Ukraine and Georgia versus Russian Bullying

[Procrustes Stretched]

Why the hell should anyone else get involved in the Crimean situation? At least Georgia stood up.and fought back...and the President and Congress back then did diddly squat.

I'm not advocating armed intervention by Ukrainians as a better response than the caution now. What I am advocating is calling out the bullshit armchair warriors calling for the USA to arm Ukraine or get involved militarliy


Russia is NOT a super power. Cold War bs revisionism and reincarnated arguments to get tough with Russia need to be flushed down the geopolitical toilet

 

[waltky]

Russian Tatars want their own country...

U.S. intel assessment: greater likelihood Russia will enter eastern Ukraine
March 26th, 2014 ~ A new classified intelligence assessment concludes it is more likely than previously thought that Russian forces will enter eastern Ukraine, CNN has learned.

Two administration officials described the assessment but declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information. The officials emphasized that nothing is certain, but there have been several worrying signs in the past three to four days. “This has shifted our thinking that the likelihood of a further Russian incursion is more probable than it was previously thought to be,” one official said. The buildup is seen to be reminiscent of Moscow’s military moves before it went into Chechnya and Georgia in both numbers of units and their capabilities. U.S. military and intelligence officials have briefed Congress on the assessment.

As a result, Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee late Wednesday sent a classified letter to the White House expressing concern about unfolding developments. An unclassified version obtained by CNN said committee members feel “urgency and alarm, based on new information in the committee’s possession.” The committee said there was “deep apprehension that Moscow may invade eastern and southern Ukraine, pressing west to Transdniestria and also seek land grabs in the Baltics.” Transdniestria is a separatist region of Moldova. Committee members noted that Gen. Philip Breedlove, head of the U.S. European Command and NATO military chief, noted the Russians had sufficient forces to make moves into those areas.

American officials believe the more than 30,000 Russian forces on the border with Ukraine, combined with additional Russian forces placed on alert and mobilized to move, give Russian President Vladimir Putin the ability to rapidly move into Ukraine without the United States being able to predict it when it happens. The assessment makes several new points including: Troops on Russia’s border with eastern Ukraine – which exceed 30,000 - are “significantly more” than what is needed for the “exercises” Russia says it has been conducting, and there is no sign the forces are making any move to return to their home bases. The troops on the border with Ukraine include large numbers of “motorized” units that can quickly move. Additional special forces, airborne troops, air transport and other units that would be needed appear to be at a higher state of mobilization in other locations in Russia.

There is additional intelligence that even more Russian forces are “reinforcing” the border region, according to both officials. All of the troops are positioned for potential military action. Russian troops already on the border region include air defense artillery and wheeled vehicles. The United States believes that Russia might decide to go into eastern Ukraine to establish a land bridge into Crimea. The belief is that Russian forces would move toward three Ukrainian cities: Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk in order to establish land access into Crimea. Russian forces are currently positioned in and around Rostov, Kursk, and Belgorod, according to U.S. intelligence information.

U.S. intel assessment: greater likelihood Russia will enter eastern Ukraine ? CNN Security Clearance - CNN.com Blogs

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CRIMEA'S TATARS CONDEMN ANNEXATION, SEEK AUTONOMY
Mar 29,`14 -- Leaders of Crimea's Tatar minority gathered Saturday to condemn Russia's annexation of the peninsula and appealed to international bodies for recognition as an autonomous group.

Tatars, an ethnically Turkic and mainly Muslim group that was subjected to mass deportation from their native Crimea by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1944, gathered to forge a collective response to Russia's absorption of their native region. Decisions on whether to accept Russian citizenship and possible participation in a Moscow-loyal government were deferred as the community further contemplates its options. But the forum of about 250 delegates underscored difficulties Russia will face in integrating a community that resisted annexation and largely boycotted the March 16 referendum to join Russia. According to the most recent Ukrainian national census, carried out in 2001, the 245,000-strong Tatar community accounted for 12 percent of Crimea's population. But anecdotal evidence of higher birth rates and a continued return of Tatars from exile in Central Asia suggest those figures may have grown markedly since then.

The Kremlin decision to annex this strategic Black Sea region, which has a large Russian majority, was backed by rhetoric of national self-determination, as Moscow argued that pro-Russian Crimeans had the right to break away from Ukraine. "Recently, all decisions (by Russia) have been based on the presupposed right of every nation to self-determination," said Refat Chubarov, the leader of the Crimean Tatar governing body. "One must now conclude that the Crimean Tatar people also have that right." Chubarov also appealed to the international community to recognize the Crimean Tatars as a "national territorial autonomy," but fell short of demanding a referendum on independence or allegiance to Ukraine.

