The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #155032 Message #3654869
Posted By: GUEST,Rahere
29-Aug-14 - 07:32 AM
Thread Name: BS: Passenger jet shot down over Ukraine
Subject: RE: BS: Passenger jet shot down over Ukraine
The Russians completed its takeover of Ukraine in 1921 and has never really departed since - the idea of independence when it still had the Russian Black Sea Fleet on its territory is a nonsense.
That is half the problem: where should that fleet go if Ukraine is no longer an option. The first response in this was the Russian incursion into South Ossetia in Georgia in 2008, in response to the French placing Salome Zourabishvili (someone I've worked with in the past, I should declare - her former secretary is a faily friend) as Georgia Foreign Minister in 2005. Part of the rationale of that was to warn Georgia not to get too chummy with the West, as the land occupied is about 5k, from the Oligarchs favourite summer holiday beaches at Sochi, where the Winter Olympics happened. Part of my thinking there was to observe what happened to the Olympic Village, as retasking for the Fleet?
The second option for the Russians was Rostov, on the Don. It has the disadvantage of being on the wrong side of the Kursk Straight into the Sea of Kharkov, adding a third bottleneck to the exit for the Fleet (Istanbul/Dardanelles and Gibraltar being the others).
The third was to move the fleet out into the Med, operating from a port in Syria - whence their support for Assad.
Then, finally, the other concern. This is that Romania is now part of Europe, is protected by the Treaty of Lisbon self-defence commitment, and now has a major US base on its land. That is an even bigger threat to Russia than the outdated missiles in Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, and possibly rules out the Syria option, as having both Turkey and Romania between them and their Fleet is not conducive to happy thoughts about stability of the supply line in the heads of its military High Command. That being said, it is also predicated in the concept of Russia as a quasi-Imperial hegemonic power, which is what this is really about.
So, to claim that this is an invasion of a fully autonomous nation is a bit much, on a pragmatic realpolitik basis. On the other hand, the iron grip on the balls of a Nation which has the theoretical right to self-determination is even more offensive. Perhaps Ukraine should ally itself with Georgia to ensure that if Russia attacks one, it has to deal with the other.