Ukraine's European Revolution?

[OttoVonBismarck]

I never said there was a requirement to protect Ukraine.  In fact, I spend a good part of yesterday arguing the opposite in another venue.  What I am saying is that the memorandum is not a treaty[1].  I haven't found a Senate ratification resolution[2] for the memorandum.  Without that vote it is not a treaty, because the US government cannot ratify a treaty without the approval of the Senate.

[1] Granted, I'm using a slightly legalistic definition of "treaty", but the definition in US law and the Constitution is more restricted than in general international law.
[2] I would like to correct one thing:  the Senate doesn't actually ratify treaties; it just approves or disapproves the ratification.

That's debatable actually, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had not been ratified. But even if it wasn't a treaty under U.S. law, that just means we aren't legally "bound" by it, it doesn't mean we couldn't reference it as justification for wanting Ukraine to be treated appropriately. The memorandum definitely is being used already by Kerry to point out how bad the Russians are behaving, for whatever that is worth. Looking at the "Treaties in Force" page at State I can see we have a treaty from 1994 with Ukraine relating to nuclear disarmament, but I can't tell if the memorandum is part of that. The problem is the website in question only contains full text treaties from 1996-2013, and it says I'd have to go to a mofuckin library that keeps agreement records to see the text of older treaties and since it's the year 2014 I don't see myself going into physical library anytime soon.  The memorandum is more about Russia's promise not to do things (which is a point I've made already and FagCroix missed in his infinite stupidity.)

It may be something you could track down from Senate records online, though.

[Syt]

Thousands demonstrate in Moscow in favor of military action. There were several dozen anti-war protesters on Red Square, but they were detained by police.

Guardian quotes a tweet:

Woman at pro-invasion protest: "My boss forced me to come. You think anyone wants to be here?"

— Laura Mills (@lauraphylmills) March 2, 2014

[Sheilbh]

Rumours that Britain's holding back Western deal on financial sanctions. Makes too much money laundering and servicing Russia's elite

Hopefully it's untrue.

[Syt]

http://rt.com/news/ukrainians-leave-russia-border-452/

675,000 Ukrainians pour into Russia as 'humanitarian crisis' looms

An estimated 675,000 Ukrainians left for Russia in January and February, fearing the "revolutionary chaos" brewing in Ukraine, Russia's Federal Border Guard Service said. Officials fear a growing humanitarian crisis.

On Sunday, the border guard service said Russian authorities have identified definite signs that a "humanitarian catastrophe" is brewing in Ukraine.

"In just the past two months (January-February) of this year...675,000 Ukrainian citizens have entered Russian territory," Itar-Tass news agency cited the service as saying.

"If 'revolutionary chaos' in Ukraine continues, hundreds of thousands of refugees will flow into bordering Russian regions," the statement read.

Ukrainians have long formed a large presence in Russia. According to the official 2010 census, 1.9 million Ukrainians were officially living in Russia, although the head of the Federal Migration Service put that figure as high as 3.5 million one year before. While those migrants were often prompted by economic concerns, political turmoil has spiked the recent rise in Ukrainian's attempting to leave the country.

On Saturday, Russian migration authorities reported that 143,000 requests for asylum had been sent to Russia within a two-week period. Russian officials have promised to expedite the processing of those requests.

"Tragic events in Ukraine have caused a sharp spike in requests coming from this country seeking asylum in Russia," said the chief of the FMS's citizenship desk, Valentina Kazakova. "We monitor figures daily and they are far from comforting. Over the last two weeks of February, some 143,000 people applied."

Kazakova said most requests come from the areas bordering Russia, and especially from Ukraine's south.

"People are lost, scared and depressed," she said. "There are many requests from law enforcement services, state officials as they are wary of possible lynching on behalf of radicalized armed groups."

A week after the government of Viktor Yanukovich was toppled by violent street protests, fears of deepening political and social strife have been particularly acute in Ukraine's country's pro-Russian east and south.

Soon after Yanukovich opted to flee the country in what he branded as an extremist coup, a newly reconfigured parliament did away with a 2012 law on minority languages which permitted the use of two official languages in regions where the size of an ethnic minority exceeds 10 percent.

