This Is Very Serious Business...

[Lord Jim]

It now appears clear that Putin is embarked on the course I speculated he might take:

It's also possible that they might intervene militarily in a more limited way (as they did in Georgia) in parts of eastern Ukraine where a large section of the population is more pro-Russian, and support a separatist strategy, and perhaps establish a de facto partition of the country with a pro-Russian rump government installed in those regions.

Russia occupies Crimea as Ukraine tensions escalate

Associated Press
Sunday, March 2, 2014

Russian troops took over the strategic Crimean peninsula in Ukraine yesterday without firing a shot. The newly installed government in Kiev was powerless to react, and despite calls by President Obama for Russia to pull back its forces, Western governments had few options to counter Russia’s military moves.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sought and quickly got his parliament’s approval to use its military to protect Russia’s interests across Ukraine. But while sometimes-violent pro-Russian protests broke yesterday in a number of Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s immediate focus appeared to be Crimea.

Tensions increased when Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, made a late-night announcement that he had ordered the country’s armed forces to be at full readiness because of the threat of “potential aggression.”

Speaking live on Ukrainian TV, Turchynov said he had also ordered stepped up security at nuclear power plants, airports and other strategic infrastructure.

Ignoring Obama’s warning Friday that “there will be costs” if Russia intervenes militarily, Putin sharply raised the stakes in the conflict over Ukraine’s future evoking memories of Cold War brinkmanship.

After Russia’s parliament approved Putin’s motion, U.S. officials held a high-level meeting at the White House to review Russia’s military moves in Ukraine. The White House said Obama spoke with Putin by telephone for 90 minutes and expressed his “deep concern” about “Russia’s clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The White House said Obama told Putin that the United States is calling on Russia “to de-escalate tensions by withdrawing its forces back to bases in Crimea and to refrain from any interference elsewhere in Ukraine.”

A statement from the Kremlin said Putin emphasized to Obama the existence of “real threats” to the life and health of Russian citizens and compatriots who are in Ukrainian territory. The statement indicated that Russia might send its troops not only to Crimea but also to predominantly ethnic Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.

“Vladimir Putin emphasized that, in the case of a further spread in violence in eastern regions (of Ukraine) and Crimea, Russia maintains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population that lives there,” the Kremlin statement said.

http://www.concordmonitor.com/news/nati ... s-escalate

And the situation grows more perilous:

Ukraine mobilizes after Putin's 'declaration of war'

(Reuters) - Ukraine mobilized for war on Sunday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared he had the right to invade, creating the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

"This is not a threat: this is actually the declaration of war to my country," said Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, head of a pro-Western government that took power when Russian ally Viktor Yanukovich fled last week.

Putin obtained permission from his parliament on Saturday to use military force to protect Russian citizens in Ukraine, spurning Western pleas not intervene.

Russian forces have already bloodlessly seized Crimea - an isolated Black Sea peninsula where Moscow has a naval base. On Sunday they surrounded several small Ukrainian military outposts there and demanded the Ukrainian troops disarm. Some refused, although no shots were fired.

Ukraine's security council ordered the general staff to immediately put all armed forces on highest alert, the council's secretary Andriy Parubiy announced.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/ ... E820140302

The big question now of course is "Wlll Putin stop with Crimea, or use that as a base to move on the rest of eastern Ukraine"? and this part of the first article that I highlighted:

A statement from the Kremlin said Putin emphasized to Obama the existence of “real threats” to the life and health of Russian citizens and compatriots who are in Ukrainian territory. The statement indicated that Russia might send its troops not only to Crimea but also to predominantly ethnic Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.

“Vladimir Putin emphasized that, in the case of a further spread in violence in eastern regions (of Ukraine) and Crimea, Russia maintains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population that lives there,” the Kremlin statement said.

strongly suggests that the answer is the latter...

Some thoughts about all of this...

