Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

The latest Anne Applebaum article on Slate is about "In Ukraine, we are watching the genesis of a new kind of warfare".

Hahaha, she clearly flunked all the history exams.  The kind of "warfare" that we have there is as "new" as bronze ware, you silly woman.

[miscmisc]

Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland doesn't seem to have been penalized or even disciplined by the Obama administration at all.  She was at the negotiation table in Geneva representing the State Department, although she was seated as far apart from EU representative Ashton as physically possible. 

Sure, that was not an official comment but a leaked conversation, but I'm telling you: few in the EU shrugged off that disrespectful outburst.  The EU (Read: Germans) knew that the neocons were running the things on the American side, but "FUCK us?"

"No, fuck YOU!" should be their unofficial response to that.

Neocons like Nuland hate "Old Europe" (= primarily Germany and France).  They would be happy if Poles invaded and occupied Germany now.  They only consider the former communist block "Good Europe".  Well, to be precise, countries like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria have been demoted to "Bad Europe" as they are way too passive (by the neocon standards) and aren't sufficiently anti-Russia, which pretty much only leaves Poland and the Baltic countries.

So that comment wasn't a brain fart.  Nuland genuinely wants Germany and France to go outside and fuck themselves.  That was just her being honest. 

As long as Obama continues to let those neocon bitches manage the situation, no one should expect a sound coordination between the EU and the US.  There is very little mutual trust between the two now, even if they don't show it.

[miscmisc]

Oh dear. The Swedish economy has sunk into an outright deflation, according to Krugman.

I think I mentioned in my conversation with seese Lars Svensson's departure from the Swedish central bank. I think I warned seese that something bad might happen because of that. 

Lars argued that the monetary tightening, when the inflation was so low and the output gap so large, would tilt the inflation decidedly downward, and was completely marginalized in the central bank for saying that. So he had to quit.

He is one of the very few European economists who actually studied what happened in Japan back in the '90s. He knew what deflation would do to his country's economy. But the neoliberal voodoo priests around him wouldn't listen.  What's worse, the current government is completely in line with the austerity/tight money camp of the EU. Sweden managed to cheat out of the eurozone, which allowed them to keep all the monetary tools and indirect fiscal flexibility. Yet the current government decided to more or less emulate what the struggling eurozone countries were doing, just because.

And the result is in: outright deflation.  Quelle surprise!

And they are saying that they didn't expect this.  A bunch of geniuses, I'm telling you.

They are the same people who cling to the revisionist history as to how Sweden managed to get out of the banking crisis in the early '90s. They think "belt-tightening" did most of the trick. They are the type of people who think that's the answer for everything.

Congrats, Carl Bildt. Your neoliberal remedy is doing wonder to your country. Say hello for me to Anders Aslund, and your silly colleagues at the Institute for Information on the Crimes of Communism.

Krugman:

The Riksbank says, in effect, that nobody could have predicted this development. But of course its own former deputy governor — and my former colleague — Lars Svensson, more or less frantically warned that the Riksbank was making a terrible mistake by tightening money despite low inflation and lots of economic slack. His reward was increasing isolation, and eventually departure. You see, all the VSSPs — very serious Swedish people — knew that it was important to raise interest rates because, well, because.

And getting out of the trap is going to be very hard.

I’d like to imagine that people will admit that Lars was right all along, and that in general the urge to purge has been highly destructive. But my guess is that he’ll still be considered unsound — he was prematurely anti-deflationist — and that tight-money advocates will continue to be regarded as reliable, prudent people even as they lead us into long-run stagnation.

[miscmisc]

It's not just John McCain anymore.  It's Joe Biden too now, which basically means the Obama administration.



Shaking hands with Tiahnybok, showing the gesture of strong support.

The EU parliament pretty much labeled Svoboda as a neofascist party not so long ago, of which he's a leader.  It's a party that was even expelled from a European far-right association due to its being too racist, of which he's a leader.  And he's now a "good guy" for no reason other than the fact that his party is on the anti-Russia side (as it has always been).  Everything else is forgotten now.   "Just don't mention it" is the spirit.

You may think that I've been obsessed with Svoboda, but this is the biggest reason.  By supporting such a party publicly and whitewashing its (very recent) past, and present for that matter, the US (and the EU, obviously) loses all the credibility as a principled "good" force in this matter.  They are in no position to laugh at the Russian media's propaganda.  It's not like the US has much credibility left after all the missteps in other parts of the world, but this latest mess suggests that the US screws up even when the subject country/region is not of its vital interest.  Hell, even Henry Kissinger came out against the active involvement in Ukraine, basically saying that Ukraine is simply not terribly important for the US, and that antagonizing Russia for such a country is plain stupid and self-destructive.

