Now the Long Knives are poised right in the back of Ukraine:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26400035

Fucking brilliant approach, this. First the attempt to play divide and conquer in Ukraine pretty transparently crashed and burned with the retun of Ukraine's Benazir Bhutto to political influence. Then, the Russians decide evidently that they really did move in Russian Army soldiers into the Crimea. Because the proper instinct when a risky gamble fails is to raise the stakes. This is not going to end well by any means. Now I'm wondering how long Lucashenko will have a country to rule as dictator, and what might happen with Round II with Georgia. If Tsar Vladimir I of the House of Putin succeeds in this kind of thing, that will only encourage him to expand his wars of aggression further because Ukraine is rather larger than Georgia, and this would permit Russia to begin aspiring to regain aspects of the old Tsarist boundaries. I sincerely expected Russia would use Central Asia for this kind of thing, not Ukraine.

The EU wouldn't give a damn about invading Muslims in Kazakhstan, but invading an EU state? That's not going to lead Russia to do anything but decide to engage in still-larger wars of aggression in the long term.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/01/world/europe/ukraine-politics/

And one of the chambers of the Russian legislature just approved this request. Hoo, boy.

Shit got real-er:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26403996

The Ukrainian Army is now on full combat alert. The prospect that the centennial year of the First World War will see the first large-scale conventional European war in decades has risen exponentially.

Comments

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Unless something goes horribly wrong, no shots will be exchanged between anyone from NATO and the Russian army over this. The reaction will be to make Putin see this as a horrible strategic mistake. While NATO allies will certainly be part of this, a speech about another reset to relations from Obama would carry far more weight than a similar one from the French, Germans, or UKians. Some other things that could be announced in the next week or so would be:

1) Restarting the missile shield in Poland
2) Green lighting natural gas exports
3) Expanding a few bases in places where Russia would not like to see them
4) Making it a priority to close Russia's base in Syria

Russia is naturally given to paranoia, the US can exploit this in ways that our European allies can't, without firing a shot.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Almost forgot, not only skip the G8 conference in Russia, but schedule a G7 conference. G7/8 membership is not for those who are still carving pieces off of their neighbors but rather for those who are done doing so.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I've read your proposals and approve.

Too bad they have 0 chance of being implemented.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Something can always go horribly wrong when states try to carve up their neighbors busy experiencing a revolution. Just ask Saddam Hussein how well invading Revolutionary Iran worked for him.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Yes, Putin seems to be willing to take such risks however. He is also no Saddam, I can't recall any large miscalculations, so far at least. If he was born a century before, he could be another Stalin, for whom carving up neighbors actually worked out pretty well... at least by his reckoning.