How the Ukraine crisis ends

By Henry A. Kissinger

Henry A. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.

Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.

Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.

The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709 , were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet — Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean — is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.

The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities.

The Ukrainians are the decisive element. They live in a country with a complex history and a polyglot composition. The Western part was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 , when Stalin and Hitler divided up the spoils. Crimea, 60 percent of whose population is Russian , became part of Ukraine only in 1954 , when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part of the 300th-year celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks. The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other — as has been the pattern — would lead eventually to civil war or break up. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West — especially Russia and Europe — into a cooperative international system.

Ukraine has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of foreign rule since the 14th century. Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art of compromise, even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in efforts by Ukrainian politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant parts of the country, first by one faction, then by the other. That is the essence of the conflict between Viktor Yanu­kovych and his principal political rival, Yulia Tymo­shenko. They represent the two wings of Ukraine and have not been willing to share power. A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.

Russia and the West, and least of all the various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle. Each has made the situation worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military solution without isolating itself at a time when many of its borders are already precarious. For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.

Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist — on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.

Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing. Here is my notion of an outcome compatible with the values and security interests of all sides:

1. Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe.

2. Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.

3. Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the expressed will of its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country. Internationally, they should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence and cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility toward Russia.

4. It is incompatible with the rules of the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea. But it should be possible to put Crimea’s relationship to Ukraine on a less fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimea’s autonomy in elections held in the presence of international observers. The process would include removing any ambiguities about the status of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.

These are principles, not prescriptions. People familiar with the region will know that not all of them will be palatable to all parties. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.

How to Punish Putin

Ignore him. He’s running a regional power and isn’t half as smart as Cold Warriors think.

By Fred Kaplan

Forget the Cold War; let's give Putin the cold shoulder.

Here are the real lessons of the crisis in Ukraine: Russia is not a great power, and Vladimir Putin is hardly the master grand strategist that many American Cold Warriors have been weirdly eager to believe.

Or these should be the lessons that Western leaders take away and broadcast to the world. I’ve been disturbed by the Obama administration’s rhetorical response these past few days—the drumbeat that Putin is on "the wrong side of history" and that his actions will bear "costs" and "consequences"—because it’s the sort of rhetoric that can’t be meaningfully translated into action. History is not some Hegelian juggernaut arcing toward destiny, and to believe otherwise is to overestimate the force of righteous words and a little nudging. (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was said to be on the wrong side of history, yet somehow he’s still around.) As for that nudging, there are no consequences—none that Obama or European leaders could credibly threaten—that would keep Putin (or any other Russian leader) from doing whatever it took to hang on to Ukraine.

None of this is to say that we should simply shrug at Putin’s aggression. But no one should suffer any illusions about the effect that our costs and consequences will produce. Which leads to the big questions: What are we aiming for? How do we want this crisis to be settled? What can we do to get there?

The primary goal is, or should be, to make things right in Ukraine: to stabilize its economy, assure its territorial integrity, and ensure free and fair elections in May. A subset of this goal is to do all this, if possible, with Russia’s cooperation.

Two things have to be kept in mind. First, for any Russian leader in history, Ukraine is vital: as a leading market, supplier, and buffer to Western encroachment. Second, Putin really views the protests in Ukraine as the product of a Western plot to wrest the country away from Russia’s orbit. He’s wrong, but everything in his background leads him to see conspiracies, and he would have found it "no coincidence, comrades," that the initial demonstrators in Kiev were protesting then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s retreat from a closer relationship with the European Union.

Secretary of State John Kerry sent the right signals in Tuesday’s press conference in Kiev. "We’re not seeking confrontation," he said. The United States "would prefer to see this de-escalated, managed through international institutions." He said he came to Kiev to proclaim Americans’ solidarity with the Ukrainian people in their battle for rights and freedom. But he also affirmed Russia’s vital interests in Ukraine—its military base, "strong ties," and "long history"—and recognized that there will always be strong relations between the two countries.

"But," Kerry added, Ukraine’s relations with Russia "should not be at the expense of having a relation with the rest of the world." This is where the task turns delicate: How to open Ukraine to the rest of the world—a process that was underway until Yanukovych yanked it to a halt—while persuading Putin that the trend poses no threat to Russian interests?

It’s dangerous when leaders who spark armed crises start turning a little bit crazy.

