Crimean War 2 in 2014 anyone? I was kind of expecting this but it's unfolding very quickly. It is the centenary of WW1, when apparently local events in south-eastern Europe spun into a major war. For some time I have been expecting a major conflict to break out.
Surely this is going to end in bloody conflict. But of course our wise political leaders knew this when they supported the armed overthrow of an elected government by 'protestors'.
Look at Syria today - that is likely to be Ukraine in the not too distant future. At the moment it seems unlikely that the West will be sending troops in to defend Ukraine or fight Russia, as they did in 1854 when Britain and France came to the defence of Ottoman Turkey in the first famous Crimean War.
In the run-up to this revolution against the Yanukovich government, I noticed a very clear political agenda at work in UK reporting and political responses to the events, which, as in 2002 in Iraq, the media is loyally repeating and reinforcing. The protestors used violence to attack police and destroy government buildings but western sympathy and traditional anti Russian suspicions blinded people to the dangers and also the dubious nature of some of the protesters, Reports ignored the protest groups' violent antics and the surprising restraint - until the final days - from the elected government of Ukraine. The Right Sector is an openly neonazi organisation, but somehow that deserved little or no comment because they are 'freedom fighters'. This is where reporting fails in its job to inform the public. How long would the UK or US government put up with mass occupations of public space? Certainly not three months.
Realistically, we cannot honestly expect Moscow to do nothing when the government of their near neighbour is overthrown with the support of the West? Remember Newton's third law - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
What is galling is that nothing has been learned since Syria - the west told Assad (who, unlike Yanukovich, was not elected) that he 'must go'. That is not a policy, that is the rhetoric of war - especially after the brutal end of Libyan dictator Colonel Qadaffi. And, lo, it led to war. In the case of Ukraine, Yanukovich did not have the kind of military backing enjoyed by Syria's Assad, nor the ruthlessness (after all he did very little against protestors for 3 months). But Putin will not be a walkover like the ex-Ukrainian president. He will be preparing to give the western Ukrainians and their western backers a bloody nose. A reckoning cometh, and it will probably start in Crimea.
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