Not only that, but this is also a terrible blow for the liberal Russians.  Putin's power has been effectively consolidated and strengthened due to this Ukrainian mess.  Look at Putin's approval ratings now (over 80%, up from the previous 50-60%), and his attempt to "rectify" the Russian media landscape, using the current situation as the perfect excuse.  The anti-Kremlin Russians' lives will be harder from now on.

Now it's a pure chest-thumping contest between the US/Nato/part of the EU (Read: Poland and the Baltic countries) and Russia, which the former started, and such thing always looks stupid and wasteful from the objective third point of view, especially when it's over a more-or-less-lost cause like Ukraine, a highly unstable country by default.

Now, Ukraine is really a lost cause. What sort of geniuses think that country could ever prosper with now-very-hostile Russia as the biggest neighbor (and trading partner) without humongous permanent support from Europe and the US, which none of them are even remotely ready or willing to provide?  Like I said a million times, they don't care about Ukrainians.

The US can never come out of this looking good.  They may be able to deceive gullible people for now, but history will remember it as yet another stupid imperial attempt by the US that ended up a failure overall.  It might be able to weaken Russia's power in the long run, but "That's a good thing for whom and what?" is the question.  The answer is "for no one and nothing other than the neocons' ideological satisfaction", as all it will do is destabilize the whole world for years to come.  You don't have to be a "realist"/realpolitik foreign policy asshole like Kissinger to realize that.

As for the EU, I don't even know.  "Good luck" is all I can say, because they will need it with the new Russia that feels as though it has its back against the wall now.  And it's not like they really wanted Ukraine in the club.  Most of them didn't, and don't.  They know many of the Ukrainians who are enthusiastic about joining the EU simply want to move to more prosperous EU countries and work there.  It's obvious from the fact that many Ukrainians support the idea while few of them seem to believe that it would make their country prosper.  Countries like Germany are already fed up with illegal immigrants from Ukraine/Moldova.  Imagine how they would feel if it became perfectly legal.

False hope is a cruel thing.

[miscmisc]

Oleg Makhnitsky, the Ukrainian chief prosecutor (from Svoboda), gave an interview @ the FT (which means it's almost as official as it could get), in which he accused former president Viktor Yanukovych of taking $32 billion in cash to Russia after the Maidan "revolution".

$32 billion in cash.  Think about it.  $1M in cash (assuming $100 notes) weighs almost 10kg.  $32 billion = 320 tons.  You'd need fucking troops to transport so much stuff.  Even a Hollywood movie wouldn't go that far.

He may not have meant it literally when he said "in cash".  But then, he would have to prove that the transfer was electrically done.  And obviously, he can't provide the evidence.  I assume that's why he said "in cash".  I don't know what kind of a bank would honor such a humongous "cash" transfer anyway.

Ukraine's government only has a $4 billion reserve left.  And the Svoboda dude is accusing Yanukovych of stealing eight times as much in a matter of a few weeks "in cash".

That's the kind of "good guys" that we are supposed to trust in this Ukrainian matter.  We are supposed to eat up the stinking bullshit that comes out of their mouth on a daily basis.

Get me the fuck out.

[miscmisc]

NYT columnist Nick Kristof visited a village in Western Ukraine, where his ancestors (Jewish immigrants from Ukraine) used to live, and had to say this:

The kids here learn English and flirt in low-cut bluejeans. They listen to Rihanna, AC/DC, and Taylor Swift. They have crushes on George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, watch "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy," and play Grand Theft Auto. The school here has computers and an Internet connection, which kids use to watch YouTube and join Facebook. Many expect to get jobs in Italy or Spain -- perhaps even America.

Leaving aside the low probability of getting "jobs in Italy or Spain" under current economic conditions, this paragraph eloquently displays the breathtaking stupidity of old American pundits.  It's as if their clock stopped decades ago.  I kid you not: they really think that just because you watch The Simpsons, listen to AC/DC(!!), enjoy YouTube and FB, and play Grand Theft Auto, you are automatically "pro-American" and aspiring to become a good American-style democrat.

