Today is another day when I feel compelled to thank the heavens that John McCain and Sarah Palin are not in charge of our foreign policy:
A Kremlin-backed journalist issued a stark warning to the United States about Moscow’s nuclear capabilities on Sunday as the White House threatened sanctions over Crimea’s referendum on union with Russia.
“Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash,” television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly current affairs show.
Behind him was a backdrop of a mushroom cloud following a nuclear blast.
Kiselyov was named by President Vladimir Putin in December as the head of a new state news agency whose task will be to portray Russia in the best possible light.
This Kiselyov guy is a real winner. Apparently, he’s on the record as saying that the organs of homosexuals should never be used for transplants because obviously it is better to be dead than to have gay cooties.
He ought to get a clue. Russia can turn us into radioactive ash, but only at the cost of being turned to radioactive ash themselves. Human life would probably not survive the exchange.
There is no reason to go around spouting off stupid threats. If you make people nervous, the next thing you know someone mistakes a flock of birds for a missile and we’re all dead.
“Kiselyov was named by President Vladimir Putin in December as the head of a new state news agency whose task will be to portray Russia in the best possible light.”
FOX “News” turned him down, first – too soft and easy-going.
What better way for Russia to be seen in a good light than to threaten nuclear annihilation?
Our weak response in Georgia begged for all of this. We should either concede East Ukraine and Moldova are part of Russia now (and probably a few more bits of a few more places) or draw a line here an now. The rest seems a side show.
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Mikheil Saakashvili now lives in exile in the United States, fearing for his life … For domestic concern, Saakashvili launched an attack on South Ossetia in 2008 with the backing of McCain and Israel. Should US Marines have joined? What a bs and incomprehension of what really happened in South Ossetia.
○ George Bush and His Legacy: the Georgian Airlift
○ Rose Evolution? Georgian Democracy After Saakashvili
○ Former Prime Minister of Georgia Convicted of Corruption – Feb. 2014
I think you incomprehension my comment. If you assumed that I’ve picked sides in Georgia’s conflict with Russia, you’re just reading way too much into my comment. If you think the West’s actions re: Georgia were a strong deterrent to further Russian military action (my point), I guess we’ll have to just differ on that. Recognizing that Russia was encouraged by the Western response to their military action in Georgia is not the same as wishing we had poured in US troops. It is simply what happened.
To restate my comment with more detail, for a little clarity:
Given that the former Soviet Republics that aren’t already Balkanized will continue to break apart (“Democracy is messy”), Russia will be there picking up many of the pieces (the ethnically Russian ones – at first), so long as they are encouraged by success. My suggestion is that recognizing that provides clarity of the decision before the West: let it happen or don’t.
There is no half measure that leaves us or the folks in the region better off than figuring out what we have the stomach for and acting on it. Living on the front lines of East-West conflict is no good for the locals as history has shown time and again. The only folks who benefit from continuous bluster and slow-simmering conflict are arms dealers (which is probably why we are doing just that).
Not that it matters, but my unstated preference would be to back off our apparent over-expansion into Asia and do it now, but maybe I’m just tired of bear wrestling and I’m not sure what right we have to finger-wag Russia given our Iraqi adventure anyhow.
Exactly. It’s stupid to pick fights where other people have a strong interest and you don’t. The Cold War neo-cons are still fixated on tightening the noose around Russia. Russia is not amused.
What would your line look like? US troops in Ukraine? What exactly are you advocating?
Putin is putting us in a shit or get off the pot situation and we’re better off if we recognize that sooner than later. I’m not advocating anything beyond that recognition. My humble opinion is not influential enough to bother with. We can either submit to this re-exertion of Russian influence over areas where the populace welcomes it or do something about it. Those are two shitty options, but what we are up to now seems only to add a garnish of stupidity on the side of the shit sandwich. I’m thinking it’s not a problem for the 7 people we are sanctioning for this to have their frozen assets replaced by the petro-wealthy state. These sanctions are an innovation, but are recognizably pointless.
I just don’t understand why we must put on this whole show of “trying” to put a stop to something we have no stomach for actually stopping (see Georgia). Putin has the stomach and the advantage, so Russia will continue to expand unless something is done. Good-bye East Ukraine, goodbye Moldova. Maybe that’s the best outcome now that the ball is rolling. I don’t know.