The answer—maybe the only answer, the only way out of this crisis—lies in the upcoming elections. Let the Ukrainian people decide which way they want to go. Russia-leaning candidates will run, maybe one of them will even win. Certainly there’s no guarantee that the winner—or a majority of the Ukrainian people—will want to embrace the West exclusively.

A case can be made that Putin committed a huge strategic blunder in this crisis. Had he simply stood by and waited for the elections—had he used Ukrainian proxies to clamp down on the more militant protesters rather than send black-masked storm troopers to occupy the Crimean peninsula (which is under de facto Russian control and populated largely by Russian loyalists)—he probably would have won in the end. The Western nations, assured of the allegiances to democratic forms, would have backed away. Ukraine would still need Russian aid and trade to survive. Even with some movement by Ukraine toward the EU, Moscow would retain its dominance.

　

But now the West is exercised, and likely to keep watch on Ukraine for longer than usual. Many of Russia’s supporters in Ukraine now view their protector with suspicion and fear; the other members in Putin’s great dream of a "Eurasian Economic Union"—including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (the central members of the former Soviet Union)—might also be leery of what a more formal alliance with Moscow might bring.

The stress is beginning to show. At his own press conference Tuesday, Putin—who usually appears cool and confident in such forums—rambled, ranted, and indulged much more openly in dark fantasies about foreign plots. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, after talking on the phone with Putin on Sunday, that he seemed to be "in another world."

It’s dangerous when leaders who spark armed crises start turning a little bit crazy—all the more reason for President Obama and other Western leaders to step up their engagement in behind-the-scenes reassurances.

But if this doesn’t work, if Putin doesn’t go along with this "de-escalation," if he continues to see any moves toward a settlement as the advancement of a Western assault, then what? Kerry said the West would have "no choice but to expand on the steps we’ve taken in recent days in order to isolate Russia politically, diplomatically and economically."

What this would mean precisely, Kerry didn’t make clear. But I would propose focusing on the word "isolate"—and, to the extent possible, add the word "ignore."

Just as Putin is not as much in command as many Western hawks suppose, Russia is not as great a power as Putin himself likes to project. It’s at best a regional power, with no global reach. Even his incursion into Crimea is hardly an imperial gesture. Leonid Brezhnev sent five tank divisions into Czechoslovakia. (Now that was aggression!) U.S. military advisers estimate that the Russian army could invade eastern Ukraine if Putin so ordered, but they say it’s much less clear how long they could sustain an occupation, especially with even sporadic insurgent resistance.

Obama’s policy of "resetting" relations with Russia rested on two premises. First, the United States and Russia had a lot of common interests, so it would be good to solve problems and meet challenges together. Second, Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, seemed to be a more willing partner. They did accomplish a fair amount for a while. But now it’s not working much at all. Russia plays a limited role, at best, in the various hot spots the United States is facing. Yes, it’s helping to rid Syria of chemical weapons, but that’s very much in Russia’s interest; Putin would be doing that regardless of broader relations. Russia also helped carve the initial P5+1 talks to limit Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran’s main motive in continuing the talks is access to American and European economies, not Russia’s.

So, given that Russia isn’t helping out much in the world anyway, the best way to impose "costs" and "consequences" on Putin’s behavior is to ignore him.

Already, plans for a G-8 conference in Sochi are on hold. Scrap the session altogether. Maybe even hold a G-7 conference (perhaps under a different name) someplace else. (The G-7 nations have already issued a condemnation of Russia’s aggression.) Other possibilities: keep Russia out of the OECD; pull out all economic and technical advisers from Russia; encourage private investors to do the same (the uncertainty of Russia’s market, as a result of the aggression, is already having this effect to some extent); suspend all bilateral talks about … well, everything; suspend travel visas to the West for select Russian officials (this is a more delicate matter, but American and EU officials are drawing up lists).

 

All of this should take place if Russia doesn’t cooperate on Ukraine’s steps toward quasi-democratic rule. Ukraine is the main thing. It’s stupid to do nothing but poke needles in Putin’s ribs for international theater. There should be carrots and sticks in this enterprise, and if the carrots work, throw away the sticks.