It never occurs to him that millions of people all over the world do all of those things and still do NOT want to be like Americans in any shape or form.  I can assure you that you would be able to find a shit load of anti-Kiev/anti-West separatists in Crimea/Eastern/Southern Ukraine who enjoy ALL of them.  Hell, there are even many jihadis like that, too.

You get this kind of a highly absurd notion only from stupid American DC types, and sadly they are not a minority in the Beltway area.  You really have to understand that they live in some weird alternate reality where time is frozen at a weird moment in history, where apparently "low-cut bluejeans" signified something.

It takes some sort of talent to actually visit Ukraine/Moldova and completely miss the reality like he does.  He talks as if all Ukrainians were more or less the same, as if there was no difference between the Western village and Donetsk or Kharkiv, like, if only Russians weren't there, they would be working together with no problem!  The proof?  Why, they speak good English, and listen to Taylor Swift.  QED.

Seriously, anyone who doesn't recognize or even know the deep divisions that exist inside that country must just shut the fuck up and never, ever, even mention Ukraine.  Kristof is doubly problematic because his case is of deep ignorance and tragicomical silliness mixed hard in a juicer.

I'm afraid that the majority of the foreign-policy makers in DC aren't much better than this idiot, and that's the root of all the problems.


 

[miscmisc]

At least 38 people died in Odessa.  Most (or all?) of them are "pro-Russian" people trapped inside a building, which was set on fire by "pro-Kiev" people.  They either suffocated or jumped off the building to death.  The civil war is seriously on now.

And these are the tweets on that from Carl Bildt:



When bias reaches such a point, you can no longer call it bias; it's total partisanship in which you even make stuff up to cheer for one side.  And you get that not from a Ukrainian politician, but a Swedish one, who is supposed to be an impartial observer.  This appalling old fucker is absolutely determined to pin all the blame on "Russia" and "pro-Russia", facts be damned.

If I were a Swedish citizen, I would call for his resignation right away, particularly for the second tweet.  I would be fucking embarrassed like crazy.  It's a double charge of the atrocious contents of the tweets and the idiocy of tweeting such things in the first place.  They say Twitter is a powerful idiot/asshole magnet, and that's evidently true in that the politicians who love tweeting almost always turn out to be the most horrible ones (which is definitely the case in Russia, for example).

Just how brain-dead is this guy?  I don't even know what the fuck he means by "Odessa is a city open to all of Europe".  Does he think that Europe can afford to pick sides in a civil war in such a crude, stupid manner?  It's simply astonishing, this guy's bottomless idiocy.  "Violence must stop!" - what a fucking despicable monkey.  My fear, though, is that other European statesmen and women aren't much better than this neoliberal amoeba.

Good God, the EU with such awful crew really is a sinking ship.

What the mainstream media and the "West" in general have shown so far regarding Ukraine is way beyond "bias".  It's totally partisan.  My stance on this issue is the same in real life, and you can't even imagine how many times I've been called a "Putin-lover", an "apologist for Mother Russia" and so on, particularly by those who don't know my long, hard history of criticizing Putin's authoritarianism.  It's really Orwellian.  It seems as if no one cares about FACTS.  I only care about facts, and the facts so clearly tell me that the mainstream "Evil Moscow vs. Freedom-seeking Kiev" narrative is total horseshit.

Besides, what exactly do they mean by "pro-Russia"?  They throw that word around without ever defining its meaning. 

You know, many of the anti-Kiev people do NOT want to become Russian citizens.  They simply don't want to be ruled by the current government in Kiev.  Are these people also "pro-Russia"?

It's just a convenient label to demonize a particular group of people and at the same time obfuscate what's ACTUALLY going on in that dysfunctional country.  "Russia" means "Evil", and they are forced to wear the Badge of Evil, like the Evil Star of David for Jews back in the old days.

The way the anti-Kiev people have been demonized for no good reason is simply grotesque.  See the contrast between the way the likes of Bildt mourned the deaths of the Maidan protesters as if they were their own children, and this time.  Bildt only said "horrible", while basically saying that they pretty much had it coming. 

Meanwhile, the media like to paint Eastern Ukraine as unsophisticated, authoritarian, "backward", as if those in Western Ukraine who voted en masse for Svoboda weren't.  You are just automatically no good if you have any connection to Russia, basically.  Never mind Svoboda are ideologically far worse in every aspect than those "separatists".

There's not even any semblance of balance and fairness.  There really is none.

Seriously, just tell me what those Eastern/Southern Ukrainians and Russia did to deserve all of this, because I don't know.  It's all seriously upsetting and scary.

