The Ukraine Crisis Leaves the West Behind

With the Oscars having just come and gone, too many Americans were focused on a day in Hollywood to care about a night in the Ukraine, but what's going on in Ukraine ought to get people antsy.  For the first time in twenty years, there could be a war in Europe, and this one could be bigger than the Bosnian Civil War.  Russian President Vladimir Putin, eager to re-assert post-Soviet Russia's power, tried and failed to intimidate the Ukrainian people through economic extortion to prevent them from establishing closer ties to the West.  So when the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was deposed, Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula, a region comprised of ethnic Russians, to "protect" the locals.  What Putin is really protecting is Russian influence in the region.

Some Russia experts have said that Western disregard for Russian interests, such as the eastward expansion of NATO and the lack of a coherent partnership with Russia to save the Ukrainian economy, but I don't buy it.  NATO expanded because nations dominated by the Soviet Union after World War II and the three Baltic States annexed by the U.S.S.R. during the war didn't trust Russian intentions, and the West had made the mistake of abandoning Czechoslovakia and giving only token assistance to Poland in the wake of German and Soviet expansion before World War II.  Part of Putin's actions are traditional Russian paranoia - did you know that the Soviet Union actually wanted to join NATO because it feared a rising West Germany? - but his actions mainly boil down to Russian assertion of authority in Eastern Europe and the Transcaucasian States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.  Ukraine has long been a fertile land, with productive grain farms, and its proximity to the Black Sea provides easy access to the Mediterranean.  Russia has long wished to dominate  the Ukrainian nation for these reasons, and Putin has found the Ukrainians to be a proud people who have a problem with his agenda.  

That said, I don't know if there's much that NATO or the European Union can do about this.  War is out of the question; the United States can't afford another armed conflict.  Putin needs a face-saving gesture to pull back; the West seems incapable of providing one to satisfy him enough.  The best thing to do is to contain the crisis to the Crimea while seeking a negotiated solution.  Because the awful truth is that Putin holds all the cards thanks to American miscalculations dating back to the previous U.S. administration, and the bluster from xenophobic right-wing foriegn policy "experts" in the U.S. doesn't help matters any.