Apart from the Russian-majority regions affected by this law, Hungarian, Moldovan and Romanian also lost their status as official languages in several towns in Western Ukraine.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Ukrainian deputies were wrong to cancel the law, while European parliamentarians urged the new government to respect the rights of minorities in Ukraine, including the right to use Russian and other minority languages.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry's commissioner for human rights, was far more damning in his criticism.

"The attack on the Russian language in Ukraine is a brutal violation of ethnic minority rights," he tweeted.

Out of some 45 million people living in Ukraine, according to the 2013 census, some 7.6 million are ethnic Russians. Leaders of several predominately Russian-speaking regions have said they will take contr

Yeah, the sentence ends there.

[CountDeMoney]

I never said there was a requirement to protect Ukraine.  In fact, I spend a good part of yesterday arguing the opposite in another venue.  What I am saying is that the memorandum is not a treaty[1].  I haven't found a Senate ratification resolution[2] for the memorandum.  Without that vote it is not a treaty, because the US government cannot ratify a treaty without the approval of the Senate.

[1] Granted, I'm using a slightly legalistic definition of "treaty", but the definition in US law and the Constitution is more restricted than in general international law.
[2] I would like to correct one thing:  the Senate doesn't actually ratify treaties; it just approves or disapproves the ratification.

The Budapest Memorandums on Security Assurances for the Ukraine and other former Soviet states are piggy-backed onto the NPT, and are Joint Declarations.

http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/49/765

[Syt]

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_02/German-media-making-U-turn-on-Ukrainian-tug-o-war-6594/

German media making U-turn on Ukrainian tug-o'-war?

Radio listeners across Germany have reportedly woken up to a surprise turnaround in the media coverage of the escalating Ukrainian crisis following the February regime change and the ensuing uprising of Ukraine's Russia-leaning east and south.

German blogosphere and social networks are abuzz with the new stance of several state-run radio stations that have opted – in a moment of truth-seeking – to go against the massive tide of pro-West reporting and get to the root of the crisis that is tearing the ex-Soviet republic in two.

Bloggers are discussing the recent shows aired by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), a member of German ARD consortium, which is now explaining to its German audience the difference between Ukraine's western and eastern populations.

According to on-the-ground reports, a slew of WDR services – WDR Eins Life, WDR 2, WDR 4 – and live news channel N24 have revised their take on the Ukrainian crisis overnight, going from the Ukraine-under-Russian-siege rhetoric to detailed coverage of pro-Russian protests that have fanned out across Crimea and scuffles between rival groups in the country's east.

Germany's mainstream channels still cling on to the black-and-white story of alleged Russian invasion in the autonomous Crimean peninsula in a US-driven bid to pressure Russia into giving up on the country in its "backyard".

Meanwhile, comments that appear on the websites of Germany's most influential online magazines seem to disagree with the country's official stand, with Spiegel readers talking about evident illegitimacy of Ukraine's new self-proclaimed rulers and Russia's intrinsic right to defend its military facilities in Crimea, which serves as the home base of its Black Sea Fleet.

Many commentators pointed out that the Turchynov regime should put the status of Crimea to a referendum, while others were apparently anxious about neo-Nazi views taking hold in Ukraine.

Many Germans underscored that calls for non-intervention sounded hypocritical, to say the least, when coming from the United States leadership, considered a string of invasions in Cuba, Iraq, Libya and its recent attempts to attack Syria.

Anti-regime protests are meanwhile spreading across the east and south of the country. In several cities, pro-Russia activists entered parliament buildings and raised the Russian flag.

According to Germany's largest daily Sueddeutschezeitung, residents in Kharkiv threw pro-regime forces out of the regional government's headquarters shouting "Krakhiv and Russia!" Police did not interfere. Similar protests have engulfed the coal mining city of Donetsk.

[Jacob]

I saw it mentioned elsewhere that while Russian official media is all going on about the Ukrainian fascists etc, Russian social media is full of people "WTF?!?!"

[garbon]

Oh Germany...