[miscmisc]

The attitude of the US officials and mainstream media re: Ukraine is eerily reminiscent of the one from the Vietnam War era.  You are most likely too young to remember it (and obviously, so am I), but they seriously argued that Ho Chi Minh simply coerced/forced the local people to follow him and had no genuine support from the Vietnamese in actuality.  Some of them argued so while perfectly knowing that was absolute BS, but the others (the majority, FYI) actually believed it for real.  All the info/intel that contradicted that view was regarded as "communist propaganda".

That delusion was one of the biggest causes of the early strategical blunders made by the US military.

All of us today know that Ho Chi Minh was actually very popular, not only in the North but also in many areas in the South.  We laugh at those who seriously argued otherwise back then.

But can we?  If you only read/watched/listened to the mainstream media today, you wouldn't know that those "pro-Russia thugs" (or "terrorists" or "Russian agents in disguise") in Ukraine do get a significant amount of sympathy/support from many of the local people who may not actually participate in the protests/operations.  You also wouldn't know the true nature of Svoboda, or the fact that they are indeed fascists (I'm not even sure if you should bother to attach "neo-" at the beginning).

You would be most likely to promptly dismiss what I've written in this thread as "Russian propaganda".

There is indeed Russian propaganda on the Russian media, plenty of it.  But they mostly engage in childish exaggerations, which means their claims do have some basis in reality.  On the other hand, the opposing side completely denies the facts that don't fit their narrative, and blames them on "Russian propaganda", the term that has become the all-purpose Swiss army knife.

And remember: Ukraine is a critical issue for Russia, and the kind of media frenzy that you see now on RT and others was to be expected.  I would expect the same from pro-Maidan Ukrainians, too.  It's their tree, and they are sitting in it.  You can't expect anything else from those two parties.

But you can't say that for the "West", particularly for the US. 

So, can we still laugh at the old Cold War media?

Of course we can't.  Nothing has changed, or you could even say that it's gotten worse, considering that the Soviet Union back then was actually very powerful, ambitious and therefore legitimately menacing - unlike Russia today.

It's entirely clear to me who is bullying whom here.

[miscmisc]

So, the mainstream media's reaction to Narendra Modi's election triumph in India can be summed up like this:

Yes, he is someone with a dark history of being a nutty ultra-Hindu-nationalist and involvement in the Hindu far-right movements, but he will make it easier for companies to fire workers!

To them, the first and second parts have the equal weight.  Should kinda remind you of their treatment of Pinochet in Chile and many other wonderful authoritarian mass-murderers in the past. 

Hell, not to invoke Godwin's Law here, but this is more than similar to the way many pundits assessed (or even welcomed) Hitler's victory back in the days, though you'd always have to insert "non-Jewish" before the word "companies" in his case.  Anyone who argues that just because there is a word "socialism" in National Socialism means Adolf was somehow anti-capitalist is clueless beyond hope.  Just show them the German corporate profit chart before and after Hitler if you want to silence them.

Anyway, openly discriminatory far-right politicians with the "pro-business" stamp on it - what could go wrong, right?

[miscmisc]

I know, I know.  You don't have to tell me.  I may not be an economist, but I'm not dumb either.  It's the euro, right?  It's clear now even to dumb arses like me that it was such a big mistake.

 "I may not be an economist, but I'm not dumb either" is a funny expression since in my opinion the word "dumb" was invented to describe most economists, the lowliest of all "scientists", but I began to notice that even the kind of people who until very recently had thought the euro was good ("Nothing wrong with the system!  It's just human errors/wrongs that is the problem!") because of the convenience and all that are now aware of the true nature of the monetary union.  They are onto the fact that the common currency has effectively sapped an immeasurable amount of wealth off the eurozone citizens except for the wealthy top 1%, and that they are being forced to endure the never-ending rounds of austerity to maintain the very status quo that has led them to this permanent stagnation and deflationary trap.

I would never vote for XXX, but my God, no one else is saying the right thing about the euro and our problems!

Another phrase that I hear a lot these days.  Mr./Ms. XXX is always either a hard left, or extreme right.  Virtually all politicians around the "center" keep bullshitting about the economy.  It's disheartening to hear the revolting nonsense coming out of the mouth of, say, Francois Hollande, the French president.  He was saying almost-correct things during his campaign, but since then has become an idiotic advocate for crude supply-side economics, pleasing the hard-money priests in Frankfurt and Brussels.

