Which is true in that these particular measures haven't been introduced into this particular situation. They won't matter a hill of beans to Vladimir Putin, but they are new:
In a phone call on Saturday, Obama and Hollande insisted on the "need for Russia to withdraw forces sent to Crimea since the end of February and to do everything to allow the deployment of international observers," it said.
Obama's conversation with Hollande was one of a half dozen telephone conversations he had with world leaders Saturday about Ukraine, the White House says.
He also spoke with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and held a conference call with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
The new warnings come in the wake of Russia's insistence that any U.S. sanctions will have a boomerang effect on the United States and that Crimea has the right to self-determination as armed men tried to seize another Ukrainian military base on the peninsula.
Sounds an awful lot like Rand Paul's filibuster a year ago - a futile gesture. It doesn't matter how stridently Barack Obama demands a withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, because he doesn't have the power to back up that demand - not military, not economic, not moral. Even if he did, he completely lacks the credibility necessary to convince Putin that he would use it. So the neoCzar rolls right ahead, as Moscow's dismissive retort in the quote above illustrates.
That roll-ahead employs the same tactics that Adolph Hitler used to take Czechoslovakia in 1938-39:
Putin, who later opened the Paralympic Games in Sochi which have been boycotted by a string of Western dignitaries, said Ukraine's new, pro-Western authorities had acted illegitimately over the eastern, southeastern and Crimea regions.
"Russia cannot ignore calls for help and it acts accordingly, in full compliance with international law," he said.
Serhiy Astakhov, an aide to the Ukrainian border guards' commander, said 30,000 Russian soldiers were now in Crimea, compared to the 11,000 permanently based with the Russian Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol before the crisis.
On Friday evening armed men drove a truck into a Ukrainian missile defence post in Sevastopol, according to a Reuters reporter at the scene. But no shots were fired and Crimea's pro-Russian premier said later the standoff was over.
Putin denies the forces with no national insignia that are surrounding Ukrainian troops in their bases are under Moscow's command, although their vehicles have Russian military plates. The West has ridiculed his assertion.
The most serious East-West confrontation since the end of the Cold War - resulting from the overthrow last month of President Viktor Yanukovich after protests in Kiev that led to violence - escalated on Thursday when Crimea's parliament, dominated by ethnic Russians, voted to join Russia.
Russians in Crimea, Germans in the Sudetenland: the advance vanguard to justify naked military aggression. Precisely the sort of naked Russian military aggression that we signed an agreement - not a treaty, but an agreement - to prevent, along with the British, in 1994. Was it a silly gesture on the part of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to pledge to protect the safety, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of a country on the very doorstep of the Russian frontier for whom no American administration would never actually go to war under any circumstances? Sure; that's another of the reasons Putin went ahead and invaded.
But that gets us back to that pesky deterrent factor again. It's not about what we can do directly against Putin in Ukraine; it's what we can do elsewhere on the global chessboard that offsets what he gains by invading. And I can guarantee one and all that "freez[ing] talks on visa-free travel and on a broad new pact governing Russia-EU ties" is not going to be too steep a price to pay for what regaining Ukraine gives Putin: the crown jewel in restoring the old Russian Empire, or Soviet Union, or whatever 21st century equivalent name Vlad eventually comes up with. Once Ukraine is "back in the fold," as it were, Putin can easily bully the Baltic States into submission, and then it's on to regaining what used to be the Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe. Maybe not all at once - Ukraine would be a very large morsel to digest - but sooner than anybody thinks, since Putin's belief that Red Barry will do nothing to stop his relentless advance is directly proportional to how often and closely he and Francois Hollande put their empty commie heads together.
O and Hollande are very reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier: pacifists who spoke loudly without sticks, fools whom Hitler and Mussolini laughed at to the degree that they took heed of them at all, as the latter's aggression rolled across Europe to the point where Britain and France felt compelled to declare war. And even then, they refused to fight it; France had to be overrun and Britain come under ruinous aerial siege before Chamberlain was ousted and Winston Churchill finally given the reins. Thus was a local confrontation that could have been contained short of war allowed to explode into a global conflagration that slaughtered over sixty million people.
A repeat performance now, with twenty-first century weaponry....well, you can do the math. But we're doing absolutely zero, zip, zilch, nada to contain it now, short of war. Sooner or later, that will have most....unpleasant consequences.
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