First, at the risk of being accused of "yelling Hitler" I feel compelled to point out that this claim of "persecution" of ethnic nationals is precisely the same claim that Adolf Hitler used to justify the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the attack on Poland.

And in the current case there is absolutely zero evidence to support the charge. There was no "civil unrest" or attacks taking place on ethnic Russian civilians. This was nothing but a fantasy cooked up to justify the lawless seizure of the territory of a neighboring sovereign country.

The only "unrest" was being orchestrated by Putin:

First he has armed masked agents, (either Russian special forces or ethnic Russian Ukrainians loyal to Moscow and acting on orders from the Kremlin) seize government buildings in Crimea. An area lightly defended by the Ukrainian military, and where by treaty agreement, (a treaty which the new Ukrainian government had already publicly pledged it would honor)...the Russians already had a major naval base presence to use as a staging ground for aggressive operations.

Then he has these stooges conduct further provocations, and cynically uses that as the excuse for a military occupation of the entire region. And now it looks quite likely that he may attempt a rinse and repeat for the whole of eastern Ukraine; manufactured "civil unrest" followed by occupation for the purpose of "protection"...

He has certainly laid the predicate for this....

I think that whether or not he goes on and attempts this depends in large measure not so much on the actions of The West, but more on how quickly the Ukrainian military can pull it's act together and make clear that they will fight, and that if he tries this, he will prevail only at a heavy price.

I don't believe Putin wants a full scale bloody war with Ukraine; I think he's too clever for that. Such a war would not be popular with a large part of his own population and thus undermine his position at home, while also raising exponentially the cost he and his country would suffer internationally, damaging his economy and further weakening his position.

I think Putin's strategy is to seize as much territory as he thinks he can get away with without a shooting war. I think he will go as far as he thinks he can without a large scale shooting confrontation with the Ukrainian military, and then call for negotiations. Then he'll let the situation settle down while he digests the territory he has taken and tries to turn the occupation into an internationally accepted fact, escaping significant international consequences, (just as he did in Georgia) Of course he's taken a calculated risk already, since he has invaded a sovereign country, and they would have a perfect right to respond, just based on what he's done so far.

What the totality of the Western response to all this should be is difficult to gauge at the moment since the situation remains fluid and it's not certain just how far he's going to go. The UN as an instrument for doing anything about this is obviously even more useless than usual, since Russia is a veto carrying Permanent Member of the Security Council.

At a minimum just based on what he has done so far, Russia should be kicked out of The G-8, which based on previous behavior should have been done a long time ago. This group is supposed to be an association of the world's most economically powerful democracies ; Russia was brought in when Yeltsin was President, largely to help bolster his prestige, encourage the development of democracy that was taking place in Russia at the time, and to give the Russian people a sense that they were still considered an important country, despite the collapse of the Soviet empire. Under Putin, Russia has completely reversed course, and no longer belongs in this group.

Other kinds of sanctions against the Russian state, some of it institutions and individuals are certainly appropriate, (and I think it's fair to say that the ill advised proposal to further reduce US military manpower is a dead issue; it already faced serious opposition on The Hill and in light of the latest Russian aggression, that opposition will grow to overwhelming, in both parties. In fact I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see the Administration withdraw the proposal; that would certainly send a good symbolic signal in the wake of what has happened.)

But the most important thing that needs to happen here, much more important than any specific measure that could be taken, is attitudinal; for the US and the rest of world to finally wake up and change the way we deal with Putin's Russia, and consider it as a state and regime...

Putin's Russia is certainly not an "ally" nor is it a "friend" or a "partner"....

It is an adversary, bordering on enemy....It is not a regime with whom you can conduct business on a normal or good faith basis...

It is a brutal, non-law based authoritarian dictatorship, with goals and objectives that are completely antithetical to western values and interests...

It is a regime dedicated to the support of thug-tyrants every where it can do so, and a regime which seeks to extinguish democracy and sovereignty in neighboring countries and returning them to the dictatorial vassal state condition they suffered under during the days of the USSR...