The sticks I’ve outlined are a bigger deal than they might seem. Putin’s main interest, after all, is to project an image of Russia as a great and essential global power. That’s what the Sochi Olympics were all about. He spent $50 billion on that PR spectacle—an investment thoroughly nullified by his maladroit move on Crimea: another sign that Putin is not as brilliant as the Cold Warriors think

Sherwin B. Nuland, ‘How We Die’ Author, Dies at 83


By DENISE GELLENE NY TIMES

Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, a surgeon and author who drew on more than 35 years in medicine and a childhood buffeted by illness in writing "How We Die," an award-winning book that sought to dispel the notion of death with dignity and fueled a national conversation about end-of-life decisions, died on Monday at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter Amelia Nuland said.

To Dr. Nuland, death was messy and frequently humiliating, and he believed that seeking the good death was pointless and an exercise in self-deception. He maintained that only an uncommon few, through a lucky confluence of circumstances, reached life’s end before the destructiveness of dying eroded their humanity.

"I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die," he wrote. "The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail."

In "How We Die, " published in 1994, Dr. Nuland described in frank detail the processes by which life succumbs to violence, disease or old age. Arriving amid an intense moral and legal debate over physician-assisted suicide — perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the concept of a dignified death — the book tapped into a deep national desire to understand the nature of dying, which, as Dr. Nuland observed, increasingly took place behind the walls of the modern hospital. It won a National Book Award.

Dr. Nuland wrote that his intention was to demythologize death, making it more familiar and therefore less frightening, so that the dying might approach decisions regarding their care with greater knowledge and more reasonable expectations. The issue has only intensified since the book was published, and has been discussed and debated in the medical world, on campuses, in the news media and among politicians and government officials engaged in health care policy.

"The final disease that nature inflicts on us will determine the atmosphere in which we take our leave of life," he wrote, "but our own choices should be allowed, insofar as possible, to be the decisive factor in the manner of our going."

 

Beyond its descriptions of ruptured embolisms, spreading metastases and bodily functions run amok, "How We Die" was a criticism of a medical profession that saw death as an enemy to be engaged, frequently beyond the point of futility.

In chiding physicians, Dr. Nuland pointed the finger at himself, confessing that on more than one occasion he persuaded dying patients to accept aggressive treatments that intensified their suffering and robbed them of an easier death. One of those patients was his brother, Harvey, an accountant who died of colon cancer in 1990 after receiving an experimental treatment with no reasonable chance of success.

Looking back on that episode, Dr. Nuland wrote that he had mistakenly tried to give his brother hope, failing to acknowledge that disease, not death, was the true nemesis.

He was born Shepsel Ber Nudelman on Dec. 8, 1930, in the Bronx, the son of Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. (He adopted the first and middle names Sherwin Bernard when he went to kindergarten.) His childhood was spent in a tiny South Bronx apartment with his parents, his older brother, his maternal grandmother and a maiden aunt, in an atmosphere permeated with sickness and death.

A brother died before Dr. Nuland was born, and at age 3, he was hospitalized for diphtheria. His mother, the emotional center of his family, died of colon cancer when he was 11. In his memoir, "Lost in America" (2003), he recalled with striking vividness the bad smells and bloody pads that came from his mother’s room.

 

Dr. Nuland’s adolescent years were dominated by his father, Meyer Nudelman, a garment worker who was incapacitated by chronic illness, physical infirmities and his resistance to a new way of life. He terrified the family with his explosive rages, never learned to read or write English — Yiddish was the predominant language at home — and could not walk more than a short distance without his son’s help.

Dr. Nuland regarded him with fear and shame, emotions that would take a deep psychological toll later in his life.

While still in high school, Dr. Nuland and his older brother changed their names from Nudelman, separating themselves from a weak, angry man who, Dr. Nuland wrote, represented "everything I so desperately wanted to be rid of." They chose a name first adopted by a cousin, Willie Nuland, a physician who looked after the boys’ parents when they were ill, and whose compassion and competence pointed Dr. Nuland toward his career.

Dr. Nuland received his bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1951 and went on to study medicine at Yale, attracted by its distance — geographically and culturally — from the old-world Jewishness in which he grew up. Reading about spinal cord diseases as a medical student, Dr. Nuland discovered that his father’s crippling illness was tertiary, or chronic, syphilis. Dr. Nuland felt anger, and then pity. "I now had some perception of the tragedy of his life," he wrote in his memoir.

 

Dr. Nuland received his medical degree from Yale in 1955. Electing to specialize in surgery, he set his sights on becoming chief surgical resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital, entering a Darwinian competition for a position seldom occupied by Jews. In 1958, Dr. Nuland won the coveted appointment. Four days later, his father died of complications of syphilis. Mr. Nudelman never knew the source of what led to his father’s death.