I’m just saying we admit the new Russian sphere and move on or if not, do what is necessary to actually stop Russian “aggression”. The West will simply look sillier and sillier if we continue to draw lines that get crossed over and over. So it’s time to shit or get off the pot, lest we continually caught with out pants down again and again.
[I’d prefer if we get off the pot because I don’t like dead people, but I’d be the first to admit that I don’t have the crystal ball that knows if that’s the right thing to do. What I do know is that the choice now will be the same as the choice later.]
If only we lived in Looney Tunes land..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cf4O-hUg78
It’s not a reassertion of Russian power as a response to aggressive US covert operations continuing to aim at the reduction of Russian power.
The irony is that we can get that reduction of Russian power just through negotiating another build-down of nuclear weapons. Maybe from 2000 to 1000, such that the next round can include a reduction in Chinese nuclear weapons.
But that isn’t macho enough for the neo-cons.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see this as an overboard comment. Russia is asserting that it will not be pushed around by the US and that it is (in its mind, at least) America’s military peer so the US ought not think that it can treat Russia like it’s Iraq or Grenada (or…or…or…).
Two thousand nuclear weapon parity makes it indeed the US’s military peer, all the other expense notwithstanding. And what Victoria Nuland and company have done is equivalent to Russian fleets being massed 400 miles east of Norfolk and Charleston Naval bases. Or supporting a neo-Confederate Southern secession in which African-Americans are still loyal to the US.
This is not endangering a minor Russian interest. The Dnieper River is a major navigable waterway into the Russian heartland.
Here’s a thought Victoria Nuland should be fired BUT that doesn’t make Russia’s chief propagandist any less alarming in his saber rattling with nukes. It is the height of US centric arrogance to assume that we alone control the action and reaction of every player in this conflict. It is also two sides of the same coin compared to what neo-cons are saying. Some progressives assume that the US controls every bit of this conflicts and neo-cons assume the US alone can fix this conflict. In the end neither one is right.
What is interesting is that a deal apparently has been reached before the President imposes his sanctions and before this guy spouts off.
Supposedly the deal involves regional autonomy in Ukraine in which Crimea remains, continuation of the Russian lease at Sevastapol, leaving the current Ukraine regime to sort out its internal politics, a support group composed of US, EU, and Russia to gather some bridge aid for Ukraine, and commitment that Ukraine is neutral, much like Finland. If true, that agreement backs away from the crisis deftly and leaves Victoria Nuland empty-handed.
It also allows both sides to claim credit for proposing the agreement.
The Moscow Times is one of the few remaining independent newspapers in Russia and was founded by Dutch publisher Derek Sauer. The paper has been sold to the Sanoma concern from Finland.
○ Russia’s Putin Scraps Major State-Run News Agency; Names Dmitry Kiselyov as new general director of Russia Today
the funny part is this is them being all insecure NOW.
just wait a month or two when they’re deep in an economic collapse.
Time to watch Dr.Strangelove again.
That was my first thought too. It’s a ridiculous comment by him. And then the similarities of last names between this “journalist” Kiselyov and the Strangelove premier, Dimitri Kissoff:
Are we sure we didn’t just get fed something from an Onion-like parody site in Russia? I don’t know. The “Onion Dome”? They’re just using the names of the Russian language version of Dr. Strangelove:
Dmitry Kiselyov v. Dimitri Kissoff
“whose task will be to portray Russia in the best possible light”
Potential fail here, ha-ha…although the intended audience may not be American.
It’s sure encouraging to see ecstatic calls for a “second cold war!” from the always-wrong Neocons and Pinhead Palins, with responsive mushroom cloud rhetoric from the Russian Imperialists. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Since it seems that US policy towards Ukraine was in the hands of a lifetime neocon advisor (and her equally braindead hubby), and that her recommendations seem to have been approved or at least allowed to be implemented from above, I’m not sure we’re all that far from the crackpot world-view that McStooge and his Pinheaded lady espouse.
Putin had the effrontery not to accept a (Western-aided) anti-Russian putsch on Russia’s doorstep, so the Very Serious People in DC have determined that we need to start a sanctions ladder with Putin because, er, democracy. Then each side can keep upping the ante to placate their hyped-up “audiences”. The mushroom cloud is just the top rung on the ladder. I guess we are to be sanguine that no one(?) wants to get there. Of course, no great power really “wanted” a general war in July 1914. Somehow they still got one….
