| Mr Khan said: Ukraine has plenty of guns, though. Legally or illegally (not sure what their laws are, but a fair few have commented on Ukraine's relatively high gun ownership rate). Crimea i'd argue is more a case in point on my side: if they had tried to shoot back at the Russians, it would have given them excuse to kill or arrest anyone who looked at them funny. |
I didn't mean guns. I meant nukes. Ukraine gave up their real nukes in exchange for fake assurances about their territorial integrity.
Crimea is really its own situation that is neither here nor there. The population is largely Russian and, except for the vehemently anti-Russian Tatars, generally pro-Russian. While the referendum was a joke, I don't really doubt that Russia would have won handily. They just shouldn't have made it so ridiculously lopsided in the final tally, at least if they wanted to look credible to the rest of the world. However, I don't think that was their goal. I suspect the North Korea style returns were intended more for the Russian audience that Putin is whipping into a jingoistic fervor than for the international audience, which doesn't matter because it isn't going to do anything about it anyway.
Had the Tatars staged an armed revolt, of course the Russians would have crushed them, and gladly. I think this is rather different from jelly-spined western countries, where the governments are capable of terrible brutality but are compelled to look and feel like they're on the side of the angels. Russia, for better or worse, has a world view rooted in hard-nosed realism. The west, and the American government in particular, has a silly and sometimes dangerous messiah complex.
