So their call was intercepted and their were caught red handed, unable to keep straight face they decided to play a truce card and agree that these are the people talking on the tape as claimed. If the audio is genuine, so are the facts. Just because they decide not blame anyone because of their political views does not discredit the credible testimony. Is like during a murder trial you have a testimony of a bypassed seeing how a guy stabbed the other guy in the back. But the Judge says, "I do not feel that the guy stabbed the other guy" A testimony proves otherwise, regardless of who blames who. You can't cover up the truth and the truth is that the Ukraine government was forcibly destroyed by the outside financed group of terrorists.
No one has been charged and proven in a court of law to have ordered the protester shootings, that's why Russia needs to release Yanukovych to stand trial in front of his own people instead of protecting him from his own crimes. What we do know is that Russia has sent its elite forces (a bunch of poorly trained drunk rapists in uniform) to go seize the Crimea and fake the vote Belarus style, and Russia needs to be severely punished for its invasion, just as it needs to be punished for spreading hate propaganda and supporting terrorists around the globe, especially Shia terrorists. Forget about hurting Putin's friends, fascism supporters like Youreyes need to go hungry for a while and have their electricity, internet and TV cut off before they begin to figure it out.
Yeah, just cherry pick through the facts and make stuff up when the facts don't comport with reality. That is what you have been doing consistently throughout this discourse.
Well, I mean, it works for our government, "news" media, lawyers, and others in positions of "power"... so why not here, right? (note, I'm being sarcastic and a bit of a dick - I hate that such tactics actually work in those kinds of positions)
The sanction wars have begun. Thus far the West (i.e. The US and Europe) have begun with mild sanctions which they have ratcheted up twice last week with the most severe sanctions coming from the US when President Obama sanctioned Rossiya Bank and promises of further industry wide sanctions. Putin responded by saying he would put his entire $80,000 per year salary in the bank – kind of a meager salary for a man reputed to be worth over 70 billion dollars. I guess Putin is a good saver and great investor. He has to be to grow and $80,000 salary into a 70 billion dollar net worth. Russian markets are down some 22+% year to date. The ruble is in free fall. Russian interest rates are soaring and the show has just begun. Smart money is fleeing Russia and that does not portend well for the Russian economy. Assets are cheap in Russia, but there is a reason for those depressed prices. It’s called risk. In my view, Russia isn’t worth the risk. Putin has blown through a lot of trust the West had placed in him. And I don’t see that trust coming back anytime soon. Putin has responded with reciprocal sanctions on Western individuals, with virtually no effect as Western politicians don’t invest their money in Russia nor do they vacation in Russia. The US at the end of last year had about 14 billion dollars invested in Russia. Russians had nearly a half trillion dollars invested outside of Russia. You don’t have to be a math genius to figure out who is holding the short end of the sanction stick. As long as Putin is in power, I think assets are going to get a lot cheaper in Russia regardless of what Putin does or doesn’t do going forward. It will be interesting to see how this plays out - to see if Russia invades, occupies and annexes Eastern Ukraine as it appears Putin had planned to do. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2014/03/21/russian-banks-feeling-pain-of-u-s-sanctions/
Excellent string of posts on the narcissistic ideologue Putin and the exceedingly dumb mistake he's made.