"I think that one time, before he was married, Meyer Nudelman was very unlucky," Dr. Nuland said in a 2003 interview with The New York Times.

Mr. Nudelman’s death fulfilled Dr. Nuland’s wish to escape his father, but instead of liberation, he felt intense guilt and shame. Plagued by feelings of unworthiness, he felt himself becoming his father, assuming Mr. Nudelman’s hunched shoulders and shuffling gait.

By his early 40s, his depression had become so severe that he was institutionalized for more than a year. Senior psychiatrists recommended a lobotomy, but they were overruled by the young resident psychiatrist who had been assigned to his case, who insisted on electroshock therapy. By early 1974, it was clear that the treatment had been a success, and as Dr. Nuland recovered, according to his memoir, he started to make peace with his father and, perhaps, himself.

Dr. Nuland’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 1977, he married Sarah Peterson, an actress and director. Besides his wife, survivors include two children from his first marriage, Victoria Jane Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Andrew; two children from his second marriage, Amelia and William; and four grandchildren.

From 1962 until 1991, he was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, where he also taught bioethics and medical history. He was a surgeon at Yale-New Haven from 1962 to 1992, when he retired to write full time.

Dr. Nuland’s books include "Doctors: The Biography of Medicine" (1988), "The Wisdom of the Body" (1997), "The Doctors’ Plague" (2003) and "The Uncertain Art" (2008). He was a contributing editor to The American Scholar and The New Republic.

"How We Die," which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1994 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 1995, has sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. In its concluding chapter, Dr. Nuland confessed that he, like many of his readers, desired a death without suffering "surrounded by the people and the things I love," though he hastened to add that his odds were slim. This brought him to a final question.

"And so, if the classic image of dying with dignity must be modified or even discarded," he wrote, "what is to be salvaged of our hope for the final memories we leave to those who love us? The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives."

A History Lesson That Needs Relearning

By SAM TANENHAUS NY TIMES

　

Think Back: Obama's Cold War

In addressing crises in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, President Obama seems to be drawing on the memory of old-time superpower struggles, says Sam Tanenhaus.

SUDDENLY the specter of the Cold War is back. Prompted by the political crisis in Ukraine, some conservatives have called for President Obama to stand up to Vladimir V. Putin in the grand tradition of previous American presidents who stared eyeball to eyeball with Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Mr. Obama came close on Friday. Responding to reports of Russian mobilization, he said, "There will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine."

His critics acknowledge that times have changed. "No one wants a new Cold War," a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, before going on to imply the opposite, that Mr. Obama could prevent a civil war in Eastern Europe "if he finally admits Vladimir Putin’s hostility to a free and democratic Europe and clearly tells protesting Ukrainians that we’re on their side."

Such a sentiment inevitably conjures John F. Kennedy’s "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech before a crowd in West Berlin in 1963, or Ronald Reagan, on a visit there in 1987, urging the Soviets to "tear down this wall."

More echoes of the Cold War surfaced in recent reports that Russia has been violating nuclear arms accords dating back to the Reagan years and alarmed reactions to the news of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s proposal to reduce the United States Army to a level not seen since before World War II.

Even Mr. Obama seemed to be drawing on the collective memory of old-time superpower struggles when he insisted recently that his administration’s approach to Ukraine was "not to see this as some Cold War chessboard in which we are in competition with Russia."

That image of a chessboard — an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy — has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones.

Born in tandem with the nuclear age, the Cold War was defined from the outset less by outright confrontation than by caution. And with caution came adjustment, compromise, improvisation and at times retreat. As often as not, both sides blinked.

The term surfaced in 1947, in Walter Lippmann’s book "The Cold War," whose title was derived from a phrase "used in Europe during the late 1930s to characterize Hitler’s war of nerves against the French, sometimes described as la guerre blanche or la guerre froide," as Ronald Steel wrote in his book "Walter Lippmann and the American Century."

Lippmann, a dean of foreign policy realism, argued that policy should be made in the spirit of pragmatism, rather than as a global crusade against Communism that would require the headache, or worse, of "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets."

In fact the costliest maneuvers — chess-piece gambits in Korea and Vietnam — backfired, increasing tensions abroad even as they shook public confidence at home.

