BALTIMORE, Maryland April 15, 2014 - This is a roll call of the Eastern Ukraine Cities taken over by, well, what will you call them? Separatists? The word separatists at least infers that somebody that is part of something wants to separate from it. But the people leading and, more and more, actually manning the takeover of buildings are Russian Military personnel trying to convince people that they are Ukrainians who don't want to be Ukrainians any longer. It is a ruse. Acknowledging a ruse might be the first step in figuring out where the two sides of this intensifying struggle stand. So let us acknowledge the obvious. They look like Russian Soldiers because they are Russian Soldiers. That has been perfectly clear for the last two weeks. These soldiers have uniforms, but they have been cleansed of referrals to Mother Russia. They have high-tech equipment and coordianted actions. Would simple factory workers angry at the national government do or act like these men. Of course not. Since when was the takeover of local Government buildings the best way to convince the national government that the "people" are unhappy. The plain fact, as has been reported in almost every newspaper or wire service with reporters on the ground in Ukraine is that the people in Eastern Ukraine don't want Russia rolling into their homeland. They have lived under Russian rule for decades. It was a miserable and dehumanizing experience. As long as Putin was merely giving the pro-westerners something to worry about, everything was fine, but do not think for a moment that the people of Eastern Ukraine are salivating for the next Russian takeover.
Until March, the elected leader of Ukraine was a Russian loyalist, Viktor Yanukovych. He was in power for several years and a lot of the employees of his government, especially in the volatile Donetsk region on the country's eastern border, were loyal to him. A lot of them were ethnic Russians. When he was sacked by the Euromaidan Movement that wants Ukraine to tilt West, the government employees in the East stayed on. Things have happened so fast that the new pro-west government now calling the shots hasn't exactly streamlined its operations. The new government knew that the elite police forces based in Kiev were rife with pro-Russians; they were on the other side when the elite police force took to the streets to battle the Euromaidan demonstrators. When violence broke out - up to 100 died in violent protests in late February and early March - it was again the elite police against Euromaidan. The new government doesn't exactly trust the police yet. In the east, when the pro-Russian mobs surround the police stations, a lot of the police officers simply come outside and join with the demonstrators. Some of the ones that didn't got beat up. When Russia invaded Crimea with up to 40,000 regular troops - again, going with the line that they weren't regular Russian troops because their uniforms had been stripped of Russian nomenclature - a lot of Ukraine's best soldiers found themselves surrounded and confined to base, with little instruction from Kiev except not to fire their weapons, because Russia would use that as an excuse to fire their weapons. The Ukraine Military was humiliated in Crimea. Their ships and their one submarine were stolen by the Russians. Even their ground-breaking dolphin-training program - only the United States has done the same thing - was thieved away by the Russians. These days the Kiev government is trying to put together a force to take back their buildings, but they are quite obviously having trouble because they have given ultimatums to leave to the separatists in those buildings, but the deadlines have passed and there are no Ukraine military forces ready to do battle.
Let us also be honest about the West. Newspapers and media reporters everywhere carry the same two truths about the West. They are angry about what Russian Strong Man Vladimir Putin - Putin these days is Russia - has done in Ukraine and Georgia, but the only thing they are somewhat willing to do is impose economic sanctions of a sort. The ones imposed so far have been confined to freezing the assets of some Russian bureaucrats and businessmen (but not Putin), and cancelling some military weapons contracts made with western weapons manufacturers. There have been no economic sanctions that go across the board against the Russian nation. All of this tepid behavior is due to the fact that the western nations in Europe all get energy of some sort from Russia, and the United States is in this phase under President Obama where it wants Europe to handle its own problems. And it isn't going over too well in Europe or, for that matter, in the United States, where his approval ratings have fallen into the 30-39 percent range. But he is the President, and with regards to foreign policy, he does call the shots until 2016. It is pretty clear at this point that Putin thinks he can push Obama around. Has anything happened to convince him otherwise? Obama wanted everyone to believe that Putin was a new and modern leader ready to govern in the new millenium. Under Obama's view of things, a leader in the new millenium NEVER resorts to military force to attain national goals or settle international disputes. When Putin did exactly what Obama said he could not do, Obama became, well, discombobulated (mixed up and confused). He is only now coming to the realization that Putin is very comfortable using his military to get what he wants. He was held back for a long time by the ineptness of the military coming out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a young but integral player in the old Soviet Union, Putin had a lot of faith in strong man tactics where you decide what you and your nation want and then use your military to get it. For years, the Soviet collapse took that away. But the energy boom that Russia has enjoyed has permitted Putin to modernize and improve that military, and it is now capable of doing his bidding. And now that Putin has found himself matched with an American leader who is loathe to use the only military on Earth that can still administer a severe whomping to the Russian military, he is on the warpath, literally. Obama is only now showing signs of understanding the full import of what he faces in Putin. He needs constant reminders of this fact, constant reinforcement. He is, as we have explained countless times here, a dyed in the wool uber leftist who hates using military force against anything other than domestic enemies. He thinks when he uses the American military he starts to resemble a Republican or old-time Democrat like the heroic John Kennedy. He doesn't want that. In fact, just as Russia started to invade Crimea, Obama announced, victoriously, that he was slashing the United States Military budget to the bone. But now he is getting to the point where he either has to put up or, well, sit there in Washington and watch Putin trounce all over Ukraine. And if Putin does that to Ukraine, you can only imagine what is next. If Putin crushes the pro-west government in Ukraine while the West sits and watches, everybody in the world will start to compare Obama to Neville Chamberlain, the former British Prime Minister who allowed Hitler to walk all over countries in Eastern and Central Europe on his way to crushing all of Europe during World War II. We in the west can only hope Obama doesn't want to go that route. I wish I were more sure. In fact, a good start for Obama would be to announce that he is not going to slash the United States Military Budget. A good second step would be to announce that the anti-ballistic missles the USA already had promised to install in Poland and the Czech Republic, before Obama broke the promise to please Putin, would now be installed after all. A good third step would be to send a hefty NATO contingent to all of the European NATO members who are within marching distance of Russia. I'm not holding my breath. But they seem like solid steps for a President who is generally against military intervention. They are steps that do not guarantee war, and in fact, might make war a lot less likely.
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