The longer Putin drags this out, the worse it will be for Russia. Each day those troops sit in Crimea and each day Putin threatens retaliation, is another dent in Putin's credibility and the credibility of the nation. Russia's bond ratings are likely to be downgraded in the not too distant future. Russian bonds are currently on the lowest rung of investable bonds. Two downgrades and Russian bonds are junk bonds. I don't know how Putin digs himself and Russia out of the mess he has created. http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...negative-by-s-and-p-as-obama-widens-sanctions http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...sion-on-sanctions-that-could-get-tougher.html
I just don't see a good outcome for Putin. He has painted himself into a corner where he has no good outcome. No matter what he does, he and Russia lose. It is now a matter of how much he will lose. It will be interesting to see what Putin does next. By the way, Russia was kicked out of the G8 today. And if Putin, cuts off the oil and gas to Europe, he defunds his government too. His oil and gas leverage is a two edged sword. He won't be able to pay his military without destabilizing his economy even further. http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/24/politics/obama-europe-trip/ Below is an excellent article by David Blair. "After Russia’s reconquest of Crimea, the central question is whether Vladimir Putin will go further by invading eastern Ukraine? Only he knows the answer to this question. Instead of venturing a prediction, I want to examine some of the factors that will lie behind his decision. First of all, Russian forces appear ready to invade Ukraine if Putin gives the order. In his memoirs, Colin Powell writes: “Military men look for three sure-fire clues that an enemy force is preparing to attack. Is it moving artillery forward? Is it laying down communications? Is it reinforcing its forces logistically with stocks of fuel and ammunition?” When General Philip Breedlove, Nato’s supreme commander in Europe, said that Russian forces near Ukraine’s eastern frontier were “very ready”, he probably meant they had been spotted doing all of the above. What will Putin be thinking? Ukraine’s new government chose not to resist the seizure of Crimea, but if Russian tanks roll across the eastern border, the Ukrainian army would almost certainly fight back. On paper, Russia has the power to overwhelm Ukraine. But remember one thing: Russia also has an unrivalled record when it comes to losing unlosable wars. Think of the First Chechen War of 1994 – 96 when Russia was defeated by a ragtag guerrilla army. Or remember the Winter War of 1939 when Finland managed to throw back an invasion by a vastly superior Russian force. Remember how the invasion of Georgia in 2008 showed up key Russian military weaknesses. For example, modern armies fight and manoeuvre at night because they have the technology to see in the dark. But it turned out that Russia’s spearhead units in Georgia didn’t have night vision equipment, or at least none that worked. Even more seriously, modern warfare depends on the co-ordination of air and ground forces. In Georgia, Russia’s air force and army fought essentially separate campaigns because they seemed unable to talk to one another. Those are pretty basic weaknesses: presumably Russia will have remedied them. In the end, a full scale clash with Ukrainian forces could only have one outcome. But my suspicion is that Russia’s inevitable victory wouldn’t be a walkover. And Putin would then face the most crucial question of all: what happens the day after a conventional military victory? Ukraine’s people are unlikely to submit to Russia’s occupation of a large area of their country. They would probably respond by launching a partisan war. There is a common misperception that eastern Ukraine is populated largely by native Russian-speakers. In fact, Crimea is the one and only Ukrainian region with a Russian-speaking majority. In the three eastern regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian-speakers are minorities of 26 per cent, 38 per cent and 39 per cent respectively. Incidentally, when Ukraine held a referendum on whether to leave the Soviet Union in December 1991, more than 80 per cent of voters in these three regions supported Ukrainian independence. So a guerrilla war would probably have the support of most of the local population. Put bluntly, if Putin invades eastern Ukraine, he would find himself with an endless insurgency on his hands. Russia already has one raging rebellion in the North Caucasus. Does Putin really want another one, this time far closer to Moscow and the Russian heartland? And what would be the objective of a Russian invasion? This would be Putin’s most difficult decision. If he decides that his aim is simply to “protect” fellow Russians, then he could confine himself to annexing the three regions with the biggest Russian-speaking minorities. But this would have two key disadvantages. First, Putin would still have to fight an eternal insurgency (see