Yet the vociferous tone of the delegates who spoke demonstrated the lingering rage within the Tatar community. "Russia turned us out three times," Aishe Setmetova, an elderly woman in a knit sweater, bellowed from the stage. "They think of us as worthless objects. I do not believe in Russia." Crimea's Tatars began to return to their native peninsula in the late 1980s with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The population is growing fast compared to the ageing Russian population and presents the Kremlin with a long-term problem of integration. Russia and the local Crimean government have assured Tatars that their rights will be fully respected on the peninsula. Tatar is to be elevated to one of the three state languages and the community has been given loose assurances it will be guaranteed a prominent political status.

But Tatars, who ruled the peninsula from the 15th century until the Russian Empire took it over in the 18th century, remain deeply skeptical of Moscow's intentions. "We, as the native people of this land, shouldn't collaborate with an occupying power," congress delegate Ilver Ametov said. "Ukraine, too, wasn't our home, but at least it was a democracy," he said. "There's a story we have about the dog who ran to Moscow because things were better over there, but ran back to Ukraine because at least here he's allowed to bark."

News from The Associated Press

 

[waltky]

Do Americans Want To Intervene In Ukraine?...

The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene
April 7,`14 ~ Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is.

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.

Ukraine: Where is it?

Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the map. Other scholars, such as Markus Prior, have used pictures to measure visual knowledge, but unlike many of the traditional open-ended items political scientists use to measure knowledge, distance enables us to measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.
About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.

Where’s Ukraine? Each dot depicts the location where a U.S. survey respondent situated Ukraine; the dots are colored based on how far removed they are from the actual country, with the most accurate responses in red and the least accurate ones in blue.

Who is more accurate?

Accuracy varies across demographic groups. In general, younger Americans tended to provide more accurate responses than their older counterparts: 27 percent of 18-24 year olds correctly identified Ukraine, compared with 14 percent of 65+ year-olds. Men tended to do better than women, with 20 percent of men correctly identifying Ukraine and 13 percent of women. Interestingly, members of military households were no more likely to correctly locate Ukraine (16.1 percent correct) than members of non-military households (16 percent correct), but self-identified independents (29 percent correct) outperformed both Democrats (14 percent correct) and Republicans (15 percent correct). Unsurprisingly, college graduates (21 percent correct) were more likely to know where Ukraine was than non-college graduates (13 percent correct), but even 77 percent of college graduates failed to correctly place Ukraine on a map; the proportion of college grads who could correctly identify Ukraine is only slightly higher than the proportion of Americans who told Pew that President Obama was Muslim in August 2010.

Does accuracy matter?

Does it really matter whether Americans can put Ukraine on a map? Previous research would suggest yes: Information, or the absence thereof, can influence Americans’ attitudes about the kind of policies they want their government to carry out and the ability of elites to shape that agenda. Accordingly, we also asked our respondents a variety of questions about what they thought about the current situation on the ground, and what they wanted the United States to do. Similarly to other recent polls, we found that although Americans are undecided on what to do with Ukraine, they are more likely to oppose action in Ukraine the costlier it is — 45 percent of Americans supported boycotting the G8 summit, for example, while only 13 percent of Americans supported using force. However, the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.

The less Americans know about Ukraine?s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene

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All-Out Brawl Breaks Out In Ukraine Parliament
- Deputies in the Ukrainian parliament brawled in the chamber on Tuesday after a communist leader accused nationalists of playing into the hands of Russia by adopting extreme tactics early in the Ukrainian crisis.

Two deputies from the Svoboda far-right nationalist party took exception to the charges by communist Petro Symonenko and seized him while he was talking from the rostrum. His party supporters rallied to his defense and a brawl broke out with deputies from other parties joining in and trading punches.

Symonenko stirred nationalist anger when, referring to pro-Russian protesters who seized buildings in eastern Ukraine, he said nationalists had set a precedent earlier this year by seizing public buildings in protest at the rule of ousted President Viktor Yanukovich.

Now, he said, armed groups were attacking people who wanted to defend their rights by peaceful means. "You are today doing everything to intimidate people. You arrest people, start fighting people who have a different point of view," he said, before being pulled away from the rostrum by the Svoboda deputies.

Symonenko did not appear to have been hurt in the brawl involving other deputies. But one deputy later resumed his seat in the chamber with scratches on his face clearly showing. The communists backed Yanukovich and his Regions Party through the three months leading up to him fleeing the country on February 21 after more than 100 people were shot dead by police snipers in Kiev.

All-Out Brawl Breaks Out In Ukraine Parliament Over How To Stop Russia [PHOTOS] - Business Insider