It appears the same corrupt and useless “establishment” basically advises every WH, so we shall see if we can rely on the sanity of the current occupant. So far he doesn’t seem all that put out by the horrendous shit pile that his gub’mint has stepped in. The goal doesn’t appear to be to clean the shit off the shoe, but to find another even larger turd and smear that one on as well.
It was a revolution, not a putsch. A putsch is a smallish armed group seizing control of the power centers. In Ukraine, the populace as a whole was defying the President and when he ordered his security forces to commit atrocities to put them down the government members defected or quit. Very different situation, both morally and in prospects (putsches rarely end well; revolutions since WWII turn out better than the pre-revolutionary situation most of the time).
Putin is not afraid of a pro-Western government. He’s said he’d be happy to work with Tymoshenko, the erstwhile leader of the pro-Western faction. What he’s afraid of is the Maidan revolution leading to Ukraine turning from and exposing the oligarchical system that dominates Russia and most of the other ex-Soviet Republics.
Tymoshenko is an oligarch herself and not a threat to Putin. But if Kyiv start a serious campaign to root out corruption, the threads they uncover will inevitably lead into Russia and threaten Putin with the same kind of humiliation Yanukovych just got. And that thought, I suspect, is giving Putin some sleepless nights.
bs
Interesting speculation, and I take your point about putsch—creative license, mea culpa. And the violence on protesters is currently a controversial matter, it seems.
But I persist in believing that Putin’s actions really do center on control of the Black Sea fleet’s home station, and that Ukraine’s political instability has become too great for the Russian state, rather than on concerns by Putin that the oligarchical nature of Russia will somehow be revealed to its people. I think Russians are well aware of their oligarchism and Putin’s historic relations with it.
Finally, what is our interest here? One would have thought it should be the development of democracy and self government in Ukraine, an emerging democracy. How this is advanced by advocating unconstitutional overthrows of elected officials mystifies me, especially when Western-leaning prezes have already held the office. Why not advocate defeating the deeply unpopular pro-Russian prez at the polls?
We don’t control the people of Ukraine. If they are to have a revolution we surely can’t stop it, and shouldn’t; it’s their country and their fate. But we needn’t be advocating extra-democratic means of control and promising aid and comfort in such circumstances. That’s just back to the Great Game, and this is what results. As for a future revolution against Putinism emanating from Ukraine, that seems quite a vision.
I don’t know how likely it is that Ukrainian reforms will expose Russian corruption and lead to Putin’s overthrow. But I’m quite confident that Putin lives in circumstances quite similar to what Yanukovych did, and that he’s very frightened that something similar could happen to him.
The business of Russian Crimeans and the Sevastopal base are just a facade to get popular support. Neither was threatened, and Putin had plenty of legitimate ways to defend them if they were to get threatened.
What was Victoria Nuland working toward if not the removal of he Sevastapol base. Remember the neo-con philosophy is to create realities that others have to respond to. She effectively disrupted some of the momentum toward Iran and Syria agreements and brought the US and Russia close to significant conflict.
If Obama signed off on the specifics of this covert operation, on this one he was a fool. I suspect that plausible denial gave Nuland and Brennan some freedom to muck about behind the President’s back. Thus, it should be much easier for him to find the appropriate time to fire both of them.
I’m actually intrigued by the US sanctions Obama issued this morning which directly affect Putin’s supporting oligarchy. Looks like EU is onboard with even more.
Even though the power elite of Russia will have seen this coming, will the sanctions infringe enough on their business & lifestyles to make them turn on Putin? These sanctions are personal. Rather than bringing our troops into Poland for an exercise, or letting McCain do a strafing flyover we are hitting the real power of Russia. And as the story unfolds Russia is teetering on a big recession.
How long can Putin ask his monied to stay in their seats?
Just look at the stock market today. Russia won’t be in real trouble unless the price of oil and gas tank. Can the Saudis, and other supposed friends, deal with a year or two of $40/barrel oil to break Putin’s back? Would the Vampire Squid go along with that?
News from this afternoon indicates that the sanctions, hinted at for weeks, are window dressing for domestic US audiences. They show Obama being tough with Putin.
The reality it seems is typical Obama–much more pragmatic. And that is a good thing this time.
Ah yes, but ‘Russia’ is a different thing than the families who are now under the thumb of US & EU sanctions. A billionaire who is asked to forego the stability of his income; to watch his customers make new allies, to not be able to pay the dock fees for his mega yacht, these are things that matter today for Putin’s friends and things that Putin’s current course cannot fix for them.