It is a rogue regime, an outlaw state, with zero respect for the rule of law and human rights, either internally or internationally...

And it needs to be treated accordingly...

And if at long last, this latest naked aggression causes the governments and peoples of the major western countries to finally wake up and confront these ugly realities about present day Russia, then at least some good will have come of this.

[Gob]

Oh well, it'll stop them joining the EU, may be a saving in it then.

[rubato]

Ukraine maps illustrating much of the problem:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014 ... rimea.html


Russia is trying to use cultural differences to divide Ukraine just as they did in Georgia (S. Ossetia) a few years ago. An evil game but effective.

yrs,
rubato

[Crackpot]

Kinda like saying the country would be better without some states....

[Lord Jim]

Excellent article about this, and Putin himself, in this week's New Yorker:

Putin Goes to War

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President and autocrat, had a plan for the winter of 2014: to reassert his country’s power a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He thought that he would achieve this by building an Olympic wonderland on the Black Sea for fifty-one billion dollars and putting on a dazzling television show. It turns out that he will finish the season in a more ruthless fashion, by invading a peninsula on the Black Sea and putting on quite a different show—a demonstration war that could splinter a sovereign country and turn very bloody, very quickly.

Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist and pro-democracy activist who was recently detained by the police in Moscow, described the scenario taking shape as “Afghanistan 2.” He recalled, for Slon.ru, an independent Russian news site, how the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, under the pretext of helping a “fraternal” ally in Kabul; to Parkhomenko, Putin’s decision to couch his military action as the “protection” of Russians living in Crimea is an equally transparent pretext. The same goes for the decorous way in which Putin, on Saturday, “requested” the Russian legislature’s authorization for the use of Russian troops in Ukraine until “the socio-political situation is normalized.” The legislature, which has all the independence of an organ grinder’s monkey, voted its unanimous assent.

Other critics of Putin’s military maneuvers in Ukraine used different, but no less ominous, historical analogies. Some compared the arrival of Russian troops in Simferopol to the way that the Kremlin, in 2008, took advantage of Georgia’s reckless bid to retake South Ossetia and then muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended with Russia taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In a recent Letter from Sochi, I tried to describe Putin’s motivations: his resentment of Western triumphalism and American power, after 1991; his paranoia that Washington is somehow behind every event in the world that he finds threatening, including the recent events in Kiev; his confidence that the U.S. and Europe are nonetheless weak, unlikely to respond to his swagger because they need his help in Syria and Iran; his increasingly vivid nationalist-conservative ideology, which relies, not least, on the elevation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been so brutally suppressed during most of the Soviet period, as a quasi-state religion supplying the government with its moral force.

Obama and Putin spoke on the phone today for an hour and a half. The White House and Kremlin accounts of the call add up to what was clearly the equivalent of an angry standoff: lectures, counter-lectures, intimations of threats, intimations of counter-threats. But the leverage, for now, is all with Moscow.

The legislators in the Russian parliament today parroted those features of modern Putinism. In order to justify the invasion of the Crimean peninsula, they repeatedly cited the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” in Kiev helping Russia’s enemies. They repeatedly echoed the need to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin’s rhetoric about Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the fall of the Soviet Union, in December, 1991.

If this is the logic of the Russian invasion, the military incursion is unlikely to stop in Crimea: nearly all of eastern Ukraine is Russian-speaking. Russia defines its interests far beyond its Black Sea fleet and the Crimean peninsula.

Marina Korolyova, the deputy editor of the liberal radio station Echo of Moscow, told Slon.ru, “I am the daughter of a military officer who went in with the troops that invaded Czechoslovakia, in 1968. Today’s decision of the President and the Federation Council—I feel the pain personally. It is shameful. Shameful.”

It is worth noting that, in Moscow, the modern dissident movement was born in 1968, when four brave protesters went to Red Square and unfurled a banner denouncing the invasion of Prague. Those demonstrators are the heroes of, among other young Russians, the members of the punk band Pussy Riot. This is something that Putin also grasps very well.

