Will Putin’s Eurasian Union rise this spring? Pretending to protect Russians within Ukraine from violence by ultra-nationalists, Putin takes power in Crimea to show his strength to the world.
Reacting possibly to EU leaders' emergency summit in Brussels that aimed to put pressure on Russia to ithdraw troops from Crimea, the mission of observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was stopped from entering Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by unidentified armed forces in military fatigues, Reuters reported. The Russian-controlled region’s deputy prime minister, Rustam Temirgaliev, said the decree making Crimea part of Russia was already in force and Ukrainian troops still on its territory would be treated as occupiers and forced to surrender, or leave."Ukraine’s government is illegitimate and Russian troops are not in control of Crimea", Russia’s Foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said in Madrid previously.
Just a day earlier, armed men stopped a special representative of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Ukraine's Crimea region. Robert Serry had been threatened, but had not been kidnapped, reported Reuters, based on information from Ukraine's foreign ministry.
While the leaders of America and the European Union discussed measures to take, or not to take, against Putin, Crimea’s parliament voted in favour of joining Russia and said it had asked Russian President Putin to “start the procedure” of allowing Crimea to be “reunited with its motherland”. Crimean MPs also voted to hold a referendum on the status of Crimea within 10 days, reported Euronews.
Two questions were put on the 16th March referendum ballot: 1. Do you vote for the reunion of Crimea with the Russian Federation, as a subject of the Russian Federation? 2. Do you vote for restoration of the 1992 constitution, and for Crimea to be part of Ukraine? Sixty percent of Crimea’s population claims to be ethnic Russian. Has the die been cast in Crimea?
Timothy Snyder, a Housum Professor of History at Yale, is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and a contributor to periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect and The Nation. On the New York Review of Books website, on 1st March, 2014, he posted an exhaustive summary on the present Ukrainian revolution and the related propaganda machine.“From Moscow to London to New York, the Ukrainian revolution has been seen through a haze of propaganda...," Snyder began. And he continued “...Whatever course the Russian intervention may take, it is not an attempt to stop a fascist coup, since nothing of the kind has taken place. What has taken place is a popular revolution, with all of the messiness, confusion, and opposition that entails. The young leaders of the Maidan, some of them radical leftists, have risked their lives to oppose a regime that represented, at an extreme, the inequalities that we criticize at home.” Snyder added, “It is entirely possible that a Russian attack on Ukraine will provoke a strong nationalist reaction: indeed, it would be rather surprising if it did not, since invasions have a way of bringing out the worst in people. If this is what does happen, we should see events for what they are: an entirely unprovoked attack by one nation upon the sovereign territory of another.”Read the entire article on: www.nybooks.com
Meanwhile, on 3rd March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Geneva "violence of ultra-nationalists threatens the lives and the regional interests of Russians and the Russian speaking population". And that is also what Sergei Markov, professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations wrote in The Moscow Times on 6th March, “ The current crisis is not about Crimea. It is about the rights of Russian-speakers throughout Ukraine whom the Kremlin wants to protect from violence and discrimination. Russia does not want a military intervention in Crimea and does not want to take Crimea from Ukraine.”
Black and bloody dollars of East and West
On newrepublic.com, Timothy Snyder published a much briefer article on 1st March calling for action, and listing Putin's vulnerable spots. He started by noting that by invading Crimea “Russia has violated international law”, and more specifically, the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 by the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, which “guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial inviolability in exchange for Kiev’s agreement to destroy its stockpile of nuclear weapons”. He added that the United States is a relevant military power in this context, as “Ukraine borders four members of NATO”.He suggested the response should be through the tourism and bank accounts of the Russian middle class in the European Union, plus “a general reconsideration of overall EU-Russian relations” concerning trade and, in particular, an energy policy that was too dependent on oil. Snyder wrote, “General restrictions on tourist visas, a few thousand travel bans, and a few dozen frozen accounts might make a real difference.” And he continued, “A simple announcement of the intention to investigate Norwegian and American hydrocarbons might make a difference. Over the long run, of course, the EU has every incentive to develop fusion and other alternatives that would free it from its artificial dependence upon a bellicose petrol state.”
The Budapest Memorandum was also recalled by Julia Tymoshenko who posted the following statement on the website of her Batkivschyna Party on Sunday, "We are not alone in this confrontation with Russia. In 1994 Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum with the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia guaranteeing our security in exchange for giving up our nuclear arsenal. Russia today is flagrantly violating its obligations and invading our territory. But I'm confident that the United States and Britain will never violate this memorandum and will do everything they can to ensure peace in Ukraine."
Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein have already frozen the bank accounts and assets of Ukraine’s ousted President, Victor Yanukovych, and his son, as well as those of more than a dozen other Ukrainians. The EU has also announced an assets freeze on Victor Yanukovych and 17 other senior officials and family in his entourage (such as Mykola Azarov, former Prime Minister, and his son, and Viktor Psonka, Ukraine's former chief prosecutor). According to information from Euronews, the US says it is issuing visa restrictions against a number of Ukrainian and Russian officials.However, not everyone shares an optimistic vision of being able to force Putin to do, or not to do, anything. A much darker picture is painted by Ben Judah in Politico Magazine, “Russia is confident there will be no Western economic counter attack. They believe the Europeans will not sanction the Russian oligarch money. They believe Americans will not punish the Russian oligarchs by blocking their access to banks. Russia is certain a military counter attack is out of the question.”
The author states that Putin feels he has nothing to lose, and nothing to fear, especially from the European Union as European bureaucrats are corrupt. Financially weaker countries, like Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Hungary are seeking to trade with Russia; but France and Britain are also in many ways engaged with Russian partners too. The only exception seems to be Germany, he writes, “Brussels today, Russia believes, talks about human rights but no longer believes in it. Europe is really run by an elite with the morality of the hedge fund: Make money at all costs and move it offshore”. Judah calls Crimea “Russia’s Club Med and imperial romanticism rolled into one”, and portrays the situation as an eventual perfect triumph that will allow Putin the simple, but extremely big, reality he wants to hide: Russia's many billions of dollars held in European banks – while Europeans are moving their money offshore. He reminds us of an old wisdom, that on both sides it’s all about the money.