I just read a really phenomenal article on the Ukraine crisis and, uncharacteristically, it is even written in English. The author’s name is Lidia Shevtsova. I have no idea who she is but she really knows what she is talking about.

In case you are ideologically opposed to reading anything but Clarissa’s Blog, here are some highlights. First of all, Shevtsova dispels the myth that Putin has suddenly gone insane and explains who promotes this myth and why:

I suspect that all the explanations aiming at provoking doubt as to Putin’s rationality and inadequacy have their origins in something other than dispassionate analysis. If Putin just suddenly lost his mind, this lets the political and expert community off the hook for failing to alert us to what was coming. If the West is dealing with an unexpected deviation from the norm, this means that the previous policy toward Russia was essentially correct. The theory of Putin’s “insanity” or “irrationality” would save so many analytical reputations.

Shevtsova is right. If people act in ways you didn’t expect, it makes more sense to analyze your own expectations than diagnose them to make yourself feel better. And among the many people who refuse to accept what is really happening in Russia and Ukraine, Germans take pride of place (and they are the most active in advancing the theory of Putin’s insanity):

200 German intellectuals signed a letter addressed to Vladimir Putin expressing “their understanding of the Russian reaction to the Ukrainian developments” and wishing him “strength, resilience, and luck.” The letter can only give further ammunition to the critics of the West who argue that the liberals democracies have forgotten their principles.

Shevtsova does not believe we are witnessing the revival of the Cold War. No, she says, what Putin is doing is a lot worse:

We are witnessing a much more complex phenomenon than the return of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin isn’t just attempting to dismantle the post-Cold War settlement; he is undermining the remaining elements of the post-Yalta order. This order was devised by the winners of World War II to prevent certain kinds of wars from happening again (specifically, to dismantle any potential justification for annexations or violations of another country’s borders). Putin is trying to assert his right to interpret the global rules of the game in such a way that Russia may violate them with impunity. The Cold War, by contrast, was marked by both sides’ adherence to the rules.

This entire time I believed this was the Cold War coming back but Shevtsova’s analysis makes too much sense for me to disagree. Here is the ultimate goal of Putin’s actions, she says:

The Soviet Union offered communist ideology to the world; Vladimir Putin offers the world something much more exciting than ideology: his services as interpreter of basic legal principles like legitimacy, legality, self-determination, and territorial integrity. 

And here is the strategy Putin will employ to get to his goal:

Putin apparently hopes that the West will eventually be ready to grasp at his outstretched hand and embark on a new reset. The West is expected to legitimate Putin’s status quo, which will not in any case bind the Russian leader in any way. On the contrary: International acceptance of the new status quo will give Putin carte blanche to violate it again.

This whole situation has demonstrated something really crucial to the world:

We have to give Vladimir Putin credit for doing something positive. He has swept the cobwebs off the current world order. However, we still don’t know whether this has been enough to shock the liberal democracies into beginning the process of rethinking things. Maybe another shock is in order…

Brilliant article, people, the best I read on the crisis anywhere.

 

After I published the last post, I spent the next hour ranting about how I’m worried that some Russian idiot is going to take a shot or drop a bomb at Americans and we’ll all be in deep shit, and N still has a Russian passport, and we should all take my father’s Jewish last name because remember Japanese interment camps?

“Don’t worry,” N says. “If the Russians start shooting, Obama will just apologize for a while and it will all be fine.”

Shit’s more serious than I thought:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Russian fighter jet made multiple, close-range passes near an American warship in the Black Sea for more than 90 minutes Saturday amid escalating tensions in the region, U.S. military officials said Monday.

In the first public account of the incident, the officials said the Russian Fencer made 12 passes, and flew within 1,000 yards of the USS Donald Cook, a Navy destroyer, at about 500 feet above sea level.

The U.S. warship issued several radio queries and warnings using international emergency circuits, but the Russian aircraft did not respond.

They actually want to provoke Americans into taking a shot.

This is not good.

I want to believe this was just a drunk pilot being goofy.

So is the difference between esta and ésta and Co still observed or has the RAE canned it together with solo/sólo?

The Crimeans were promised that if they supported the annexation of the peninsula by Russia, Putin would raise salaries.

Putin is an honest guy and today he announced that salaries will, indeed, be raised by 2,6 times. The salaries being raised are his own and Medvedev’s.

I mean, it isn’t like he ever specified whose salaries would be raised, and if people assumed he meant anybody but himself and Medvedev, that’s their misfortune.

 

I don’t see Iran as a nuclear threat to the world right now. And I’m not usually wrong in my political analysis.

However.

There is a great danger that Russia will push Iran in the direction of aggression and heavy militarization. This would be straight from Comrade Stalin’s bag of tricks. Use Iran to start hostilities, then pretend you need to save the world and interfere.

This is why I believe that the US’s best course of actions right now would be to lift all embargoes and restrictions from Iran and work hard to improve Iran’s economy and standard of living. It wasn’t done in Ukraine when there was still time. Now there is still time to do it in Iran.

This leaves North Korea, where Russia might employ the same strategy as I prognosticate for Iran. Here I don’t know what can be done, so I’m worried.

The most annoying people are the ones who bleat, “But why should I care about what’s happening in Ukraine? We have so many problems in this country, maybe we should just concentrate on solving them.”

The problem with this approach is that even if you stop paying attention to the world around you, it doesn’t stop paying attention to you. Only very small children believe that if they close their eyes, nobody can see them. Adults usually know better.

Yes, why should you care that the largest country on the planet is turning Fascist? The same country that has one of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals and that builds its identity around hysterical and massive anti-US and anti-EU propaganda.

Of course, I could start explaining why it makes sense to care about Fascism, but I’m thinking that if the tragic history of the XXth century was not enough to get that point across, I might not manage to be any more convincing.

A colleague whose research has to do with the development of European Fascism said, “There are just two more steps Russia has to make before it becomes a fully Fascist state.”

I studied Fascism but not as profoundly as my colleague, so I asked, “What are the steps?”

“The first one is the collective and massive militarization of regular people.”

“That part of the journey to Fascism has already been traveled,” I said. “Putin recently brought back the GTO norms. They had been created by Stalin in preparation for WWII. Now Putin says they are part of the Russian cultural traditions and brings them back. What’s the second step?”

“People have to accept this militarization enthusiastically and joyfully. This must become a massive, collective ritual everybody engages in with enthusiasm and glee. Have you seen the footage of Stalin-era Red Square parades with gymnasts and all kinds of half-naked athletes? The moment this comes back, we’ll know that Russia has become Fascist.”

This entire time I was betting on the Russian-speakers’ notorious and usually very obnoxious cynicism. After the decades of Soviet propaganda, our people developed a knee-jerk reaction of boredom, contempt and disgust towards anything that even remotely smacks of ideology or even just simply ideas. If they manage to hold on to that skill of distancing themselves emotionally from propaganda, there is hope. But I’m afraid the current wave of ideological conditioning is too strong and the message that is being peddled is too seductive.

Now that Putin has officially invaded Eastern Ukraine (as I predicted weeks ago), the main line of impotent American pundits is that “it isn’t clear” where the Russians will stop.

Nothing teaches these losers. Putin is not planning to stop. He wants global dominance. And he wants the entire territory of Ukraine to be part of Russian Federation.

I totally feel like Cassandra.