[The Brain]

Germany won't use natural gas for power generation? Non-rhetorical.

Yes, it will. But not more than before. In fact, since the decision to phase out nuclear power earlier in 2011 the percentage of gas in electricity generation has dropped from 14% to 10.5% - a faster drop than nuclear by the way. Both drops were compensated roughly half by burning more coal and half by more renewable energy.
Meanwhile, we have bought less gas from Russia and more from Norway and the Netherlands.

OK?

I would have preferred if we had kept the nuclear power plants a while longer and phased out some coal plants first. But in the end, there was a broad consensus about phasing out nuclear power in Germany and the topic was toxic for our political system in that it gave way too much weight to the Greens. So overall it made sense to make that decision just to defuse the political situation. Otherwise we would have gotten the Greens much stronger, which would have led to even worse decisions on other topics.

Ah yes, let's give the political nutcases what they want and they might be satisfied. Tends to work out great in Germany.

[Jacob]

Right now every old leftist in Europe is looking for their old Russian phrasebook.

You don't know very many old European leftists, do you?

[Syt]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/02/ukraine-what-will-happen-crimea-europe-west

Ukraine: what will happen now?

Events in Crimea have the potential to turn Ukraine into Europe's worst security nightmare since the revolutions of 1989

In his 14 years in power after a career as a KGB officer grieving the loss of the Soviet empire, Vladimir Putin has launched three wars against Russia's neighbours and territories formerly under the Kremlin's domination.

As a newly appointed prime minister in 1999, before becoming president on New Year's Day 2000, he launched his career with a war in Chechnya, brutally suppressing an armed insurrection against Moscow's rule in the north Caucasus and razing the provincial capital, Grozny.

In 2008, he ordered a blitzkrieg against Georgia, partitioning the country in five days. He remains in control of 20% of Russia's Black Sea neighbour: the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Russian military also controls a slice of Moldova known as Transnistria in a frozen conflict dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the Crimea and the Ukraine, however, in the event of full-scale war, Putin has opted for a game-changer with the potential to be Europe's worst security nightmare since the revolutions of 1989 and the bloodiest since Slobodan Milosevic's attempts to wrest control of former Yugoslavia resulted in four lost wars, more than 100,000 dead, and spawned seven new countries in the Balkans.

Ukraine is a pivotal country on the EU's eastern and Russia's south-western borders. Territorially it is bigger than France. Its population is greater than Poland or Spain at 46 million. It has fighting forces and is well armed. Ukraine was the Soviet Union's arms-manufacturing base, it remains in the top league of global arms exporters. And although its military is no match for Russia's, its fighting forces will be able to inflict a lot of damage if forced to defend their country.

The Georgia scenario

The most benign outcome is that Putin envisages a Georgia-style incursion, a brief week of creating new facts on the ground, limiting the campaign to taking control of the Crimean peninsula with its majority ethnic Russian population, and then negotiating and dictating terms from a position of strength to the weak and inexperienced new leadership in Kiev.

Putin made no public comments after last weekend's revolution in Kiev that saw the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych to Russia until his Crimea operation, well-planned and activated without a shot being fired, was effectively over.

The military operation was accompanied by political moves – the regional parliament and political leadership calling for Russian help, declaring loyalty to Moscow, disowning the new administration in Kiev and ordering a referendum on Crimea's status by the end of the month.

If that is the aim, it is virtually mission accomplished. The goals were achieved even before Nato ambassadors could gather in Brussels on Sunday or EU foreign ministers could assemble to ponder their options on Monday.

But there are plenty of signs that controlling or even annexing Crimea may not sate the Russian appetite in Ukraine.

A more ambitious and much more dangerous scenario is also entirely conceivable.

The Yugoslavia scenario

If the Crimean seizure has been easy and bloodless, it is because of the heavy Russian military assets there, the support of much of the local population and because the Ukrainian forces there were caught off-guard by the speed of the takeover, and also because they are under orders not to fight back (yet), for fear of provoking a significant and bloody escalation.

