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Yet talk is about all he can do at this moment in time.

A difficulty with effective sanctions lies in Western Europe, where many nations now depend on cheap Russian natural gas to fuel their economies. Germany leads the group, with around 40 percent of its natural gas coming from Russia..
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Secure at home, Putin also fears little backlash from abroad. He believes the United States and Europe will publicly condemn Russia but implement few economic sanctions because Europe remains dependent on Russian natural gas.

"The biggest blow would be the largest companies in Germany not doing business" with Russia, Hill said. "That is what Putin banks on: Russia is too big and important.

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Yet talk is about all he can do at this moment in time.

How about should do....

About Crimea nothing, it should belong to Russia and there is no way to keep Russia from having it so fighting over it would be pointless.

Ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych asked Russia to send troops across the border to protect civilians, Moscow's UN envoy has claimed.

Vitaly Churkin told a Security Council meeting Mr Yanukovych wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday.

Thousands of Russian troops have been pouring into Ukraine's Crimea region.

Russian forces have also been holding military exercises near Ukraine's borders, but now Mr Putin has ordered them back to base, the Kremlin says.

So your answer is to do pretty much the same as Obama.

Obama said the US state department was reviewing its entire portfolio of trade and co-operation with Moscow, including preparing a raft of possible measures targeting senior government and military officials implicated in the invasion of the peninsula. Obama said the condemnation from other countries aimed at Russia "indicates the degree to which Russia's on the wrong side of history on this".

The president is expected to use his executive authority to bypass Congress to quickly target senior Russian officials. But Washington is clearly aware it may struggle to rally support for punitive measures from Europe.

"The most important thing is for us – the United States – to make sure that we don't go off without the European community," the majority leader in the Senate, Democrat Harry Reid, told Politico. "Their interests are really paramount if we are going to do sanctions of some kind. We have to have them on board with us."

But at an emergency meeting in Brussels the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy and Spain resisted calls for trade sanctions, instead limiting discussion to freezing long-running talks with Russia on visa liberalisation that would have made it easier for Russians to visit Europe. Washington is also threatening to kick Russia out of the G8 group of leading economies, but Berlin opposes that.

Britain's attempts to ensure any EU action against Russia over Ukraine would exempt the City of London were embarrassingly revealed when a secret government document detailing the plan was photographed in Downing Street. The document said Britain should "not support, for now, trade sanctions … or close London's financial centre to Russians".

Like other EU countries, and especially Germany, which obtains almost 40% of its gas and oil from Russia, the UK is reluctant to adopt measures that could damage its still fragile economic recovery.

So you'd give Russia free reign, that's really standing up for American values.

I’m talking about the economic model that has given Denmark lower unemployment than the U.S., less inequality, more social mobility, lower budget deficits, more opportunities for women, a bigger share of working people, and a happier population.

Today Nick Haekkerup, Denmark’s minister for trade and European affairs, spoke at the New School for Public Engagement about why, in his view, Denmark can thrive with a combination of high taxes, generous social services, and an efficient public sector.

You said talk was not enough

What can and should the United States do about the apparent de facto Russian annexation of the Crimea and the real possibility that it will move to exert effective control of at least parts of eastern Ukraine? If the goal is to significantly affect events on the ground in the short term, then the short answer is that nothing Washington can realistically do is likely to have much effect. Force is clearly off the table, as well it should be, which makes the welter of suggestions that there should be shows of force such as U.S. naval exercises in the Black Sea, the deployment of missiles in the Czech Republic, and the beefing up of NATO forces on the Polish-Ukrainian border, seem as unserious as they would be costly. Yes, the United States can impose unilateral sanctions and freeze some bank accounts, but Europe is unlikely follow in any serious, prolonged way for the simple reason that major nations in the E.U., above all Germany, are at least as dependent on Russia economically as Russia is on them.