At the same time that he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet, his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic mercy has come to an end.

It’s also worth noting that, in 1968, Moscow was reacting to the “threat” of the Prague Spring and to ideological liberalization in Eastern Europe; in 1979, the Kremlin leadership was reacting to the upheavals in Kabul. The rationale now is far flimsier, even in Moscow’s own terms. The people of the Crimean peninsula were hardly under threat by “fascist gangs” from Kiev. In the east, cities like Donetsk and Kharkov had also been quiet, though that may already be changing. That’s the advantage of Putin’s state-controlled television and his pocket legislature; you can create any reality and pass any edict.

I spoke with Georgy Kasianov, the head of the Academy of Science’s department of contemporary Ukrainian history and politics, in Kiev. “It’s a war,” he said. “The Russian troops are quite openly out on the streets [in Crimea], capturing public buildings and military outposts. And it’s likely all a part of a larger plan for other places: Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson. And they’ll use the same technique. Some Russian-speaking citizens will appear, put up a Russian flag, and make appeals that they want help and referendums, and so on.” This is already happening in Donetsk and Kharkov.

“They are doing this like it is a commonplace,” Kasianov went on. “I can’t speak for four million people, but clearly everyone in Kiev is against this. But the Ukrainian leadership is absolutely helpless. The Army is not ready for this. And, after the violence in Kiev, the special forces are disoriented.”

Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West. As it happens so often in these situations—from Tahrir Square to Taksim Square to Maidan Square—people were taken up with the thrill of uprising.

After Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, the coverage moved to what one might call the “golden toilet” stage of things, that moment when the freedom-hungry crowds discover the fallen leader’s arrangements and bountiful holdings—the golden bathroom fixtures; the paintings and the tapestries; the secret mistress; the lurid bedrooms and freezers stocked with sweetmeats; the surveillance videos and secret transcripts; the global real-estate holdings; the foreign bank accounts; the fleets of cars, yachts, and airplanes; the bad taste, the unknown cruelties.

The English-language Kyiv Post published a classic in the genre when it reported how journalists arriving at the “inner sanctum” of the mansion where Yanukovych had lived in splendor discovered that he had been cohabiting not with his wife of four decades but, rather, with—and try not to faint—a younger woman. It “appears” that Yanukovych had been living there with a spa owner named Lyubov (which means “love”) Polezhay. “The woman evidently loves dogs and owns a white Pomeranian spitz that was seen in the surveillance camera’s footage of Yanukovych leaving” the mansion.

But that was trivia. Masha Lipman, my colleague in Moscow, sketched out in stark and prescient terms some of the challenges facing Ukraine, ranging from the divisions within the country to the prospect of what Putin might do rather than “lose” Ukraine.

Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own people.

He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don, in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004, failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy, while another country has troops on its territory?

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian politician who no longer holds office, said that the events were not only dangerous for Ukraine but ominous for Russia and the man behind them. “It’s quite likely that this will be fatal for the regime and catastrophic for Russia,” he told Slon.ru. “It just looks as if they have taken leave of their senses.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/n ... rimea.html

[Econoline]

Another relevant map:

[Guinevere]

Bingo, Econoline.

I know this is "Very Serious Business" sayeth Lord Jim, but seriously, when are these closing ceremonies going to end? Isn't a week a bit too long . . .

[Lord Jim]

Russia's worries in one map

So what are their "worries"?

That prosperity is getting too close to them?

Their worries sure can't be military in nature, since western troop levels have been slashed dramatically since 1989 in Europe....

[Rick]

Reminiscent of a place called Czechoslovakia in the late 30s...

[Lord Jim]

As I pointed out in the OP...

[Rick]

First, at the risk of being accused of "yelling Hitler" I feel compelled to point out that this claim of "persecution" of ethnic nationals is precisely the same claim that Adolf Hitler used to justify the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the attack on Poland.