All the signs are that Putin, with his proprietorial approach to large stretches of the former Soviet Union, will refuse to accept the legitimacy of a Ukrainian state that has turned west to secure its future, cutting the umbilical cord that the Kremlin thinks makes it Russia's baby.

The aim, as Ukraine's acting president speculated on Sunday, may be to wreck Ukraine economically; to disable its functioning as a genuinely independent state.

That aim would encourage Putin to expand his influence from Crimea into eastern Ukraine, dismissing Kiev's authority, broadly cutting the country in two, Kiev and the west versus the east and the south.

That raises the prospect of civil war. Already, in the initial skirmishing, the tactics and the methodology that made Serbia's Milosevic so ascendant in the Yugoslav wars of 1991-95 and Kosovo in 1998-99 (although he lost them all in the end) are evident.

There is the establishing and no doubt arming of local loyal militias, the emergence of new pro-Russian leaders handpicked by the Russian security services, the use of quick referendums to lend a "democratic" veneer to pre-ordained decisions taken in Moscow, the funding of loyalist forces, the staging of "provocations" that are then amplified by outrage and the clamour for retaliation in the Kremlin-controlled media, the creation of parallel state structures, say, in Kharkov in the east – Ukraine's second city and its capital during the Russian civil war because it was "red" and Kiev was "white".

There are also the ethnic, confessional and cultural divisions that sunder Ukraine, between the Catholic and nationalist west and the Orthodox and often pro-Russian east, also recalling Yugoslavia.

These, however, are far from insuperable problems. There is nothing inevitable about an east-west clash, given benign and careful political leadership.

But if the state and its propaganda arm and television are resolved to magnify these underlying tensions into a casus belli, it is easily, as Milosevic proved, accomplished.

If Putin opts to be the new Milosevic, the west will be staring a new division of Europe in the face.

What can or will the west do?

There appears little appetite in the west for getting seriously embroiled beyond diplomacy. The responses have been slow and after the fact. The Ukrainian turmoil started in November with the Kiev protesters opposing a pro-Russian president to demand a European vocation.

But the EU is split, lumbering and reactive. There is no European foreign or security policy. It is difficult to imagine Germany spilling blood for Ukraine. It is not difficult to envisage Russia spilling blood for Ukraine.

The default EU position in these crises, from Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe to Alexander Lukashenko next door to Ukraine in Belarus, is to impose sanctions and travel bans on leadership cliques. However, there is too much at stake in Ukraine for that to have much impact.

But John Kerry, the US secretary of state, has upped the ante, warning of a sanctions package that would isolate Russia economically.

That is an intriguing suggestion because the Russian economy is entirely dependent on raw materials; on oil and gas exports.

Isolating Russia economically would entail quarantining, for example, the gas sector and the world's largest gas producer Gazprom. But Gazprom is Europe's biggest gas supplier. The US would be barely affected by such sanctions. Europe and Germany would be hammered. All of the Baltic, central and eastern Europe, including Ukraine itself, are utterly dependent on Gazprom, while Germany, Europe's biggest energy consumer, gets more than a third of its gas from Russia.

More likely is also Yugoslav-style western mediation, with "contact groups" of diplomats or UN envoys charged with running negotiations between the warring parties, monitoring ceasefires and dispatching observers under the UN or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Ukraine will start to sound like Switzerland. There will be lots of talk of new arrangements entailing "federalisation" or "confederalisation", with the Russian aim to maximise its control over much of Ukraine while arguing it recognises its territorial integrity.

[celedhring]

Right now every old leftist in Europe is looking for their old Russian phrasebook.

You don't know very many old European leftists, do you?

My parents are "old European leftists" and are absolutely dismayed by Russia's antics. Actually it's more the clueless anti-everything kids that I see saying nonsense.

[DontSayBanana]

Putin on the Ritz.

http://putintheritzon.ytmnd.com/

[garbon]

No, Cal, no!

[CountDeMoney]

It is difficult to imagine Germany spilling blood for Ukraine. It is not difficult to envisage Russia spilling blood for Ukraine.

And there you have it, in a nutshell.  Russia's tolerance for the costs of escalation in achieving its aims is substantially higher than European or American tolerance in preventing them.  IR Theory 101.