Overheated rhetoric often contributed to trouble. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected on a Republican platform that promised to replace the Communist containment strategy of President Harry S. Truman with a more aggressive "liberation" policy that would seize the initiative from the Soviet Union.

Yet throughout his two terms, Eisenhower consistently opted for stability over conflict. Arriving in Geneva for a summit with Nikita S. Khrushchev in July 1955, Eisenhower said he came bearing "the goodwill of America" and "the aspirations of America for peace."

A year later, when Moscow sent two Red Army tank divisions to quell anti-Communist protesters in Budapest, killing as many as 30,000 people, the cry went up for action. "What are the West and the United Nations going to do?" one despairing protester asked an American reporter.

The answer: nothing. Counteraction would only provoke Moscow to tighten its noose and perhaps "go back on de-Stalinization," Eisenhower explained.

To some this sounded like retreat. John W. McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused the Eisenhower administration of appeasement and said it was living in "a dream world" that was emboldening the Soviets.

A similar tone was struck recently when Senator John McCain said Mr. Obama was "the most naïve president in American history," blind to the reality that Mr. Putin "wants to restore the Russian empire." That second charge was also made (by Lippmann, among others) of Stalin and his successors.

Still, it did not stop Eisenhower from inviting Khrushchev to the United States in 1959, again angering conservatives, who mounted protests during the visit.

Later presidents followed Eisenhower’s example. Even the most celebrated war of nerves, the Cuban missile crisis, was resolved by a secret bargain: The Soviets agreed not to place missiles in Cuba, and the Kennedy administration agreed to remove missiles it had placed in Turkey.

Another cold warrior, Richard M. Nixon, got the country out of the Vietnam War and also cut deals with the Soviets, including an accord that reduced both nations’ stockpile of nuclear missiles.

Or consider the most hallowed of Republican Cold War presidents, Ronald Reagan. Early in his first term, he too faced a Ukraine-like emergency when the Solidarity movement was crushed in Poland. Many expected a powerful response. Instead he showed restraint. He voiced sympathy for the movement, but the assistance he provided came quietly — and covertly, in part — through money and communications equipment funneled to anti-Communists. Eventually, Poland and other Soviet satellites were freed, but the change was partly made possible after Reagan realized he could negotiate with Mr. Gorbachev.

Calculations like these are the true prologue to the approach that Mr. Obama seems to have adopted in trouble spots from Syria to Ukraine. Like Nixon, he wound down a war he inherited, this time in Iraq, just as his reliance on drones and cyberwarfare parallels Eisenhower’s avoidance of military operations. And his ambition to eliminate nuclear arsenals builds on the efforts of both Nixon and Reagan.

Perhaps it’s time the chessboard metaphor was retired. The truth is that the Cold War was less a carefully structured game between masters than a frightening high-wire act, with leaders on both sides aware that a single misstep could plunge them into the abyss.

Putin Goes to War

Posted by David Remnick

THE NEW YORKER

 

 

 
Vladimir Putin, the Russian President and autocrat, had a plan for the winter of 2014: to reassert his country’s power a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He thought that he would achieve this by building an Olympic wonderland on the Black Sea for fifty-one billion dollars and putting on a dazzling television show. It turns out that he will finish the season in a more ruthless fashion, by invading a peninsula on the Black Sea and putting on quite a different show—a demonstration war that could splinter a sovereign country and turn very bloody, very quickly.

Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist and pro-democracy activist who was recently detained by the police in Moscow, described the scenario taking shape as “Afghanistan 2.” He recalled, for Slon.ru, an independent Russian news site, how the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, under the pretext of helping a “fraternal” ally in Kabul; to Parkhomenko, Putin’s decision to couch his military action as the “protection” of Russians living in Crimea is an equally transparent pretext. The same goes for the decorous way in which Putin, on Saturday, “requested” the Russian legislature’s authorization for the use of Russian troops in Ukraine until “the socio-political situation is normalized.” The legislature, which has all the independence of an organ grinder’s monkey, voted its unanimous assent.