Why yes you did, I was just a loathe to mention the name that needs not be mentioned.

[Econoline]

London's Laundry Business
By BEN JUDAH | MARCH 7, 2014

LONDON — The city has changed. The buses are still dirty, the people are still passive-aggressive, but something about London has changed. You can see signs of it everywhere. The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes.

England’s establishment is not what it was; the old imperial elite has become crude and mercenary. On Monday, a British civil servant was photographed arriving in Downing Street for a national security council meeting carrying an open document in his hand. We could read for ourselves lines from a confidential report on how Prime Minister David Cameron’s government should respond to the Crimea crisis. It recommended that Britain should “not support, for now, trade sanctions,” nor should it “close London’s financial center to Russians.”

The White House has imposed visa restrictions on some Russian officials, and President Obama has issued an executive order enabling further sanctions.

But Britain has already undermined any unified action by putting bankers’ profits first.

This is what it boils down to: Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money. And forget about Ukraine.

Britain thinks of itself as a trading nation, open for business, but it no longer has a “mission.” Any moralizing remnant of the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Britain’s ruling class has decayed not just to the point where Mr. Cameron is considered a man of exceptional talent, but to where its first priority is protecting its percentage on Russian money — even as Russian armored personnel carriers rumble around the streets of Sevastopol. But the establishment understands that in the 21st century what matters are banks, not tanks.

The Russians also understand this. They know that London is a center of Russian corruption, that their loot plunges into Britain’s empire of tax havens — from Gibraltar to Jersey, from the Cayman Islands to the British Virgin Islands — on which the sun never sets.

British residency is up for sale. “Investor visas” can be purchased, starting at £1 million ($1.6 million). London lawyers in the Commercial Court now get 60 percent of their work from Russian and Eastern European clients. More than 50 Russia-based companies swell the trade at London’s Stock Exchange. The planning regulations have been scrapped, and along the Thames, up and up go spires of steel and glass for the hedge-funding class.

Britain’s bright young things now become consultants, art dealers, private bankers and hedge funders. Or, to put it another way, the oligarchs’ valets.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, gets it: You pay them, you own them. Mr. Putin was absolutely certain that Britain’s managers — shuttling through the revolving door between cabinet posts and financial boards — would never give up their fees and commissions from the oligarchs’ billions. He was right.

In the austerity years of zero growth that followed the 2008 financial crash, this new source of vast wealth could not be resisted. Tony Blair is the latter-day embodiment of pirate Britain’s Sir Walter Raleigh. The former prime minister now advises the Kazakh ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev on his image in the West. Mr. Blair is handsomely paid to tutor his patron on how to be evasive about the crackdowns and the mine shootings that are facts of life in Kazakhstan.

This is Britain’s growth business today: laundering oligarchs’ dirty billions, laundering their dirty reputations.

It could be otherwise. Banking sanctions could turn off the financial pipelines through which corrupt officials channel Russian money. Visa restrictions could cut Kremlin ministers off from their mansions. The tax havens that rob the national budget of billions could be forced to be accountable. Britain has the power to bankrupt the Putin clique.

But London has changed. And the Shard — the Qatari-owned, 72-floor skyscraper above the grotty Southwark riverside — is a symbol of that change.

The Shard encapsulates the new hierarchy of the city. On the top floors, “ultra high net worth individuals” entertain escorts in luxury apartments. By day, on floors below, investment bankers trade incomprehensible derivatives.

Come nightfall, the elevators are full of African cleaners, paid next to nothing and treated as nonexistent. The acres of glass windows are scrubbed by Polish laborers, who sleep four to a room in bedsit slums. And near the Shard are the immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, who broke their backs on construction sites, but are now destitute and whiling away their hours along the banks of the Thames.

The Shard is London, a symbol of a city where oligarchs are celebrated and migrants are exploited but that pretends to be a multicultural utopia. Here, in their capital city, the English are no longer the ones calling the shots. They are hirelings.

