Putin's Crimean Anschluss

[unhappycamper]

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/putins-crimean-anschluss/495462.html



Putin's Crimean Anschluss
By Victor Davidoff
Mar. 03 2014

In the 1940s, Soviet poet Nikolai Glazkov wrote that "the more an era is interesting to historians, the more it is heartbreaking for the people living through it." Watching the breaking news as events unfold rapidly in Crimea, it is hard to shake the thought that you are reading a history textbook. Only which one? Is it a book about the annexation of Sudetenland by Hitler in 1938? Or it is about Stalin's annexation of the Baltic states in the 1940s?

It looks like President Vladimir Putin took the lessons of both events to heart. Like Hitler, who justified his aggression as "concern for the lives of our German compatriots," Putin also justified the occupation of Crimea by concern for the Russian-speaking population on the peninsula. Putin provided asylum to Viktor Yanukovych, who said he still remains the president of Ukraine and its commander-in-chief and declared the decisions of the Ukrainian parliament illegitimate.

Meanwhile, to provide legislative justification for this Anschluss, the State Duma is already reviewing a legally insane draft law that allows the Kremlin to declare any territory part of Russia if the leaders of the territory request it. There are no stipulations on determining the legitimacy of the leaders. It might be noted that in the last election, the party of the current head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, who was elevated to that position with the help of the Russian military, got only 4 percent of the vote.

Worst of all, in the face of this aggression, Western democracies are in the same position as they were in the 1930s. According to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the U.S. and Britain are obliged to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Nevertheless, despite strong statements made by U.S. President Barack Obama and the representatives of the European Union, it is hard to imagine what meaningful actions the West might take. Any action — a sea blockade of the peninsula or a no-fly zone — would put NATO troops in direct conflict with the Russian army. It would be a European remake of the Cuban missile crisis — the worst nightmare of even the most militant hawks.