It's a case of intellectual corruption, and that's more powerful than your standard political corruption.  It's painfully clear to me that many, many, many of the European elites do understand the folly of the euro, and of the policies that they are enacting to preserve it.  Yet they are still clinging to it anyway.  In other words, they stopped caring.  They are doing what their heart should tell them to stop.

The euro was a top-down project from the get-go.  Most of the eurozone citizens didn't vote for it.  The whole project has no democratic legitimacy.  It should be obvious to anyone without being reminded of the complete farce of the Lisbon Treaty referenda and all that.

I may not be a big believer in democracy, but I'm not dumb either; I definitely know that things without democratic legitimacy do fall off the cliff easily.

Especially when this "thing" is a predictably malfunctioning neoliberal mad machine like this European Common Currency.

[miscmisc]

This is a poster that Indian(Hindu) Americans made for Narendra Modi, the new PM of India, a few years back:



You can't tell me that the world is not going in a completely wrong direction.  All of us are being owned by rich cocksuckers all around the world.

[miscmisc]

Malcolm Glazer, an American billionaire whose family own Manchester United, died.

It always baffled me that the likes of Abramovich (Chelsea) got much more shit from footy fans than the Glazers.  What the latter did to Manchester United is definitely worse than what those natural resource tycoons did to their clubs and English football.  Yes, the ridiculous amount of money that those Asians/Russians pour into English football absolutely disrupts the healthy competition, which is bad, and I have no intention to defend their presence in any way.  But from the ethical point of view, what the Glazers did goes way beyond that.

I mean, shifting your own debt onto the entity that you've just purchased with the very debt, while collecting all the profits at the margin - that's typically 21th-century financial bullshit right there.  It's a totally corrupt way to make money, and the Glazers did it right in front of hundreds of millions of audience.  That's a daylight robbery, targeting YOU if you are a Manchester United fan.

Malcolm's death won't change the ownership (his children have been in charge of it lately anyway), so Manchester United will have to continue to pay down the debt for which it shouldn't have been responsible.

Just to remind you of this fact to commemorate Malcolm's death.

[newman]

May 30, 2014 13:47:32 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

Malcolm Glazer, an American billionaire whose family own Manchester United, died.

It always baffled me that the likes of Abramovich (Chelsea) got much more shit from footy fans than the Glazers.  What the latter did to Manchester United is definitely worse than what those natural resource tycoons did to their clubs and English football.  Yes, the ridiculous amount of money that those Asians/Russians pour into English football absolutely disrupts the healthy competition, which is bad, and I have no intention to defend their presence in any way.  But from the ethical point of view, what the Glazers did goes way beyond that.

I mean, shifting your own debt onto the entity that you've just purchased with the very debt, while collecting all the profits at the margin - that's typically 21th-century financial bullshit right there.  It's a totally corrupt way to make money, and the Glazers did it right in front of hundreds of millions of audience.  That's a daylight robbery, targeting YOU if you are a Manchester United fan.

Malcolm's death won't change the ownership (his children have been in charge of it lately anyway), so Manchester United will have to continue to pay down the debt for which it shouldn't have been responsible.

Just to remind you of this fact to commemorate Malcolm's death.

Evidently you're not in the UK as the Man United fans over here (and football fans in general who don't dislike United tremendously) were horrified by the Glazer takeover and how it was all financed by debt, much moreso than the sleazy dealings of Abramovich and his like.

[miscmisc]

May 31, 2014 11:03:28 GMT 1 newman said:

May 30, 2014 13:47:32 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

Malcolm Glazer, an American billionaire whose family own Manchester United, died.

It always baffled me that the likes of Abramovich (Chelsea) got much more shit from footy fans than the Glazers.  What the latter did to Manchester United is definitely worse than what those natural resource tycoons did to their clubs and English football.  Yes, the ridiculous amount of money that those Asians/Russians pour into English football absolutely disrupts the healthy competition, which is bad, and I have no intention to defend their presence in any way.  But from the ethical point of view, what the Glazers did goes way beyond that.

I mean, shifting your own debt onto the entity that you've just purchased with the very debt, while collecting all the profits at the margin - that's typically 21th-century financial bullshit right there.  It's a totally corrupt way to make money, and the Glazers did it right in front of hundreds of millions of audience.  That's a daylight robbery, targeting YOU if you are a Manchester United fan.

