COUP IN KYIV?

that cons state without book

I was never able to make such a decision, like I said, he was on to me from day 1.

One actually rejected religion in order to lie in on Sunday morning.

Schäuble said Russia's actions in Ukraine remind him of the expansionism of Nazi Germany. "Hitler already adopted such methods in Sudetenland," Schäuble said at a public event at the Finance Ministry in Berlin on Monday morning. "That's something that we all know from history." Schäuble's comments were directed at the justification provided by the Russians for annexing Crimea. Russian officials claim ethnic Russian residents of the peninsula are threatened by Ukraine. The Nazis argued similarly in the 1938 that "ethnic Germans" in peripheral regions of what was then Czechoslovakia required protection.
Given stewing tensions between Russia and the West and the finance minister's political prominence in Europe, Schäuble's comments could further intensify discord.

The finance minister made the comments while speaking to 50 school children from Berlin participating in a government-organized EU Project Day. Schäuble answered children's' questions about European unity and the euro crisis. He made his remarks after a student asked if the Ukraine crisis could potentially intensify the euro zone's problems. Schäuble said the most important thing was to prevent Ukraine from becoming insolvent. He said if the government in Kiev were no longer able to pay its security forces, "then of course some armed bands would seek to take power." That, he warned, could serve as a pretext for a Russian intervention. "The Russians would then say they can't accept that, that they are threatening our Russian population. Now we have to protect them, and that is our reason for invading."

The finance minister also explained to the students how Russia's occupation of Crimea came about. "At some point the situation escalated and then Putin said, 'I actually always wanted Crimea anyway.'" Schäuble said Putin had justified the action because the Russian Black Sea fleet is located on the peninsula. He said Putin must have told himself, "And the current opportunity is the right one." Schäuble also claimed the Russian president deployed troops near the Ukrainian border, "to show that I can take care of ensuring order if need be."

Schäuble also told the students that concerns about Russian actions are widespread among his colleagues in the EU member states that used to be part of the Eastern Bloc -- particularly Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states. "They're quite scared," he said. He said the finance ministers of these countries have told him personally that they planned to expand their military expenditures. But Schäuble said there were no plans to increase Germany's defense budget. "That would be of no use," he said.

It is long past time that we welcomed Georgia into NATO though, and maybe the Georgians would be willing to allow the US Navy to have a permanent base on the Black Sea.

I'm not sure we really want to tie up a significant portion of our Navy in the Black Sea, but even a small base with just one or two warships would send a message to Putin.


Also maybe time for us to build up a troop presence in Poland and Romania, if they are willing to allow us bases.

And maybe we could ask Poland and Romania if they'd each like to be a repository for 10-20 of our new tactical nukes.

(Reuters) - The United States has asked to boost the number of troops and aircraft it has stationed at an airbase in NATO ally Romania, President Traian Basescu said on Tuesday, as tensions between the West and Russia simmer over neighboring Ukraine.

U.S. forces have used the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base on the Black Sea in eastern Romania since 1999. It is a major hub for U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan and is located not far from Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, annexed last month by Russia.

"The U.S. embassy in Bucharest has asked for support from Romanian authorities to expand current operations at the Mihail Kogalniceanu base," Basescu said in a letter of notification to the speaker of Romania's lower house of parliament.

The U.S. request would add up to 600 U.S. troops to the roughly 1,000 currently stationed in Romania and would also increase the number of military aircraft there, the letter said.

NATO and Ukraine announced in a joint statement after their ministers met in Brussels that they would intensify cooperation and promote defense reforms in Ukraine through training and other programs.

(Reuters) - Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday that the pace at which NATO increases its military presence in Poland was unsatisfactory.

"We are gaining something step by step, but the pace of NATO increasing its military presence for sure could be faster. You remember the endless debates about the missile shield, with mediocre results," Tusk told a press conference.

"This is an unsatisfactory result for us," he said, commenting on earlier statements by Polish foreign minister, who said he would be fully satisfied if NATO located two heavy brigades in Poland.

We would like to propose to the Russian side that before issuing ultimatums to a sovereign and independent state, it turn its attention to the disastrous conditions and complete powerlessness of its own national minorities, including the Ukrainian one…

That in a nutshell was the view of one senior Nato diplomat who I spoke to recently.

But something has changed in the wake of Russia's seizure of the Crimea and its continuing military threat to eastern Ukraine.

Moscow has broken with a pattern of behaviour that has characterised diplomacy in Europe since the end of the Cold War and arguably one that has held sway in western Europe since the collapse of Nazi Germany.

The idea that disputes will be settled by diplomacy rather than force; that the currency of power is increasingly economic might rather than military.

Worse still, Mr Putin's Kremlin speech some 10 days ago signalled that this might not end here. Russian spokesmen may say they have no desire to move troops into Ukraine but their deployments signal otherwise - and that is precisely what they are intended to do.