I struggle to fight my way through our own propaganda and gain some kind of balanced awareness of the situation in Ukraine, but it’s hard to argue with the idea that Vladimir Putin is acting strangely and saying things that make little sense and bear no relationship to reality.
That makes him unpredictable.
No, he has himself completely under control. He knows what he’s saying, lying dissembling, and he knows what he wants—an autonomous/semi-independent Crimea that is eventually rejoined with Russia—and he will get it. Now, the riddle has been solved. No one will defy him, everyone will complain for appearances’ sake.
Precisely.
Thank you.
AG
I agree with Arthur Gilroy for the very first time.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”-Lao Tzu and/or The I Ching
Congratulations.
You’re on your way.
AG
Yes, thank God, we don’t have political leaders in America who talk out of both sides of their mouth, contradict themselves within the same press conference and mau-mau the press. And by none, I mean the entire GOP.
Not exclusive to Republican politicians, pundits, and “think-tanks.”
You mean Obama doesn’t talk out of both sides of his mouth?
Kerry?
Clinton?
Please.
It’s in the job description.
WTFU.
AG
Did you look at some of what he said in that press conference? He was pretty incoherent. It wasn’t bald-faced lying, it was nonsensical rambling. He sounded like he’d taken too many drugs, not like he was a dangerous powerful man.
Majority of Crimea does want that.
I have no idea what Putin is doing or what is going to happen.
I am, however, enjoying (in a gallows humor sort of way) watching the reich wing have cognitive dissonance over the situation. On the one hand, whenever Russia is involved in anything their Red Dawn gut instincts take hold and it’s all 1980 US Hockey Team again. On the other hand, they’ve had a man crush on Putin since forever (and the more dictatorial he acts the more tingly they feel due to their authoritarian bent) – and now he’s being opposed by the Greatest Satan Ever(tm), Obama.
Yeah, all the “Obama isn’t man enough to take on Putin” soundbites are … interesting. I’m half expecting some “Tom of Finland” style Putin fan art to start making the rounds of the winger echo chamber.
Which might also partially explain why they want to go off into some half-cocked [sic] military posturing against him.
I agree. The Republican party long ago became an unthinking, reflexive vegetable and it can be fascinating to behold if one can detach from expectations.
One man’s strange behavior is another man’s strategy for (continued) regional domination.
We went to war with Iraq because of what a Saudi in Afghanistan allegedly masterminded with the help of Dutch drug smugglers in Florida.
Or maybe there was something lost in translation.
Putin’s been talking about keeping NATO out of his backyard for years. I seem to have understood the message.
And we overlook the agreement between GHWB and Gorbachev which was that if the USSR disbanded the Warsaw Pact, NATO wouldn’t expand. Gorbachev should have known better than to take the west at its word and demanded that NATO be disbanded.
I was surprised by the harsh criticism from Mikhail Gorbachev directed at “bulldozers full advisers” pouring into Kiev to influence internal Ukrainian affairs.
○ Gorbachev urges Putin, Obama to help end Ukraine crisis – Jan. 23, 2014
Ukraine ranks as one of the most corrupt nations, even outpacing Russia, at 144 out of 177 nations. Corruption has been endemic in the Ukraine from the moment of its independence and is spread across all parties and related oligarchs …
Screw Gorbachev and screw Putin.
How is Putin “acting strangely,” Booman?
He says in the full official transcript rather than the totally propagandistic Washingtoon Post article: (I mean, really, Booman!!! The Post headline says it all. A brief rundown of Vladimir Putin’s strange, rambling press conference:
Is that somehow “crazy?” Only in PermaGov media-land, where anybody who seriously disagrees with the PermaGov line is labelled as suffering from some form of insanity. (See the Ron Paul/RandPaul rants both on this site and in so many major newspapers for all the evidence you might ever need on that account.) Is kicking a reporter out of a conference for interrupting with a cellphone “crazy?” I don’t think so. I wish I had the power to do so with students and audience members who don’t have the sense or courtesy to quiet their phones. A few bodyguards with AK 47s might do the trick for me. Putin’s got them, and he uses them.
Or this?
Observing these statements…he sounds like Noam Chomsky regarding the way the U.S. runs its international game…the only thing that might considered “crazy” is if one compares those statements to the totally bullshit, nonspecific drivel that runs out of the mouths of U.S. presidents and their administrations. Is everything he says “true?” No. Of course not. Lawyers are hired to represent the best interests of their clients and politicians are hired to represent the best interests of the countries who have hired them.
“Not guilty, Your Honor” is often a lie. Ditto here.
We shall see.
This is a power game, and Putin is not backing down.
I repeat:
Word.
Watch.
The U.S. blinks.
Bet on it.
It may try to disguise the blink…”Blink? OH no!!! There was some dust in the air and it got in my eye!!!”…but blink it will be.
Watch.
AG
I don’t see the US as “blinking” anymore than Putin will when he withdraws. They’re going to both “blink” and make it look like they both won what they each respectively wanted; the US blustering and then Russia withdraws (free they get what they want). In short, what Quentin said.
