Invasion Is Imminent, Ctd

In pro-Russian Kharkiv today, activists for the revolution are beaten and forced to kneel: http://t.co/onto628G1e via @HromadskeTV #Ukraine—
Simon Shuster (@shustry) March 01, 2014

The most popular Qs in Kyiv right now: "Where is US, EU?". Shocked ppl just randomly talk to each other on the streets—
Maxim Eristavi (@MaximEristavi) March 01, 2014

quite a coincidence that @navalny is in court-ordered Internet silence now.

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) March 1, 2014

Here is Moscow’s protest against Putin’s move to invade Ukraine. One guy. (Anyone else’d be arrested) pic.twitter.com/nPHspwBTj0 via @oosipova — Simon Shuster (@shustry) March 1, 2014

The new prime minister of Crimea, who requested Russian troops, belongs to a party that won 4% of the vote in last election — igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) March 1, 2014

Photo of riot-policemen, disbanded for mass-murders in Kyiv, allegedly showing off their new Russian IDs in Crimea pic.twitter.com/Wu6h5ToaR9

— Maxim Eristavi (@MaximEristavi) March 1, 2014

Ukraine Liveblog: Without testing its loyalty, Ukrainian leader Vitali Klitschko calls for mobilizing the army http://t.co/oj3rmcjr3P

— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) March 1, 2014

Earlier tweet reax here. Max Seddon summarizes today’s developments:

Putin asked Russia’s upper house of parliament for permission “to use the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine until the normalization of the socio-political situation in that country,” the Kremlin said in a statement. The body is a rubberstamp institution that fulfills Putin’s every wish and voted unanimously to approve his request less than two hours later.

In an extraordinary session of the Federation Council reminiscent of a Soviet party congress, senators accused protesters in Kiev of having been trained in Lithuania and Poland to overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych and moved to ask Putin to recall Russia’s ambassador to the United States as a rebuke to U.S. President Barack Obama[.] … Ukraine has accused Russia of an “invasion” of Crimea, where Russia has a key naval base, but Putin’s request would give him the right to send troops anywhere in the country.

It’s not yet clear if or when a formal invasion might begin. But the US seems to have been caught flat-footed:

“Nobody thought Putin was going to invade last night,” one Senate aide who works closely on the Ukraine crisis. “He has the G8 summit in Sochi coming up, no one really saw this kind of thing coming.” This source also stressed that events are still moving quickly on the ground. “There is still a question about whether this is Russian troops coming across the border or Russian troops moving around the installations in Crimea.” …

Among the options being considered [by the Obama administration], according to U.S. officials, is boycotting the G8 Summit scheduled for Sochi in June and encouraging other countries to do the same. If Russian troops stay in Crimea, it could scare off trade and further investment in Russia and also further weaken the ruble. It’s debatable whether that would influence Russian thinking.

Michael Weiss is critical of the administration:

It’s obvious that Putin calculated correctly yet again. The United States was gulled into thinking that Russia would forbear this time because the siloviki gave assurances to a U.S. diplomatic corps eager to believe anything that it would do. Washington’s own intelligence community, fresh from proclaiming a year ago that Bashar al-Assad had “weeks left” in power, assessed yesterday that “we don’t have any reason to think” that the surprise drill of 150,000 soldiers announced overnight by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu would amount to “more than military exercises.” And given that the United States has yet to definitively label what transpired eight months ago in Egypt a “coup,” the Kremlin must have also reckoned that a rapid takeover of Crimea would be all over but for the shouting as Washington sputtered to define exactly what had just transpired, much less attempted a coherent response to yet another international crisis.

