Relishing Ravishing Success
"Don't believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea. We do not want a partition of Ukraine. We do not need this."
"I do not want to be welcomed in Sevastopol by NATO sailors."
Russian President Vladimir Putin
There ... it's done. Swift and painless. Like a skilled surgeon wielding a very sharp knife and excising a tumour, sending his patient back home to rest and recover. Time heals all wounds.
All right then, perhaps not all wounds, but sufficiently so that life goes on. Consider the Holdomor, that was a deep and dreadful wound that nothing could quite cauterize, fatal to millions. Ukrainians faithful to the memory of their immediate forebears recall that orchestrated famine and miserable, lingering stench of death.
Russians still love Ukrainians as their brothers. Russia has now declared it has no territorial ambitions on other parts of Ukraine. So the East and the North can breathe easy now, and relax.
In fact, the Kremlin really had no designs on Crimea either, but it was incapable of resisting the anguished appeal of Crimeans to rescue them from the criminal fascists ruling in Kyiv. Russia had that obligation to its brothers. And now it can nurture them properly, as part of the Russian Federation.
"We understand that for 23 years after Ukraine's formation as a sovereign state, Crimeans have been waiting for this day", said the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, Sergei Naryshkin. And so, Russia rose to its responsibilities. The referendum was conducted in "full accordance with international law and the UN charter"; true, because that was stated by none other than President Putin, with his full authority, and not a glimmer of a grin.
"Under the stage direction of the Russian Federation a circus performance is underway: the so-called referendum. Also taking part in the performance are 21,000 Russian troops, who with their guns are trying to prove the legality of the referendum", was the grim assessment of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the day the referendum took place. And that too is now history.
Take heart: President Putin promised on Tuesday not to so much as reach a finger toward eastern Ukraine. Of course, he also promised on March 4 that Russia had no intention whatever to claim Crimea as its own. Tuesday's integration of Crimea into Russia represented an agreement between two independent states.
And now, Russia can breathe a sigh of relaxed satisfaction that the Black Sea Peninsula is theirs. Who says that such matters don't always work out for the best?
Of course there's the little annoyances that usually accompany such world events. It seems likely that participation by the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan at the G-8 summit scheduled for June in Sochi may not take place quite the way it was planned. Mr. Putin may find Sochi a very lonely place in June.
But he doesn't really care. It's their loss, not his. He's happy, they're not.
And the new leaders of Ukraine are "neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites". So there, world. Have at it.
Labels: Crimea, G8, Russia, Ukraine
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, March 20, 2014
