Ukraine Archives - Page 6 of 7 - the patient investor

April 30, 2014

Challenging Putin’s Values | NYTimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman’s opinion at the NY Times:

…….Ukraine is not threatening Russia, but Ukraine’s revolution is threatening Putin. The main goal of the Ukraine uprising is to import a rules-based system from the E.U. that will break the kleptocracy that has dominated Kiev — the same kind of kleptocracy Putin wants to maintain in Moscow. Putin doesn’t care if Germans live by E.U. rules, but when fellow Slavs, like Ukrainians, want to — that is a threat to him at home.

Don’t let anyone tell you the sanctions are meaningless and the only way to influence Russia is by moving tanks. (Putin would love that. It would force every Russian to rally to him.) If anything, we should worry that over time our sanctions will work too well. And don’t let anyone tell you that we’re challenging Russia’s “space.” We’re not. The real issue here is that Ukrainians, as individuals and collectively, are challenging Putin’s “values.”

We couldn’t stop them if we wanted to. They’ve been empowered by globalization and the I.T. revolution. Get used to it, Comrade Putin.

March 27, 2014

Vladimir Putin’s irrational behavior: Why the Russian president wins if we think he is crazy.

Scott Radnitz suggests that Vladimir Putin is not crazy — just deliberately acting that way.

….consider strategic theorist Thomas Schelling’s concept of the “rationality of irrationality.” This can be illustrated through the game of chicken, in which two drivers are heading for each other at full speed, and the first to swerve is the chicken. A driver who appears crazy enough to prefer dying over chickening out will always have the advantage. It is therefore rational for a player to convince his opponent that he is actually irrational.

March 14, 2014

Polish Foreign Minister Discusses Weak EU Position in Ukraine Crisis | SPIEGEL ONLINE

From a Der Spiegel interview with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski:

SPIEGEL: Why are the Poles so highly engaged in this conflict?

Sikorski: The Ukrainians are our neighbors. They are fighting for the same things we did back in 1989 – for a country that is more democratic, less corrupt and is European.

March 12, 2014

How Ukraine Can Move Forward | Cato Institute

Dalibor Rohac at the Cato Institute suggest the Ukraine should focus on getting its economy back on track:

….to really understand where Ukraine is headed, it’s important to understand the roots of the unrest that led to the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych.

First, the country’s oligarchic elite, which ruled the country for the past two decades, cared little about the prosperity of ordinary Ukrainians. The evidence is not just in the tacky mansions of President Yanukovych and his men, but also in the fact that the average income in Ukraine is roughly one third of that in Poland even though both countries started from around the same point in 1990.

Second, the change of government in Ukraine follows a miscalculation on the part of the Kremlin, which long considered Ukraine as its client state, dependent on imports of natural gas from Russia. Ukrainians simply lost patience after their government effectively followed instructions from Moscow and canceled the broadly popular association agreement with the EU. Now that the plan to bully Ukrainians into submission has backfired, Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to leverage the situation to push claims to parts of Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine — most prominently Crimea and the port of Sevastopol.

Regardless of whether such territorial concessions become a reality, with an interim cabinet in place and a new presidential election scheduled for late May, it is time for Ukraine to reckon with the massive governance failure of the past twenty years.

The best response to Putin’s land grab would be to turn Ukraine into an economic success story and example to its large neighbor to the East.

March 11, 2014

Sanctions nerves ripple through Moscow | FT.com

The Financial Times quotes Igor Yurgens, a former Kremlin adviser:

He added that capital flight was likely to soar. He said his bank had received “a huge number of calls” into his bank’s Swiss offices from Russian clients over the past two weeks and a number of wire transfers into Swiss bank accounts out of Russia. Clients, he said, would prefer to keep money outside the country despite the risk of asset freezes.

March 8, 2014

China will never support Putin on Crimea

Offering the people of Crimea a referendum — on whether to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation — may appeal to Vladimir Putin but he should not expect support from China. For two very simple reasons: Hong Kong and Taiwan. China claims these two territories as part of China, but there are no prizes for guessing the outcome if a similar referendum (to secede) were held in either territory.

March 8, 2014

Europe’s Five Deadly Sins on Ukraine | Carnegie Europe

Jan Techau of Carnegie Europe writes:

….In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has talked about the Kremlin’s fears of Western encirclement. He has declared that EU and NATO enlargement are part of a conspiracy to destroy Russia, that Ukraine is not really a sovereign nation, and that Western agents provocateurs were behind Ukraine’s 2004–2005 Orange Revolution.

Amid all that rhetoric, the West failed to recognize that Putin was deadly serious. Such talk was dismissed either as cheap propaganda or as the mild lunacy of a handful of overideologized true believers. Nobody imagined that Putin himself really believed his own bluster.

But for the Russian president, the fight over Ukraine is not an imperialistic adventure, it is a fight for survival against a mortal Western enemy. Just because observers in the West know that’s nonsense, that doesn’t mean that others think the same. Such Western projections were finally debunked when German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked to U.S. President Barack Obama on March 2 that Putin was “in another world.”

March 6, 2014

Putin invaded Ukraine because he had to | Foreign Policy

Leon Aron at Foreign Policy writes:

The right foreign-policy move at the right time can boost a leader’s ratings and the regime’s popularity. This is doubly true for authoritarian regimes that lack democratic legitimacy, and it is true for Russia today.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as one top pollster told me in Moscow a few weeks ago, “foreign policy is pretty much the only thing that works.” What he meant was that, with the country’s economy slowed to a crawl, and with the regime facing near-universal revulsion over the corruption, thievery, and incompetence of officials at every level, racking up foreign-policy successes has become vital to maintaining Putin’s popularity — which, in turn, is key to the legitimacy of the whole enterprise.

March 5, 2014

Putin’s ploy

The Wall Street Journal quotes Vladimir Putin’s justification for occupying the Crimea:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia reserves the right to use force in Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking residents there…….”

This was a ploy used by Hitler to assert control of the Sudetenland in 1938. Sudetenland is the name given to the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia, within Czechoslovakia, that had large German-speaking populations. Hitler encouraged Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten Nazis, to rebel, demanding a union with Germany. When the Czech government declared martial law, Hitler threatened war. This led to the September 1938 betrayal of Czechoslovakia by France and Britain. Adopting a policy of appeasement, the two countries agreed to give Hitler the Sudetenland, with Chamberlain describing the crisis as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”. On his return to London, Chamberlain asserted that the accord with Germany signaled “peace for our time”.

Hitler enters the Sudetenland, October 1938

Hitler enters the Sudetenland, Bundesarchiv, Bild | October 1938

In March 1939, German troops occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland on a similar pretext of protecting the German minority from persecution. War followed, leaving more than 60 million dead. Almost two-thirds were civilians.

Hopefully Western leaders have learned from history. Appeasement is not an option.

Read more at BBC History and Wikipedia: The Sudeten Crisis.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. ~ Winston Churchill

March 4, 2014

China Sides With Russia on Ukraine | The Diplomat

Shannon Tiezzi writes:

China’s ambiguous position reveals its dilemma. Beijing’s instinct is to back Moscow, both to uphold the fruitful cooperation between these two nations and to stand firm against pressure from the West. However, vocally supporting Russia would violate China’s principle of non-interference. More importantly, it could arguably set a precedent of Chinese support for military intervention to protect separatists unhappy with their government—which goes against all China’s instincts, given its own issues with Tibet and Xinjiang provinces. Yet as the Global Times put it, at the end of the day power calculations mean more than principles. China’s geopolitical strategy requires Beijing to at least tacitly support Russia, and at the end of the day that argument outweighs more abstract philosophical concerns.