Ioffe sizes up the Russians:

We didn’t think Putin would do this. Why, exactly? This has often puzzled me about Western analysis of Russia. It is often predicated on wholly Western logic: surely, Russia won’t invade [Georgia, Ukraine, TK] because war is costly and the Russian economy isn’t doing well and surely doesn’t want another hit to an already weak ruble; because Russia doesn’t need to conquer Crimea if Crimea is going to secede on its own; Russia will not want to risk the geopolitical isolation, and “what’s really in it for Russia?“—stop. Russia, or, more accurately, Putin, sees the world according to his own logic, and the logic goes like this: it is better to be feared than loved, it is better to be overly strong than to risk appearing weak, and Russia was, is, and will be an empire with an eternal appetite for expansion. And it will gather whatever spurious reasons it needs to insulate itself territorially from what it still perceives to be a large and growing NATO threat. Trying to harness Russia with our own logic just makes us miss Putin’s next steps.

Larison’s take on the crisis:

Obama has threatened Russia that there would be unspecified “costs” for what it is doing, but whatever real costs Russia pays will not be imposed by Western governments or the U.N. Moscow is not only wrecking its reputation with most Ukrainians, but it is also potentially risking a ruinous war that could make it a pariah in much of the world for little real gain.

Western mediation is probably of little use here, but if there is a government that might be able to get through to Moscow at the moment it might be Germany. Because Germany has taken Russian interests into account more often in the past than other major Western governments, it might be able to defuse the situation before it results in violence and further escalation. It should go without saying that the U.S. and NATO shouldn’t make any threats to take their own military action or make promises to Ukraine that everyone already knows they aren’t going to keep. They would be foolish, they wouldn’t be meant or taken seriously, and they would only make the crisis harder to resolve. …

Annexing Crimea outright would be a clumsy and provocative action that would leave the new government in Kiev with almost no choice but to fight, so it seems more likely that there would be an attempt to use continued control over Crimea as leverage in future dealings with Kiev. Does Russia “want” Crimea? Maybe not officially as a part of Russia, but it does seem to want to be able to use control of it to its advantage. Whether this takes the form of phony independence or just autonomy remains to be seen.

Millman wonders if the Ukraine would be better off giving up Crimea:

I can make a reasonable case that Ukrainian nationalists should welcome Russian intervention in Crimea. The status-quo ante meant a large Russian bloc, and a large Russian naval base, within Ukraine. The former makes it harder for Ukrainian nationalists to dominate the country electorally; the latter makes it harder to maintain a policy of distancing from Russia. Lose Crimea, and both problems are solved.

Of course, nationalists can’t simply allow sovereign territory to be seized by enemy forces. But what if Crimea achieves de-facto independence, but is not annexed by Russia and independence is not recognized by any other country? Kiev could demand an end to the violation of its sovereignty. And Russia could refuse to accede to that demand. And this could become the new status quo. Wouldn’t that, in the short-term, anyway, be optimal from the perspective of a Ukrainian nationalist?

Josh Marshall wonders if control of Crimea is all the Russians are considering:

There is of course the possibility that Putin may have in mind the occupation of most or all of Ukraine. But this is difficult to envision. Not only would the international response be ferocious. More importantly, recent events have shown that sustaining and normalizing such an occupation in the vast portions of the country where ethnic Ukrainians predominate would be difficult and debilitating.

The real levers Obama or more specifically the US and Europe have are the ability to make the price of a Russian land grab some version of international pariah status, through a mix of economic and diplomatic exclusion. Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas and oil significantly complicates that option. But the combined economic might of the US and the EU is vast in comparison to Russia’s.

Taking a step back, Masha feels that ”the Crimean invasion is a landmark in Russian domestic politics”:

It signals a loss of innocence: no longer will Russians be able to think that Putin merely feels nostalgic for the USSR. It also signals ever greater polarisation of Russian society: in addition to all the other lines along which Russians are divided and across which civilised dialogue is impossible, there is now the chasm between supporters and opponents of the planned annexation. It also means the political crackdown in Russia will intensify further.

These clear and tragic consequences obscure the challenge the new Crimean war poses to Russia’s post-imperial consciousness. “I can be reasonable about everything, but I cannot give up the Crimea,” was a line from the late Galina Starovoitova, who as Boris Yeltsin’s adviser on nationalities policy, oversaw Russia’s first attempts at releasing its colonies. She meant that, like just about every Russian, she felt the Black Sea resort area was part of her birthright, whatever the maps may say.