Kerry privately urges Poroshenko to provide evidence of Kremlin involvement with separatists in Ukra

[JackRiddler]

87. This is not a legal proceeding and you are sticking to the fallacy.

Someone's word in court can be rendered impeachable as testimony, because they are known as a liar. And yet still, you cannot pretend that every factual statement they made is proven untrue simply because they said it.

In other words, court policy notwithstanding, no one is the famous Cretan who always lies; they will generally lie out of interest. E.g., the sun may still rise in the east, and that's still true if a Cretan said it, etc.

However, this isn't even your fallacy. You go even further: Your doctrine with regard to Putin and Russians seems to be that once someone is designated (by you) as a liar about anything, then you can make up any accusation against them that you feel like and consider it to be proven true. So this is a kind of hyper-fallacy. (I'm sure it has a name, do you by any chance recall it? "He's an asshole, so he's fair game for any bullshit I hurl"?)

If we look at Putin's interest, it's actually complicated. His government did not prompt or support the change in Kiev, but was taken by surprise. The February Kiev regime expressed immediate belligerence toward Russians. Given the close NATO-U.S. connections of the Yatsenyuk government, it's no surprise that Moscow (rightly or wrongly - and I'd say wrongly!) sought to secure Crimea, an overwhelmingly Russian peninsula with Russian bases and a population that welcomed annexation. The last thing Moscow now needs, however, is a destabilizing civil war in the rest of Ukraine, and so, logically, Putin has been looking to negotiate a solution.

As long as the ethnic Russians in the east are under violent attack from the Kiev government, there are doubtless pressures on Putin to help protect them, for example to allow volunteer Russian ethnic paramilitaries to get through the border. You say, " I doubt he has any interest in making any such statement" that he opposes separatism, and I'm sure it's true. Not as long as ethnic Russians are being killed by Kiev. This doesn't mean the Russian state has an interest in stoking the Donbass separatist movement, or attempting to seize territory that, again, will only bring enormous headaches: civil war, terrorism, refugees, trade war with the West. The Russian state's real interest is self-evident: a ceasefire.

If peace is reestablished and Ukraine continues to have semi-unfixed elections, sooner or later the toppling of the austerity government is practically guaranteed. In fact, it's clearly the Yatsenyuk side that would have the realpolitik interest in ethnic strife. If the issues are about ethnicity and fear, they can retain a solid base, which may explain their willingness to make a coalition with out-and-out fascists as their partners, even though these fascists, as you like to point out, are unpopular. If the issues become economic, however, they may be able to sell the IMF-EU austerity bullshit for a while, but inevitably will become very unpopular.