Could be. It’s a rotten game any way you look at it.
AG
when Putin’s actions cost the money men $54 BILLION yesterday on the Russian stock market..
some phone calls were made.
I’m just sayin’.
One problem with that. Putin and his cronies get paid in Euros and dollars for their oil/gas. Also, how do you know they didn’t short the market? It’s what The Vampire Squid and others would do here. So not only did Putin’s buddies make out yesterday because of what the dollar/euro did but some of them likely shorted the market too. So you’re getting an incomplete analysis by looking at the Russian stock market.
.
○ h/t seabe Oligarchs Triumphant: Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda
○ Anne Applebaum’s Dull Conspiracy Existence
See my new diary – Putin Orders Troops Back to Base; East-West Détente.
Gee, everyone on the nets today is saying that Putin is nuts. It’s like a Mighty Wurlitzer is playing the same song.
I would again recommend THE SCIENCE OF COERCION by Christopher Simpson for anyone who is lucky enough to track down a copy.
I found it in .pdf form online. Great book.
AG
P.S. “The Mighty Wurlitzer” is a leaky, old, out of tune pipe organ.
Perfect for its current job playing the weak chin music of America.
A lame duck at that.
He only has one weapon left.
Lame.
DUCK!!!
Over and out…
AG
Merkel habe mitnichten ausdrücken wollen, Putin verhalte sich irrational. Sie habe Obama vielmehr gesagt, Putin habe eine andere Wahrnehmung der Lage auf der Krim. Deshalb drängt Merkel ja auf eine “Fact-Finding-Mission”.
I think for what it’s worth the chancellery is saying a different perception, not perspective–i.e. a different judgment as to what the situation is as opposed to just a different point of view. And different from Obama’s and her own.
Senator Menendez said on MSNBC that Putin responds to “strength”. My question, what type of strength is Menendez et al advocating…troops, bombing Putin… i.e. how much “strength” will satisfy
Putin vs. Angela Merkel on “Arms of Steel”: Fight for Crimea
When the US sends drones over Pakistan to kill people, is that okay? I mean, there was a border, right?
Yes
Sigh. We’re invited into Pakistan to do drone strikes by the government. Up until a couple of years ago, our bases were in Pakistan. Same in Yemen. It’s not an invasion of sovereignty if the government gives you a hangar for your drones.
So then drones are okay to kill people in Pakistan? Seems like they complain a lot? How about sneaking into Pakistan to kill Osama?
Grenada?
By Grenada do you mean the United States should not do what it is going to do to Russia?
Are our medical students in danger?
Maybe Putin is an alky as so many Soviet leaders were.
I’m more interested in the basic non-reaction of the Europeans to this whole situation. They’ll grumble but seem to be unwilling to do anything else about it right now. And I am NOT talking about military blustering since we are quite far from anything like that being remotely a the best response.
The story in RT of Putin’s news conference was pretty coherent. He mentions some incidents that haven’t penetrated the western press. Worth the read before you send your zene beans to Moscow.
Are the Cold Warriors ready to admit that invading Grenada was illegal? How about Panama? How about the Bay of Pigs? Gulf of Tonkin? How about that Cambodian incursion? Guatemala? Iran? When we send drones over Pakistan to kill people are we respecting borders? If the Russians in Ukraine weren’t in danger was Tony Blair a half hour away from an Iraqi scud missile blowing up 10 Downing Street?
This is the perfect time to understand how complete the Mighty Wurlitzer is. Notice how Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow can sing in harmony with Fox commentators that Putin must be crazy.
Remember how Hussein was crazy? Remember how Gaddafi was crazy? Remember how Noriega was crazy? That guy in North Korea, he’s crazy too.
Well, call me crazy but if for no other reason than to get some variety, can we have another narrative? Or if we must play the crazy card, can we at least get a little more definitive, like he’s obsessive-compulsive?
Perfect.
Thank you.
But the majority of the people on this site…including the owner, first and foremost…are not going to get it. Not so long as they keep using the “He’s CRAAAZY!!!” meme on Ron and Rand Paul.
So it goes.
AG
welp. graham has really stepped into, when Michelle Malkin’s minions are ragging him over that tweet.
Boy-oh has the propaganda on both sides kicked in big-time.
Putin’s individual statements read out of context sound crazy and contradictory, but in the context of the history of Ukraine and Russian relations over the past ten years they make as much sense as the contrary American statements.
There are a number of issues going on. Will Ukraine be aligned with the West and NATO or with Russia and outside NATO. The key point here is that there is ethnic and geographical division on this point in Ukraine–especially when you have nationalists insisting on a monolingual state. Russia fears that the US under NATO will heavily arm Ukraine; same fear we would have if Canada joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and accepted military aid either from Russia or China. Russia’s experience with US-advised “shock treatment” after the fall of the Soviet Union (in contrast to the Marshall Plan) makes them think that the US seeks the destruction of the Russian people. (The flip side of US Cold War propaganda extended through the neo-conservatives and expressed in the GOP’s criticism of Obama’s handling of Putin–consider Palin’s latest word salad about wrestling bears.) US over-eagerness to claim Ukraine as a prize for the West here does not help matters.