Malcolm's death won't change the ownership (his children have been in charge of it lately anyway), so Manchester United will have to continue to pay down the debt for which it shouldn't have been responsible.

Just to remind you of this fact to commemorate Malcolm's death.

Evidently you're not in the UK as the Man United fans over here (and football fans in general who don't dislike United tremendously) were horrified by the Glazer takeover and how it was all financed by debt, much moreso than the sleazy dealings of Abramovich and his like.

Well, I'm not (in the UK), and I'm sure you're right on the negative reactions to the Glazers.

But I don't think they truly understand the meaning of the fact that nothing could stop that deal.  I don't think they are outraged enough.

That kind of a deal is the symbol of the illness of today's financial world.  Similar deals have destroyed so many peoples' lives over these years, on a daily basis.  It's just that those destroyed companies/organizations aren't as glamorous as Manchester United, so no one other than the ones involved shed any tears over them.  Then, the Glazers, a typical money-shuffling nouveau billionaire family, came in under blindingly bright daylight and just grabbed one of the biggest names in English football with their greasy hands, with no care in the world and all the confidence that the society, and millions of fans from all over the world, have no choice other than just accepting it as a fact of life.  Indeed, all the fans and others could do was whine, while the City of London cheered for the deal.

Even more problematic is the fact that Manchester United is a rare case in which that kind of shenanigans actually do NOT destroy the entity or many people's lives.  Its global merchandise revenues have been very noticeably up.  If you momentarily forget about all the debt, nearly everything looks okay, or fine.  The visible "victims" so far are the poor fans who have been shut out of attending the games due to the inflated ticket prices, etc.  Ironically, Manchester United is probably "too big to fail" despite all the potential, and immediate problems.

But few others are as "lucky" as Manchester United, and while the fans bitch about "debt-financing", actual people are still suffering everywhere from similar deals, mainly due to the passivity of the society toward the gross bullshit that should've been illegal anywhere in the world.

It simply goes way beyond football.

[miscmisc]

Wow.  Tom Friedman @ NYT is a fucking idiot.  I know it's a redundant statement, but he truly thinks that just because Russia isn't doing enough to support the rebels in Eastern Ukraine, the so-called West "won".  Putin "blinked", he says.

The level of dumbness and idiocy displayed there is just off the chart.  It takes total ignorance not only on the geopolitics in that particular part of the world, but also on human nature in general to reach such a monumentally stupid conclusion from what has happened so far.

First of all, the assumption that Putin wants to grab the Eastern part of Ukraine, de facto or de jure.  The simple question is: why?

Why the fuck would Putin want it now?  The simple answer is: he doesn't.  I bet my entire assets on that.  Well, I feel stupid saying that, because it should be so unfuckingbelievably obvious to anyone.

It's much better for Russia to leave the region in the state of semi-chaos.  Putin is many things, but is certainly not some dumb hick who thinks Russia could afford to go too far.  He's at least smarter than the Russian "silent majority" rednecks in the countryside who despise the "liberal" urban middle-class in Moscow and enthusiastically support Putin.  The gain would be completely outweighed by all the trouble and risks that would come with it.  He doesn't want the rebels to completely die out, or actually out right win.  As a matter of fact, if Kiev manages to put all the things under control for now, it's still okay for the Kremlin, as long as the anti-Kiev sentiment remains smoldering underneath.  And Russia doesn't have to do anything to keep it that way, as the anti-Kiev sentiment over there is actually real, seemingly unbeknownst to many of the "Western" pundits.

Hell, even the new oligarch president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko (a corrupt fuck, of course), seems to understand that.  That's why he didn't hesitate to use a serious force to attack the rebels, killing scores of people, and still is in no mood to declare triumph.

Putin doesn't have to be any kind of a genius to think this way.  It's all simple, standard statesman thinking.  But of course, those American dumb asses on major newspapers think that the world is run by heroes and villains.

Look, much more important is the fact that no one even mentions Crimea anymore.  Have you seen the word in the headlines recently?  I haven't.  No one seems to make a fuss about it anymore.  Thanks to all the trouble in Eastern Ukraine, Russia managed to sweep that precious peninsula off the pages of newspapers.

Like I said, Putin "won" Crimea, and it seems that he REALLY won it.  Crimea is what he wanted, and he got it.  Mission accomplished.  The rest is much less important for now.

I'm not sure that it's a positive thing for Russia in the long run, but as someone famous said, in the long run we are all dead anyway.