in his
>> press conference a few days after the Crimean invasion, he must have
>> realised that his foreign audience, as well as the citizens of Kiev
>> and all the people of Ukraine who favoured the revolution, knew there
>> was no chaos.
>
>
> No chaos, perhaps, but an unelected government that has come to power
> through a coup d'etat pushed through by right wing extremists in violation
> of various agreements between the government and the protesters. Right
wing
> extremists presumably represented only a very small part of the protesters
> against a corrupt but democratically elected government but now constitute
> twenty percent of the government and have been given/taken over
> responsibility for national security/the military.
>
> It seems that this is what we wanted, supported and continue to support.
>
> I am no fan of Putin or Yanukovich but every account of the events that is
> critical of Putin's actions needs to address these issues. Otherwise it is
> merely propaganda of the most dangerous sort.
>
> And of course, there is also the expansion of NATO and the geopolitical
> chessboard, not to mention Chevron and Nuland/Kagan or the interests of
the
> EU and Germany which led to the shameful display of our foreign minister
> making deals with a barely disguised Nazi like Oleh Tyahnybok (as for
> shameful displays, see also Tyahnybok/McCain).
>
> And I will not even mention the decisive issue of who exactly deployed the
> snipers.
>
> As far as I am concerned, the last time I have seen German and US
> politicians and pundits in such Orwellian harmony was when they decided to
> bomb the sh** out of Serbia. Didn't like it then, don't like it now. The
> stakes are much higher now, though...
>
> Enter John Kerry for some comic relief:
>
> "You just don't invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert
> your interests (...) This is an act of aggression that is completely
trumped
> up in terms of its pretext. It's really 19th century behavior in the 21st
> century."
>
> If political satire had not been dead since Henry Kissinger received the
> Nobel Peace Prize, it certainly would be now.
>
> The Ides of March, eh?
>
> Thomas
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