above). Second, Ukraine’s government in Kiev would have no option but to throw itself into the arms of the West, seeking all the help (including military help) that America and its allies could give. If Putin’s strategic aim is to anchor Ukraine in Moscow’s orbit, then it makes no sense to bite off three eastern regions and stop. The rest of the country would jump into the Western embrace almost immediately. So logic dictates that if Putin invades, he should press on and go all the way to Kiev, toppling the new government and installing an acceptable pro-Kremlin leader. But Kiev is a European capital with almost 2.8 million people. If Russian tanks appear in the streets, many in the city would fight back. The Russians would have to conquer Kiev street by street and building by building, destroying much of the capital in the process. It would become rerun of Budapest in 1956. Does Putin really have the stomach for an operation of that kind? And even if he were to succeed in installing a puppet leader (Yanukovych?) to preside over the ruins of Kiev, Russia would then have to help him impose his rule by force on the whole of Ukraine. The result would almost certainly be an endless nationwide insurgency. So a limited invasion of the east risks driving the rest of Ukraine into America’s arms. A full-scale attack would turn into an eternal guerrilla war in a vast country with 46 million people. Fortunately for him, Putin has another option. He could maintain a credible threat of invasion by keeping his troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern border. He could wage a covert war in the shadows to keep the new government in Kiev permanently off balance and in fear of attack. That would give him immense influence over Ukraine’s future. And he could take pride in his easy conquest of Crimea. The problem is that if Putin stops now – after sparking the biggest crisis in international affairs since the Cold War – then Ukraine might just defeat his shadowy campaign in the east, stabilise its economy with Western help and step gradually out of Russia’s orbit. The loss of Crimea will only add to the natural majority in Ukraine who want to be part of the European mainstream. If Putin stops now, he risks a long term strategic defeat. If he presses on and invades, he risks a dangerous (and endless) military campaign. If his western foes have difficult decisions to make, Putin has landed himself with the most agonising dilemma of all." http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...will-vladimir-putin-give-the-order-to-invade/
It's easy, West can go f**k themselves with high oil prices, our new friends are BREC. Ukraine will get same thing, unless the legitimate president elections will be held in the region with all the parties of the East Ukraine present there as well. And is time USA, returned the stolen land of Alaska as well.
LOL, unfortunately for you and Putin you cannot dictate oil prices on the long term. There are alternatives to Russian oil and gas. And now that Putin has proven himself untrustworthy, Europe will be changing its oil and gas supplier. And if you think you can find solace in BRIC, good luck with that. There are only 4 BRIC countries with mother Russia being one of them, and all of them are heavily dependent on the West. As for Alaska, you need to brush up on your history. Alaska was purchased from Czarist Russia 150 years ago. That predates the Russian Federation by more than a century Bubba. The Ukraine does have scheduled elections. Unlike the socalled staged election in the Crimea, the Ukrainian elections will be open and transparent and without threats and the ballots won't be preprinted and it will operate under the one person one vote rule.
They already were your friends, and quite the motley crew they are. The only allies you'll have left in the end are a bunch of craptastic repressive third world dictatorships living in squalor, dependent on western trade, investment and education for anything worthwhile they do with their lives. On behalf of Canada and its massive oil industry, I thank you for making us even richer, and wish you all the best while you have fun sitting around all day with your fingers up your ass, drinking vodka and watching your shithole country falling apart. Oooh, ooh, the Ruskies are looking for more lebensraum still, even though they can't even do something productive with all the millions of square kilometres of stolen land they're already squatting on. Ok, if it so happens one day that Konigsberg falls back into German hands, you think they'll fork it over to you once more? Sorry, Alaska is America's in perpetuity. Russia stupidly sold it for a bargain, fair and square, and if they had known the territory would be so useful, they would have asked for a higher price. The czars were too incompetent to know what Alaska was worth, and it's just tough luck for you and all the other heirs to what's left of their stolen retard empire. Go ahead, try and take it back, I'd rather the rest of Siberia fell under American control than remain with fascist Russians.
