Take some time to review the BBC time line on the crisis in the Crimea (Here). It is interesting to see how the crisis progressed from general protests, after the President threw away a deal with Europe and its Western allies, to a near civil war condition. After the events in the Arab spring, you would think that world leaders would understand that persecuting and killing protestors is a good way to escalate a political protest into a government destabilizing crisis. Still, once President (now ex-President) Yanukovych got anti-protesting laws on the books and used them to persecute the protestors, the whole country quickly descended into chaos. Compare that with the situation in Thailand where continued demonstrations have not escalated (yet) to civil war, and you can see that the glaring difference is that the government/military of Thailand has not turned its guns on its populace. Here is a timeline in which the current crisis appears at the end of the article (Here).
What is strikingly different in the Crimean situation than anything that has gone on either in the Arab spring or any of the Asian disputes is that a large neighbor with regional ties and a large ethnic ex-pat population stepped in and further escalated the situation. Russia surprised the world by massing its troops at the border and then seizing the Crimean peninsula and some of the eastern most portions of the Ukraine leading to it. It's excuse for doing so, other than the above mentioned large ex-pat population, is that it has a large military base on the peninsula and agreements with the former Ukrainian government that allows it to protect its interests in the area. In the modern era of diplomacy, the West was caught completely off guard by what is a pre-world war era style annexation of territory. More over, Russia was able to do this without alerting Western intelligence agencies to its intentions, rattling the already shaky foundation of modern intelligence work. Undoubtedly Russia used much of the information that Snowden gave them access to, in exchange for virtual asylum in Russia, to avoid detection from electronic surveillance. This has set off a scramble in the intelligence community to improve intelligence gathering capabilities in this region. NATO has gone so far as to warn other former soviet block countries with breakaway or restive populations of further land grabs by Russia.
The future of the Crimea is uncertain. Western countries have assessed various sanctions on Russia and Russian companies and today agreed to shut Russia out of the Group of 8 by only meeting now as the Group of 7. These actions make sense, in that no one is looking for a military confrontation, but they don't want a repeat of what happened in Georgia either, where Russia was able to take a large chunk of Georgian territory with little to no repercussions. So they are targeting the weak leg of the new Russia, its economy. The results of these sanctions have already been felt, with Russian securities markets losing value and the ruble losing a large chunk of its value versus Western currencies. Still, it is not clear whether this will be a significant enough harm to Putin and his allies to halt further aggressive action. Likely we will not find out until Russia makes its next move.
The open question then is whether Western effort will lead to a conciliatory Russia that halts its expansionist policies, or if it instead will embolden Russia to grab even more territory, or move against other ex-soviet block countries. Or worse, will it embolden China, which itself has been rattling the saber at its neighbors over control of a variety of geographic regions and the resource rich South China Sea? The worst outcome may well be if both Russia and China form an alliance and start seizing more territory in concert. That could well result in world war three.
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