NYT: Putin's Crimean Crime

[okaawhatever]

For Vladimir Putin the break-up of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Everyone has something that makes them tick. Putin’s obsession is the restoration of Russia’s pride through the restoration of its imperium.

The Russian seizure of control of the Crimean Peninsula, a clear violation of the very international law Putin likes to invoke, has turned Ukraine into a European tinderbox. Sarajevo and the Sudetenland: Europe’s ghosts hover. Putin argues he is protecting Russian-speakers from the usurpers of Kiev, a pro-European government seen in Moscow as the undercover agents of a predatory West whose talk of liberty is mere camouflage for the advance of its interests.

SNIP

Putin’s Crimean message to President Obama and the West is clear: Not one inch further. After NATO’s expansion into the Baltic states (and how critical NATO’s protection looks now to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia), after the European Union’s embrace of the likes of Poland and Romania (freed, like the Baltic states, from the Soviet empire), after the humbling by NATO of Serbia (Russia’s Orthodox ally), after the West’s perceived manipulation of a United Nations mandate to have its way in Libya — after all this the Russian president, as he has already made clear in Syria, is saying: “Game over.”

But this is no game. Putin’s obsession with a 20th-century order, with turning back the clock to before the “catastrophe,” blinds him to the passionate attachment to their nationhood of states liberated from stifling Soviet subjection. There is a grotesque amnesia to Russia’s Ukrainian gambit.

To imagine Germany today (unthinkable notion) moving into western Poland with a claim of protecting ethnic Germans there conveys some idea of the historical offense Putin has given to many Ukrainians — and of the fear he strikes into other nations with Russian minorities and dire memories of Moscow, like Lithuania.

Continued at Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/opinion/putins-crimean-crime.html?_r=0

[LiberalEsto]

1. This is an Op-Ed column by Roger Cohen, not a NYT editorial

That should be made clear.
The OP gives the impression that this is the opinion of the NYT.