Russia and China relations seem to be warming up due to Ukraine as well. From reading some stories on it, the Chinese turned down an American request to impose sanctions on Russia, as well it sounds like negotiations for the Russian's to sell more natural gas to the Chinese through Gazpro at a discount, China also wants to build a pipeline into Russia to expedite the process. If this deal is signed Russia basically is in a stronger position in terms of sanctions against their energy exports.
I think the Chinese support is for sale. Back when the security council voted on the legality of Russia annexing Crimea, China abstained (Russia vetoed and everyone else voted against). It did effectively isolate Russia at the time, but it seems like now they just needed some extra grease.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
I think the Chinese support is for sale. Back when the security council voted on the legality of Russia annexing Crimea, China abstained (Russia vetoed and everyone else voted against). It did effectively isolate Russia at the time, but it seems like now they just needed some extra grease.
Yup and the Russians got a 2 cent per unit discount on natural gas because of it. They also basically rebuffed a American request for sanctions from a high level.
China does what's best for China, in this case a strategic partnership with Russia economically makes a lot of sense for them. It makes massive sense for the Russians because it reduces the pressure of the weakened American sanctions (I say weakened because Europe isn't exactly rushing to the sanctions bus).
Russia is acting with a large amount of impunity in the Ukraine. They've already broken their pledge to cool things down that they gave to the American's last week and actually ramped things up.
It looks like Putin has brought back the cold war. At least I hope that's as far as it goes but with new hostilities, who knows how crazy he is.
I knew it was going to happen, and the West has basically given him free reign to do it, and to do what he wants in the Ukraine.
When Obama leaned over and told Russia's Prime Minister that he would have more flexibility to deal with Russia on contentious issues in his second term and to give him some space, Putin took that as a green light that Obama would basically sit on his hands and do nothing.
The Russian's have been after re-annexing parts of the Ukraine for years. Putin re started the cold war basically with permission.
The Russian's in their mind have legitimate security concerns in the face of an aggressive NATO Alliance, Putin might be a sociopath, but he's a determined sociopath.
I still expect that the Ukraine will break into semi-autonomous states, and Russia will devour them or destabilize them at their pleasure
They don't know who did it yet (or they aren't saying). The mayor is an ethic Ukrainian, but supported the former president and wanted closer ties to Russia, but since hell broke loose, he has moved more to the other side and is against Russia annexing Ukrainian territory.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
All sorts of really interesting tidbits coming out today or last night. Beyond the mayor getting shot, it sounds like the Russians are surprised that the pro russia movement hasn't been bigger.
Putin has convened a meeting of his senior commanders and defense ministry officials.
of the engineered famine was to destroy the Ukrainian national idea by wiping out the national elites and their social support base, and then by turning the peasants who survived the Holodomor into obedient collective farm workers – virtually slaves of the state.
AFTER MILLIONS
of Ukrainians died in their own native land, the authorities resettled tens of thousands of families from Russia, Belarus, and other parts of the USSR to the depopulated lands of Soviet Ukraine. By the end of 1933 over 117,000 people were resettled in Ukraine, at a 105% fullfilment rate.
How did Ukraine get so divided? Ukraine was conquered and divided for centuries by neighboring powers: the Polish, the Austrians and most of all the Russians. But Russian rulers didn't just want to rule Ukraine, they wanted to make it Russian.
The Russification of Ukraine began 250 years ago with Catherine the Great, who oversaw Russia's "golden age" in the late 1700s. At first, she controlled only eastern Ukraine, where she developed vast coal and iron industries to feed Russia's expansion. Though she later took the west as well, she and subsequent Russian rulers focused overwhelmingly on the east, which also happens to be some of the most productive farmland in the world.
The director of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, Serhii Plokhii, recently told National Geographic that the country is divided between a super-fertile steppe in the east and forestland in the west – an ecological split that lines up almost perfectly with the linguistic-political line in our maps above.
So many Russians swept in to Ukraine's southeast – a number of them troops, to fight the neighboring Ottoman Empire – that it became known as "Novorossiya," or "New Russia." Russian leaders, hoping to make the territory permanently Russian, banned the Ukrainian language.
Then came Joseph Stalin. In the 1930s, the Soviet leader "collectivized" peasants into state-run farms, which caused several million Ukrainians to die of starvation. The governments of Ukraine and the United States consider it a deliberate act of genocide, though historians are more divided. In either case, after the famine, Stalin repopulated the devastated eastern farmlands by shipping in ethnic Russians.
Today, Ukraine is only about one-sixth ethnic Russian. But the cultural imprint goes much deeper, and not just because so many Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language. When the Western-oriented, Ukrainian-nationalist politician Viktor Yushchenko became president, in 2005, "about 60 percent of TV programming was in Russian and 40 percent in Ukrainian," according to the Christian Science Monitor. By the time he left office in 2010, "that ratio [had] been roughly reversed." Most magazines and newspapers were still in Russian. This came after five years of "Ukrainianization" so aggressive that, even though he spoke fluent Russian, he would only converse with Russian President Vladimir Putin through an interpreter.
US spy agencies have obtained wiretaps of Russian Intelligence officers coordinating destablization activities in eastern Ukraine. Not surprising since this is what many of said for weeks but now there is more official evidence of Russian involvement. Kerry adds that there will be many more targeted sanctions should Russia advance into Ukraine.
Quote:
The United States has proof that the Russian government in Moscow is running a network of spies inside Eastern Ukraine because the U.S. government has recordings of their conversations, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a closed-door meeting Friday.
“Intel is producing taped conversations of intelligence operatives taking their orders from Moscow and everybody can tell the difference in the accents, in the idioms, in the language. We know exactly who’s giving those orders, we know where they are coming from,” Kerry said at a private meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington.
“It’s not an accidental that you have some of the same people identified who were in Crimea and in Georgia and who are now in east Ukraine,” said Kerry. “This is insulting to everybody’s intelligence, let alone to our notions about how we ought to be behaving in the 21st century. It’s thuggism, it’s rogue state-ism. It’s the worst order of behavior.”
Kerry previewed to the group of influential world leaders Monday’s announcement that the Obama administration is adding a group of Russian officials, businessmen, and institutions to their sanctions list. He gave new details about the administration’s planning of economic assaults on broad sections of the Russian economy that the U.S. would impose only if Vladimir Putin decides to launch an all-out invasion of eastern Ukraine.
“I’m not convinced he’s made the decision to cross the line with his troops because then it’s absolutely no question that its full force sector sanctions, energy, banking, finance, technology, arms, you name it, they are all on the table,” Kerry said. “We are trying to find a way to do sector sanctions so it is minimal negative impact on Europe and Canada and the U.S. but maximum impact on Russia. We believe there is a way to do sector sanctions with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.”
Meanwhile the prosecutor general of Ukraine has announced that based on audits former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych embezzled almost $32 billion dollars out of Ukraine's coffers that was smuggled into Russia. How does one even remotely steal that much? How can the protesters in Eastern Ukraine even justify their actions complaining the new Ukrainian government is illegitimate with embezzling of that scale? Source