Ben Judah is the author of “Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opini ... inion&_r=1

[Gob]

To offset any possible lost Gas revenues and to boost the economy, the Ukraine has anounced plans to open Chernobyl, their nuclear disaster site, to tourists. They say it's just like Disneyland, except the 6-foot mouse is real.


64% of U.S. students can't find Ukraine on a map. Doesn't matter, really. Soon, nobody will.



Say what you will about George W Bush, but he wouldn't have stood for Russian aggression in Ukraine. He'd have invaded New Zealand by now.

[dgs49]

Sorry, can't get excited about this. A pox on any U.S. politician who even uses the word, "vital" to describe this situation.

It is a neighborhood argument whose ramifications are 90% symbolic. The government in Kiev has no legitimacy, the majority of the people in Crimea support it, and nobody is getting killed. If ever there were a matter that could be resolved by diplomacy, this is it. John Kerry likes to keep a high profile, so maybe he can offer to mediate, but right now our government is just looking silly. What are we going to do if Putin doesn't back down, hold our breath?

If we really want to do something constructive (I know I'm delusional here), we would be working with the countries of western Europe, encouraging them to "frack" like crazy, so that in 5 years they can tell Putin to go fuck himself. But the "greens" have too much power over there (largely through Russian support).

[Lord Jim]

The government in Kiev has no legitimacy

You surprise me Dave...

You don't seem like the kind of fella who get's his news from Radio Moscow...

The fact is Yanu­kovych wasn't removed by any sort of "coup" led by a neo-fascist mob...Which is apparently what happened on Planet Putin...(but then, planet Putin is a pretty strange place; on Planet Putin, there aren't any Russian soldiers in Crimea...)

On Planet Earth, he was removed from office by a 328-0 vote of the elected members of the Ukrainian Parliament, including members of his own party...

[dgs49]

Obviously, the political situation in Ukraine is not as clear as it could be. But last time I looked, Yanukovych was elected to a term of five (5) years, and sworn in in February of 2010. Under the prevailing constitution, the parliament had no power to remove him directly. Under the OLD constitution, they could have. In real countries, you don't switch constitutions with a handshake and a slap on the back.

When his popularity evaporated mobs took to the streets and forced him out. All of the machinations that followed the mob uprising can plainly be seen as extortion. Including the 328-0 vote to oust him. Anytime a vote is that lopsided it is bullshit - in this case spurred by fear of violence.

As Our Beloved President has reminded us more than once, "Elections have consequences." You don't like the results of an election? Wait until the next election and elect someone else.

The current government in Kiev has no legitimacy. Maybe after a real election takes place they can make that claim, but right now it's just rule by the mobsters with the biggest cocks.

And the U.S. should be interested but not involved.

[Grim Reaper]

Elections have consequences. Ignoring your constituents has consequences too.

[dgs49]

Reaper-person, are you suggesting that an elected official should step down if he loses popularity? Even if everybody hates him?

There are times when an elected official MUST do things that the population will find unpalatable: raise taxes, institute a military draft, enter into a military alliance, scale back a part of the social safety net. It takes integrity to do such things, knowing that they will harm your popularity, and politicians should have the courage to do such things, especially when they are unpopular.

Yanukovych allied himself with Russia and entered into an agreement that he thought was in the best interests of Ukraine. This was his job. To exercise his discretion in matters exactly like this. His background and preferences were no secret when he was elected.

Ignoring your constituents has consequences: you won't get elected next time. That's the way it is supposed to work.

[Grim Reaper]

There's a difference between doing things that are unpopular and pissing off a large chunk of the population to such an extent that forcible removal was the only option they felt they had left.

[dgs49]

Like in Egypt? Morsi had become so "unpopular" that literally millions of Egyptians were demonstrating in the streets to get rid of him. Most who voted for him were livid with rage at how he Islamicized the government - despite his promises not to.

Do you support the military takeover in Egypt?