To me, the more interesting question is why in 2014 the conviction persists among much of the policy establishment that the wishes of the United States should prevail everywhere in the world, including in a region bordering on Russia? Is it because people in Washington believe that the march of liberal capitalist democracy across the world is inevitable—Fukuyama’s "End of History," and all that? At the very least, the consensus seems to be that Russia’s actions were the direct result of American weakness, or, more precisely, the Obama administration’s fecklessness. The possibility that they were, instead, the result of Russian strength must be simply too horrible to contemplate.


It’s an old Washington trope, this "Who lost _____?" In the case of the Crimea, the accusations have already begun to fly thick and fast. Asked on CNN Sunday what he would do, Senator Lindsay Graham replied, “I would like to tie a democratic noose around Russia.” Presumably he meant granting NATO membership to Georgia, and making as many forward deployments of NATO ground, air, and missile forces along the Russian border. If the senator imagines this will make Putin back down, he’s an idiot; if he thinks that should Russia persist, those forces should be used, he’s a monster.

My own intuition is that the storm over Ukraine is actually mostly a displacement of the Iran debate. It seems inexplicable otherwise: a Russian takeover of the Crimea, where the Russian Black Sea fleet already was based and came and went as it pleased, changes nothing about the geo-strategic calculus in the region. What makes a bit more sense is that those who believe that Iran will never relinquish its nuclear weapons program and that, sooner or later, the U.S. must grasp the nettle and launch military strikes, look at American impotence in Ukraine and worry it’s a harbinger of the future. For Simferopol, read Natanz.

Ukraine says OSCE military observers to go to Crimea
(Reuters) - Ukraine said on Tuesday that observers from a pan-European security body would travel at its invitation to the Crimea region, where Russian forces have taken control, in an attempt to defuse a military standoff.

"An OSCE mission has arrived in Kiev which will go to the Crimean peninsula to monitor the situation," Ukraine's national security chief, Andriy Paruby, told a news conference in Kiev.

He said the security situation on the Black Sea peninsula was "complicated but stable".

Several members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - including the United States - were set to send observers on the mission, tentatively scheduled to start on Wednesday and last a week, diplomatic sources at OSCE headquarters in Vienna said. They said the mission could be extended for longer.

It was not immediately clear whether Russia would allow monitors to enter the region, where it controls the airspace and access points. The diplomats said Russia's agreement was not legally necessary.

The Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, Philip Oltermann, has sent this analysis through on Germany’s response to the crisis:

Many expectations rest on the shoulders of Angela Merkel: many believe that if any Western leader has the ear of Vladimir Putin, it is the German chancellor – not just because she speaks fluent Russian, but because of the close trade relations between Russia and Germany. Germany draws around a third of its gas and oil imports from Russia; Germany is Russia’s biggest trade partner after China, even if trade volume shrunk in 2013 for the first time in years.

This may also explain why spokespersons in the chancellory were yesterday eager to deny that Merkel believed Putin had “lost touch with reality”, as the New York Times had reported. They claimed that the German chancellor had merely told US president Obama that Putin had a very different perspective on events in the Crimea.

While the tenor of voices in Berlin are highly critical of the Kremlin’s aggressive stance over the Ukraine, the German chancellor also has to negotiate a number of more pro-Russian voices in her own government.

Foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has played a more active role in diplomatic negotiations over the last few weeks, calling for sanctions against the Ukraine while Merkel merely emphasised dialogue. Last night, he described the current stand-off as “Europe’s biggest crisis since the fall of the wall”.

But Gernot Erler, a social democrat and the government’s special coordinator of Russia policy, has warned against economic sanctions and argued that “the economic community should concentrate on diplomatic solutions until the very last minute”.

Putin Has No Plans To Annex Crimea, But They Have The Right To Self-Determination


In his remarks Tuesday, Putin said that Russia has no plans to annex Crimea. But he also added that "only the residents of Crimea may conduct their own election," leaving open the possibility that if they voted to be annexed, then the peninsula could become part of Russia. This is precisely how the bill in the Duma would work -- a local referendum held in a foreign state would have to take place before the territory became part of Russia. But Ukraine appears to have no mechanism for a local referendum -- any referendum would involve the whole country.