Grass isn't greener--yet! Margaret Steinfels

The inevitable story appears and it isn't pretty. It's hard to change countries. So the citizens of Crimea report in the NY Times. New laws, new bureaucrats, new plans. The locals are finding that Russian officials may not be as efficient as the ones they booted out after the referendum on March 18. And many more of them seem to be applying for passports. Which direction will they be going? Perhaps the high point of schadenfreude are the methodone users who voted for union with Russia but find their heroin alternative is illegal under Russian law and in short supply. Their rations have been halved and are likely to dry up.

Has Putin bitten off more than he can chew? Billions promised. A bridge to come. Will he be forced to annex Eastern Ukraine to relieve the delivery of everything problem? Should we expect a citizen uprising? So many things to think about!  Steinfels

Comments

[kao_hsien_chih]

Assuming that the Ukrainian government would have played ball with the Russians.

The overtly anti-Moscow stance taken by the new Kiev gov't, which, if I recall correctly, included threats of evicting Russians from Sevastopol, could easily have been seen from Moscow that these were not people whom they could deal with, at least not without teaching them a costly lesson. The justified suspicions of the large majority of the Crimean population of the powers that be in Kiev gave the Russians the means to deliver that lesson relatively easily.

Will these turn out to Russia's advantage in the long run? I don't know if we can quantify that, certainly not now and possibly not even in the future. For Moscow, the alternative would have been to let Kiev off the hook and look weak, or just delay making its move to a later, presumably less advantageous, date when Kiev would, presumably, have made the demands for vacating Sevastopol formal. Even if having to absorb Crimea were to be costly, I don't see how the Russians will have come out a net loser given the likely alternatives.

[nick b]

Fred,

I have no idea. Perhaps after losing the Democratic nomination to Malloy for governor, he had had enough. I think he went on to academia.

[Stephanie]

Hillary Clinton didn't lose an election, true, but she was beaten in the primaries and her vote was an important part of that loss. She voted for the AUMF and refused to apologize for it, thus giving the anti-war elements in the Democratic Party, who were stronger then after 8 years of Bush than they are today, a very handy club to beat her with once a viable candidate not named Clinton turned up. Obama's vote against the war in the state senate was key to his appeal.

[Margaret Steinfels]

All: We shall see. Buyers remorse is a strong emotion. But perhaps not in eastern Eastern Europe.