Other critics of Putin’s military maneuvers in Ukraine used different, but no less ominous, historical analogies. Some compared the arrival of Russian troops in Simferopol to the way that the Kremlin, in 2008, took advantage of Georgia’s reckless bid to retake South Ossetia and then muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended with Russia taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In a recent Letter from Sochi, I tried to describe Putin’s motivations: his resentment of Western triumphalism and American power, after 1991; his paranoia that Washington is somehow behind every event in the world that he finds threatening, including the recent events in Kiev; his confidence that the U.S. and Europe are nonetheless weak, unlikely to respond to his swagger because they need his help in Syria and Iran; his increasingly vivid nationalist-conservative ideology, which relies, not least, on the elevation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been so brutally suppressed during most of the Soviet period, as a quasi-state religion supplying the government with its moral force.

Obama and Putin spoke on the phone today for an hour and a half. The White House and Kremlin accounts of the call add up to what was clearly the equivalent of an angry standoff: lectures, counter-lectures, intimations of threats, intimations of counter-threats. But the leverage, for now, is all with Moscow.

The legislators in the Russian parliament today parroted those features of modern Putinism. In order to justify the invasion of the Crimean peninsula, they repeatedly cited the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” in Kiev helping Russia’s enemies. They repeatedly echoed the need to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin’s rhetoric about Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the fall of the Soviet Union, in December, 1991.

If this is the logic of the Russian invasion, the military incursion is unlikely to stop in Crimea: nearly all of eastern Ukraine is Russian-speaking. Russia defines its interests far beyond its Black Sea fleet and the Crimean peninsula.

Marina Korolyova, the deputy editor of the liberal radio station Echo of Moscow, told Slon.ru, “I am the daughter of a military officer who went in with the troops that invaded Czechoslovakia, in 1968. Today’s decision of the President and the Federation Council—I feel the pain personally. It is shameful. Shameful.”

It is worth noting that, in Moscow, the modern dissident movement was born in 1968, when four brave protesters went to Red Square and unfurled a banner denouncing the invasion of Prague. Those demonstrators are the heroes of, among other young Russians, the members of the punk band Pussy Riot. This is something that Putin also grasps very well. At the same time that he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet, his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic mercy has come to an end.

It’s also worth noting that, in 1968, Moscow was reacting to the “threat” of the Prague Spring and to ideological liberalization in Eastern Europe; in 1979, the Kremlin leadership was reacting to the upheavals in Kabul. The rationale now is far flimsier, even in Moscow’s own terms. The people of the Crimean peninsula were hardly under threat by “fascist gangs” from Kiev. In the east, cities like Donetsk and Kharkov had also been quiet, though that may already be changing. That’s the advantage of Putin’s state-controlled television and his pocket legislature; you can create any reality and pass any edict.

I spoke with Georgy Kasianov, the head of the Academy of Science’s department of contemporary Ukrainian history and politics, in Kiev. “It’s a war,” he said. “The Russian troops are quite openly out on the streets [in Crimea], capturing public buildings and military outposts. And it’s likely all a part of a larger plan for other places: Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson. And they’ll use the same technique. Some Russian-speaking citizens will appear, put up a Russian flag, and make appeals that they want help and referendums, and so on.” This is already happening in Donetsk and Kharkov.

“They are doing this like it is a commonplace,” Kasianov went on. “I can’t speak for four million people, but clearly everyone in Kiev is against this. But the Ukrainian leadership is absolutely helpless. The Army is not ready for this. And, after the violence in Kiev, the special forces are disoriented.”

Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West. As it happens so often in these situations—from Tahrir Square to Taksim Square to Maidan Square—people were taken up with the thrill of uprising. After Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, the coverage moved to what one might call the “golden toilet” stage of things, that moment when the freedom-hungry crowds discover the fallen leader’s arrangements and bountiful holdings—the golden bathroom fixtures; the paintings and the tapestries; the secret mistress; the lurid bedrooms and freezers stocked with sweetmeats; the surveillance videos and secret transcripts; the global real-estate holdings; the foreign bank accounts; the fleets of cars, yachts, and airplanes; the bad taste, the unknown cruelties.

The English-language Kyiv Post published a classic in the genre when it reported how journalists arriving at the “inner sanctum” of the mansion where Yanukovych had lived in splendor discovered that he had been cohabiting not with his wife of four decades but, rather, with—and try not to faint—a younger woman. It “appears” that Yanukovych had been living there with a spa owner named Lyubov (which means “love”) Polezhay. “The woman evidently loves dogs and owns a white Pomeranian spitz that was seen in the surveillance camera’s footage of Yanukovych leaving” the mansion.

