Meanwhile, elsewhere...

"The circus is gone, but the clowns stayed."

— Leonid Zakharov, resident of Crimea

A while back, you may recall, Tatar activists blew up the main power lines through which the Crimean Peninsula got most of its electric power from Ukraine.  Ukrainian president Petro Poroschenko has shown scant inclination to remove the Tatar activists from areas around the downed lines so that they might be repaired.

Crimea is a part of Russia once again, but apart from the power crisis, not much has changed.  The same incompetent local officials are still in power, just as corrupt as ever.  Not much has changed in the Ukraine either.  The rebel provinces are still in rebellion, and corruption remains rampant, albeit many of the bribes now are collected by putatively pro-Western officials rather than Russian puppets.  Obama sent Biden to Kiev to complain, indicating that Obama has more important things on his mind.

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Venezuelan elections have gone badly for the Chavistas, and the presidency of the comically incompetent Nicolás Maduro is threatened.  If he survives, and his United Socialist Party maintains significant influence in Venezuelan politics, it will be because the fractious members of the winning Democratic Unity coalition will be fighting too hard over who gets to steal what from the public coffers.

The two most prominent leaders of Democratic Unity, Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles, already were at each other's throats before all the votes were counted.  (López, jailed by the Chavistas for fomenting anti-government riots, was represented in the media by his wife.)  A major obstacle to reconciliation is the low price of oil, significantly limiting government funds available to be looted.

Wrapping up March

It's been a pretty depressing month.  That mudslide out in Oso, Washington, is heartbreaking, and every developer who built a house in that known danger area should be financially wiped out.  It won't happen, of course.

Then, there was the Malaysian Airlines flight.  I can't pretend to have any clue as to what happened, albeit I suspect depressurization had some role — but, then, what do I know?  In both Washington and Peking, there are hundreds of people suffering, wondering what became of their loved ones.

As usual, though, there was more crap.

Crimea

It's part of Russia again, and won't be undone.  In the meanwhile, Ukraine is a mess, economically, and probably about to get worse, thanks to the IMF.  Look forward to shitloads of austerity, Ukrainians.  It's been six years of hell for Greece, and it will be worse for you.  Maybe you can overcharge the Crimeans for water, and make the Russians absorb some of the pain.

Israel and Palestine

Abbas will not agree that Israel is a "Jewish State," because that will accept the second-class status of Arab-Israeli citizens.  I no longer believe in the "two-state solution," if I ever did.  It's time for Israel, the settlements, and the rest of the West Bank to become a single state, with equal rights for all.  The Hassidim and the Arabs can compete to see who will reproduce more like the proverbial rabbits to see who stays in control.  Too bad for the secularists, but that's how the sperm splatters.

Barack and Francis

Okay, they've met, and sort of seem to agree that some degree of income redistribution is needed.  The big difference (apart from differences regarding abortion and birth control) is that Obama's perspective is political and the pope's interest is moral.  (My interest, by the way, is sociological.)

Greece

Supposedly, Greece now has a balanced budget.  Unfortunately, it still has a 25% unemployment rate.  If it experiences any GDP "growth," ordinary Greeks won't see any of it.

More depressing crap.

More Ukraine (groan!)

Ukraine, with or without Crimea, is screwed.  Its tiny economy is pretty much on a par with that of Greece, and the IMF can't wait to get in there and impose austerity.  Except for the usual plutocrats, Ukrainians are going to suffer.

So, think about it: if you lived in Crimea, would you be more likely to go for a Russian bailout with continued cheap natural gas, or a whole lot of pain?  Personally, I think I might go with the dreadful Mr. Putin over the parsimonious Ms. Merkel.

Do the "nationalists" in Kiev understand how hooking up with the EU will make Ukrainian poverty so much more obvious to the Ukrainian people?  Yes, much of the blame can be cast on Yanukovych, but it's unlikely that replacing one group of corrupt assholes with another will do much good.

In the meanwhile, the media are not paying enough attention to Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, the CAR, or other places where people are in a hell of a lot more trouble than Crimea.  Pretty clearly, the Russians are going to keep Crimea this time around, the (very) Light Brigade of the USofA and Europe notwithstanding.

