Putin’s Crimea ‘victory speech’ – applause – YouTube
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A week before the vote just 41 percent of Crimeans wanted their land to be a part of Russia, yet the returns came back showing 96.6 pecent approval. The electoral commission, such as it is, released numbers indicating 474,137 people voted in the port city of Sevastopol, which would be 123 percent of the registered population there.
Vladimir Putin’s Seizure of Crimea Is Based on Pure Fiction – The Daily Beast
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Over the weekend about 5,000 pro-Russian protesters roamed central Donetsk in eastern Ukraine smashing doors and windows and forcing entry to government buildings.
Ukraine Expects U.S. Military Help If War With Russia Starts – The Daily Beast
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By late Monday afternoon, Crimea’s leaders had stripped all references to Ukraine from the government’s website and made it clear that Ukrainian institutions, assets and state agencies in the peninsula now belonged to the Republic of Crimea.
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I’ve doubts about the “long way around” — appeals for “diplomatic measures”, years to decades of protracted hot air (“negotiations”), the tolerance, first, then institutionalization of barbaric Russian imperial expansion.
Dictators are machines without brakes: they don’t stop on their own as self-restraint would seem not to become them.
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The main alarming uncertainty of this day is the fate of the Ukrainian military in Crimea. They are being presented with ultimatums and coerced into betrayal, but they keep standing firm. But their future is unknown, which is particularly frightening.
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The good news:
1. The Ukrainian authorities finally announced partial mobilization. It came as a response both to the Crimean “referendum” and to the Moscow-provoked events in the Southeast of Ukraine.
Mobilization will simultaneously strengthen two armed formations with considerably different tasks – namely, the army and the National Guard. The former would be used to fight the enemy’s regular army, and the latter, to destroy gangs. This means that Kyiv is demonstrating that it’s preparing for all possible operations of Moscow, be it an armed invasion or the “Crimean scenario” (actions of the so-called “self-defense” supported by mysterious “little green men”). Such foresight on the part of Kyiv is reassuring.
INVASION OF CRIMEA – March 17, 2014 – SUMMARY (created today)
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The revolutionary government in Kiev knows well Russian duplicity, and, perhaps, it is learning about the relationship between post-WWII, post-Hitler European comfortableness, productivity, and to this date largely unchallenged security.
Apart from the infiltration of Islamic Jihad within overall Muslim migration, Europe has seen nothing like an old fashioned 19th Century military invasion — but it would seem its radars detect something like it now.
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As anger at the corrupt government expands through Russian society, the experience of Ukrainian revolutionaries could prove invaluable. It revealed that demonstrations led by activists willing to risk their lives can topple a regime that looks impregnable. Ukraine’s success might encourage similar attempts to unseat a corrupt Russian regime.
Anti-Putin dissidents watching Ukraine: Column – Janusz Bugajski, USA Today, 3/16/2014.
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STUTTGART, Germany — NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove asserted Tuesday that soldiers surrounding Ukrainian bases in Crimea are Russian forces, dismissing accounts that the troops are pro-Russia local militia.
“After extensive review of multiple information sources, we believe these are Russian military forces acting on clear orders to undermine Ukraine forces in Crimea,” Breedlove wrote in his blog, From the Cockpit.
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It’s hard to believe that it has been a quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan began to dismantle the ideological wall that divided Europe. Harder still to believe that American politicians, Right and Left, are trying to resuscitate the Cold War — or something hotter. Recent events in the Ukraine seem to be giving the citizens of Europe and America hot flashes of deja-vu.
Articles: Russophobia and Islamophilia – G. Murphy Donovan, American Thinker (today).
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It’s not the Cold War redux.
As with the Islamic Small Wars, of which Putin has made himself a part in the middle east’s unholy troika that is Putin-Assad-Khamenei, the European Theater with the curtain coming up on the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine revolves around the simplest of democratic open society concepts: integrity.
Putin, who appears to fit well the concept that is “malignant narcissist”, invests in deceits and lies, in under-the-table (“behind the curtains”) dealing, in control of entire information atmospheres. In the post-Soviet, post-KGB era, the ideology may have been thrown out the window but not the unbridled urge for absolute control and power over all others (and for the purpose of, yawn, obtaining unlimited “narcissistic supply”).
Today’s post-KGB FSB employs more staff per capita than the KGB; the media of Glasnost has returned to “glass? No!” as regards independence and rendering key elements within the state transparent.
Putin’s Russia is no more a benign dictatorship than would be a pirate’s cove dominating the Caribbean — or, look to that mansion in Marbella, Gibraltar.
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MOSCOW —Russia effectively absorbed Crimea Tuesday afternoon, moments after President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine.
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As Russia and the rest of the world move ever closer to a cold war footing over Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised Crimean invasion, an important dimension of this conflict has received scant coverage, in both Western and Russian media: how do Russian citizens feel about this escalating conflict?
Faces of war and peace on Moscow streets | rabble.ca – 3/17/-2014.
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Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
Vladimir Putin Moves Against the Press : The New Yorker – 3/12/2014.
Additional Reference and Updates
52% Support U.S. Diplomatic Action Against Russia Over Crimea – Rasmussen Reports™
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