Putin, from his perspective, is rightly concerned about Russian national security and the US is not allaying those fears. Bad diplomacy. But what do you expect from Victoria Nuland-Kagan.
The legal status of Russia’s huge Sevastapol military base is now ambiguous until Ukraine states what it intends to do about the lease that has existed since the independence of Ukraine. The seizure of Crimea is to claim that base for Russia. It also helps that Crimea is the most pro-Russian oblast in Ukraine. It is possible that the soldiers who were patrolling the streets were Crimean militias allied with Yanukovych and pro-Russian parties. It is also possible that they were trained, advised, and assisted by Russian special operation units based in Sevastapol. The rest of the world does watch how the US has operated over the past six decades. It is also possible that Russia deployed troops out of the base to secure the road from the isthmus that provides access to the Crimean Peninsula to prevent Ukraine from forcibly ejecting Russian troops from Sevastapol. It is also possible that Russian troops on the streets in Crimea might calm an otherwise dicey situation between pro-Russian militias and Ukrainian nationalists in Crimea, not to mention Crimean nationalists. And so far it has seemed to work. Likely any Russian troops have come from the base and been backfilled by reinforcements ferried across the Dnieper River to the base.
Although disputed, the agreement between Ukraine and Russia allows 11,000-25,000 troops on the Sevastapol base. Last reports were of 6000 troops patrolling Crimea, which is roughly 100 miles by 100 miles large.
The EuropeMaidan demonstrations were somewhat like the protests in Syria. A first non-violent protest began with police suppression, which escalated to killings. This protest was broad-based. Following the killings, a second protest was manned primarily by the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, which are Ukrainian nationalist parties that in World War II were allied with the Nazis; it was the militias of these parties that brought down the government of Yanukovych. And the interim government has a member of the Right Sector party as the interior minister. Right Sector is a coalition of nationalist parties headed by the Ukrainian Nationalist Party-Bandera. Bandera was a nationalist Ukrainian from the Polish-Hungarian part of Ukraine who opposed the Soviets in the pre-WWII period and acted as a Nazi agent during World War II. He was too much for the CIA to pick up after World War II, but the CIA did cultivate relationships with other nationalist parties that are now allied in Right Sector. There needs to be some investigation of the relationships by Congress, but that is not likely to happen; Congress loves the unsavory characters that Cheney so much depended on in foreign policy.
And Cheney is relevant to this situation because his NSC protege Victoria Nuland, who was on the White House staff during the Orange Revolution in 2004 is Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland and Ambassador to Ukraine Pyatt were taped coordinating the overthrow of the then-existing government of Ukraine and arranging the diplomatic support for what was definitely regime change. BBC reported and analyzed the contents of the tape which was circulated on YouTube–likely as part of social media propaganda for someone. So the US has been caught with its special operations fingerprints on the regime change in Ukraine, shortly after troubles in Venezuela. Putin’s actions are not the sign of weakness, but they are the sign of someone who does not want to be surprised in his own country. His actions have rallied Russian nationalists and supporters of Orthodoxy (which is what the imprisonment of Pussy Riot and the law against homosexuality were all about).
So, if the US wants to calm this situation down, it can privately or publicly end the ambiguity with respect to the continued Russian basing at Sevastapol, likely ultimately non-negotiable as the best warm-water port for its nuclear submarine fleet. Because, it is no doubt a dream of the US neo-cons to strip Russia of warm water ports (a tired canard of US history of foreign policy courses) in order to assert US sole superpower status. The US, likely privately, will counsel the interime Ukraine government to conduct absolutely honest elections (yep, I know; the US itself can’t seem to do that) and be open to granting some degree of autonomy to areas with ethnic Russian majorities. What is likely the alternative is a Crimean referendum on independence and federation with Russia that could possible ripple through major centers of south and east Ukraine–Krakiv, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa particularly.
The reality for Russia is the Kyiv and western and central Ukraine are going to be independent from Russia. Period. No longer part of the empire. And there is strong support in the NATO countries for that self-determination.
As much as the US media tries to make the situation about personalities, it is not. Not even the presence of Victoria Nuland in this is about her personality, it is about her alliances and prior commitments and philosophy of foreign policy.
The Washington Post is trying to ramp up a war to sabotage other agreements that the US is working on with the Russians–namely Syria and Iran.
Instead of pointing out that the NATO countries with the most material interest in this are Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Turkey–the closest to Ukraine and Russia, we get this personalized drivel.
In fact, in dealing with this crisis on his doorstep Putin has been very restrained, considering the stories surrounding him. He has done just enough to force the key Russian issues. Unrestrained would have been paratroopers and tanks in Kiev and Lvov.
Chart MICEX index – Chart USD-RUB – Chart EUR-USD [Euro at 12-month high]
“That makes him unpredictable.”
In Putin (and in many of his predecessors), hasn’t this always been “a feature, not a bug”?
What now clear is, since the former “communist” state has embraced capitalism, his plans will live and die by the markets. Putin’s become a slave to the oligarchy, and the markets have already become restless.
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