After the putsch

I wish I could get away from Ukraine, but that seems unlikely at the moment.  Granted, Yanukovych was a moron, a kleptocrat, and an ineptocrat (I just made that up) as well.  Just the same, it seems pretty obvious that the ouster of Yanukovych was not especially constitutional.

I'm calling the uprising a putsch because "coup d'etat" seems a little too Latinized to me.  I do not think all the "nationalists" are, as Putin would have it, fascists, but I can't be sure of the actual proportion.  Europe is full of fascists these days, so who knows?

The West supports the new government in Ukraine because the friend of my (kind of) friend is (kind of) my friend — and the alternative is (Cold Warriors may gasp now) Russia.  Whatever.  If the Crimeans are dumb enough to want to return to Russian control, I'm inclined to let them have self-determination.  Would they do better as a somewhat more autonomous region of Ukraine?  Given the crappy economic situation Ukraine is in these days, Russia might be the better choice.  Ukraine's current "leaders" already are discussing the kinds of austerity measures they'll be taking to satisfy the IMF.  (Think Greece.)

Clearly, Obama doesn't want to look any more like a wimp than he already does, and the more traditional Republicans want to cast him in that light and find ways to puff out their chests like robins in the springtime — but for all concerned, the best bet is just to let Russia re-absorb Crimea.  Russia already controls Crimea with their military/naval bases, so what's the big difference?

There is no way to know if a new Ukrainian government will be any less inept nor any less corrupt than the Yanukovych regime — nor any less inept nor any less corrupt than the Putin regime — but I think it's for Crimeans to decide which is the lesser of two evils.

Options for Crimea?

The Crimean Parliament has moved up its plebiscite to about ten days from now, presumably so that nobody gets a lot of time to think about it.  The boys (and maybe a girl or two) are hoping the Russian speakers will just go for rejoining Russia, and Russia can maintain that "the will of the people" justifies re-annexation.

The other choice, aside from rejoining Russia, will be remaining in Ukraine with more autonomy than Crimea already enjoys — and that autonomy is not insignificant.  Crimeans who don't want to put up with Putin, even among the majority Russian speakers, just might vote that way (but who will be monitoring the vote?)  Funny, though, there's no way to choose independence.  (Think Kosovo.)

Okay, there won't be a hell of a lot of independence in Crimea no matter how the vote goes — not with those Russian military bases there.  So why in hell is Putin making such a big deal out of what is, for Russia, essentially nothing.  The bases will stay, whatever transpires.  The fleet will stay, if only because it pumps a few extra rubles into Sevastopol.

I read the Times this morning (as always), and I think it may have been devoting a few too many column inches to Ukraine.  Granted, not much else was going on.

Crimean Crisis

I cannot pretend to have any idea of what has been passing through the head of Vladimir Putin lately, but if he took off his shirt and rode into eastern Ukraine on a horse, I would not be especially surprised.  In the meanwhile, though, I figured I could point out a few things that are getting scant notice in the media.

It was during the Crimean War that the 600 rode into the "valley of death," because "someone had blundered."  So much for early history: fast forward to 1954.  That was the year that Nikita Krushchev gave the Ukrainian SSR "power" over the peninsula, not that it much mattered, because they all were SSRs anyway.  When the Soviet Union decomposed, there were some problems working out the differences between the majority Russian Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.

Hence, Crimea is a "semi-autonomous" region, hosting Russian naval bases and, so it seems, some ground forces flown in for the occasion.  If it became entirely autonomous (that is, independent), Ukraine would lose most of its major ports — not that it's exporting much, except to Russia.

Ukraine's most significant geopolitical importance is as a place where Russian petrochemical pipelines cross over to the rest of Europe.  Since a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine would inevitably shut down those pipelines, it would create problems for everybody outside the Persian Gulf.  Russia's economy, already in bad shape, depends on commodity exports.  Without oil and gas exports, it would collapse.  Western Europe (including Germany) would slide back into recession.

It would not be such a bad thing if the new (and mostly illegitimate) government of Ukraine let Crimea have its independence following the plebiscite the Crimean leadership is sponsoring.  If they wanted "pan-European" trade, it could be done by rail.

Well, at least the Ukrainians are not killing each other — okay, not much — as compared to ethnic/language/racial groups in other parts of the world.  Yes, Obama will take shit for "doing nothing," but nothing seems like the best alternative right now.