BREC? You mean BRIC I believe They include Brazil, China, Rusia, India and China (and then theirs also south africa). Tomorrow or the day afther we will see what Europe decides in terms of sanctions meanwhile Belaris (white Russia) is the only country recognising the claim (8 others agree a referendum took place), none of them are part of the BRIC. Russia is a pretty isolated Barack had a lengthy discussion with kazachstan today it speaks volumes that even kazachstan is sitting this one out (for now). If The EU would inport 20% less oil from Russia their economy will probably collapse (this would involve starting u nuclear power plants in Germany France and Belgium altough Germany for imports sake will probably default sanctions but then sell the (nuclear) energy to the dutch) (Germany exports a lot of products to Russia). Who knows how it will all end, but Russia could have handled the situation better and Ukraine is still plagued by corruption and destabilizing it won't help
Youreyes, I don't know if your Russian but I tried to follow the Crimea debate from multiple sources (regular YouTube, Rt for the russian side, Al jazeera for neutrality and stewart and colbert (altough they have little to say) What I notice on the pro russian channels are, that the people in interviews believe that their incomes and pensions will DOUBLE? Is this a misconception or do they really believe that? Meanwhile Ukraine is still providing water and electricity to Crimea I agree that Crimea has a complicated history but imposing 5 year of inprisoment for suggesting the return of Crimea to Ukraine and the fact that tartars will be forced to vacant land doesn't bode well.
I've been reading the wiki page abouth Crimea and it's economy they say it's main branches are agriculture (60%), toerisme and others (industry and refining fuel). Crimea doesn't have it's own power plants and are heavily depended on water from the Mainland (North Crimean Canal ). As one of the thing that Putin is promising is economic improvements what is stopping Ukraine from closing down the canal? My gues is that it's a more gentle way of completly ruining Crimea's economy that turning of the power but it does seem like a bargaining chip to demand cheap oil (for water). Russia could bring in 1 or 2 of it's floating nuclear power stations but they havent been build yet and altough they could be used for desalination it's more on a scale for human consumption then for agriculture. Then their is the fact that Putin also has lost over 2 million Russian sympathizers in ukrain trough the annexation making it far more western. The canal could easly be diverted to the perekop gulf near perekop it close to the coast (less then 1 km) and in Mainland ukraine
It will be interesting to see what Putin does next. He has got his weenie stuck in a meat grinder. He can continue to grind it off by launching another invasion of Ukraine or he can attempt to extricate himself and save what he can of his weenie. What will Putin do? That nationalism drug only lasts so long. When it wears off and his people, the Russian people, realize the price Putin’s aggression has inflicted on them, they will probably have second thoughts about Putin which will lead Putin to toss more people in jail and wala we are back to the days of Stalin and his famous gulags. Russia is almost there now. It’s illegal to be critical of Putin in Russia. Putin uses the state to strip wealth from his opponents and jail cells to keep them safely secured where they can cause him no harm.
I'm I don't think the word steal means what you think it does. The us bought Alaska from Russia. That you claim it was stolen only goes to show how very out of touch you are. You remind of draqon and his insane theories.
It won't be war theirs also little change that Putin can keep his coup Ukraine is going to make a fuss sooner or later abouth having to supply free electricity and water to several million people that I assume no longer pay taxes to Ukraine. It isolation will mean basic necessities like food and water will need to be inported and if Ukraine taxes the goods life in general will become more expensive and simply inpossible if they would cut electricity and water I doubt they have any obligation to keep providing these services (except moral ones) and their might even be problems with basic repairments. Russia could do a air bridge like the americans did with berlin but again that would provide food and water for the population, not for agriculture that's inpossible power issues are also a problem The penisuela has oil and gas pipes and refineries it does not have any power plants, running a cable from Russia is also not practical it's quit a distance and the bridge Russia wan'ts to build in the next 3-4 years isn't the first bridge attempted it's not a easy sea to build in Winter Ice is a real problem Crimea needs it's water (for as long as their is significant agriculture) and it's electricity (unless significant infrastructure is build over several years) from Ukraine Mainland. Then theirs the tourisme the main tourists that vist Crimea are ukrainians and Russia somehow I doubt many ukrainians are going to take their holidays here, Putin will have to make a serious effort to convice Russians to take their vacation there
