As you sow....

Surprisingly, one of the most insightful comments I've seen so far on the Ukraine situation came from a sportswriter at the Toronto Star, Cathal Kelly.  While calling for Canada to withdraw its team from the Paralympic Winter Games, set to start this week, he recognized that there was no case for even a threat of a military response, adding: "This would be a good time to think about Iraq".

Someone who might have thought about that before speaking is US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has described the Russian moves in Crimea as "an incredible act of aggression".  That description of a limited number of troop movements, with next to no actual fighting, sounds passing strange coming from a country whose own acts of aggression customarily begin with volleys of hundreds of cruise missiles, usually under cover of darkness.

There are all sorts of reasons, of course, why Vladimir Putin has chosen his present course of action.  He has, after all, referred to the collapse of the USSR as "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century", and as recently as 2008 apparently told George W. Bush that he regarded Ukraine as Russian territory.  (As, in the case of Crimea until 1954, it undoubtedly was).

However, one other factor that must be somewhere in Putin's mind is the sense that Russia has been consistently misled by the US and its allies in recent decades.  There can be little dispute that the 2003 Iraq invasion went far beyond the UN authorization that Russia reluctantly went along with -- and we now know that it was based on entirely false pretenses (Saddam's WMDs).  Likewise the NATO action in Libya, which very quickly abandoned its origins in "defending the civilian population" and became a naked push for regime change.  Putin has probably been ruthless and untrustworthy all his life, but even if he wasn't, he could certainly have picked up the basics by watching the Western powers in action.

It's impossible to know how all of this is going to end, but one thing that's certain is that Ukraine is close to bankruptcy.  It apparently needs $35 billion, yesterday.  Who's going to come up with that?  The EU? Not with its own problems still unresolved.  The US?  Even with the GOP trying to look tougher than President Obama, probably not.  Which leaves only the Russians as potential saviours, and the Ukrainians with very few palatable choices.