But that was trivia. Masha Lipman, my colleague in Moscow, sketched out in stark and prescient terms some of the challenges facing Ukraine, ranging from the divisions within the country to the prospect of what Putin might do rather than “lose” Ukraine.

Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own people. He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don, in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004, failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy, while another country has troops on its territory?

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian politician who no longer holds office, said that the events were not only dangerous for Ukraine but ominous for Russia and the man behind them. “It’s quite likely that this will be fatal for the regime and catastrophic for Russia,” he told Slon.ru. “It just looks as if they have taken leave of their senses.”

　

Thoughts on the Ukraine Situation

Josh Marshall TPM

Unquestionably, we've got a dangerous and unpredictable situation unfolding in Ukraine - and a taste of the reinforcing mix of authoritarian tendencies and aggressive behavior that has persistently characterized Russia through the eras of autocracy to totalitarianism and on to the present one of pseudo-democracy. That said, we shouldn't be blind to the downsides of the current situation for Russia.

Lets say that Russia proceeds and formally annexes Crimea and perhaps goes ahead and slices off the most Russified eastern portions of Ukraine. Setting aside relations with the US, that will undoubtedly spawn a new and darker era in relations with the rest of Europe and a post-partition Ukraine that is hyper-European in its posture both because of renewed Russian aggression and a transformed composition of Ukrainian and Russian percentages of the population. That's a bad development for everyone, not least Ukraine obviously. It would reintroduce militarized borders into Europe for the first time in 25 years after a generation in which the aim has been to keep often arbitrarily drawn borders in place and focus on making them less important through economic and political integration. But it's hard to see how it's not a worse development for Russia.

Putin's main aim in Ukraine has been to secure its entry to his Euroasian Union, a counter agglomeration to the European Union, based on autocratic post-Soviet regimes stretching from Europe into Asia. Putin has made it clear that the value of the whole enterprise hinges on Ukraine being in, not out. After coming close to securing a Ukraine permanently aligned with Russia, Russia settles for slice Russified Ukraine at the expense of a permanently hostile post-partition Ukraine basically forever. Yes, Putin's mentality (and let's be fair, Russia's) is that it is better to be feared than loved. But the Sochi games are a good example of his willingness to spend vast resources to be, if not loved, than admired as a great power peer state on the global stage. Russian businesses that operate in Europe would also suffer across the board.

There is of course the possibility that Putin's aim is to grab chits on the ground that could later be traded for a Finlandization of all of Ukraine or some international agreement akin to Austria's status after World War II. If history is any example (and I mean here not Russian or even European history but history in general) states usually have a less clear idea of what they want or what they can get than we imagine from the outside. This is always a point that is extremely important to bear in mind.

Much as people carp about the insufficiency of President Obama's response, the entirety of this crisis is governed by the fact that the US has no viable military options and Russia does. (A good example for the United States of why it is important to cultivate sources of strength other than purely military ones.) We know that; Putin knows that. It is difficult to overstate the ease with which Russia can take possession of the Crimean Peninsula since, in effect, it already has possession. It's the home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet. And the peninsula is riddled with Russian military installations, as part of an uneasy post-Soviet accommodation in which Ukraine leases Soviet-era bases to Russia.

I don't agree with the suggestion of this piece in the Telegraph - that it may better for Ukraine to agree to a partition on diplomatic terms rather than face military occupation. But it's right that the post-Soviet history of Ukraine has been marked by neither the country's east nor west being able to successfully or sustainedly unite the country.

The crux of current crisis, or the central issues at stake, is not which slabs of land, in the abstract, should be part of Ukraine or Russia but that borders shouldn't be changed by force or the threat of force. Crimea's current status is the result of a Russian invasion almost a quarter of a millennium ago and a totally arbitrary reassignment of the region from the Russia SSR to the Ukraine SSR in 1954. If history were our guide, the people with the bigger beef or demand for recompense aren't the people in Kiev but the Tatars, Greeks and other ethnic minorities (what's left of them) who were expelled en masse from Crimea after World War II.

But the wise course of the post-Cold War Era has been to recognize that history has too many cross-cutting injustices and historic claims to let it be a guide. We take the borders as we find them and try to find future justice and equity within them - often by diminishing their importance. The great exception to this rule - or in some ways its greatest confirmation - is the partition of the former Czechoslovakia since it was done entirely by mutual consent of the parties involved, the geopolitical equivalent of an amicable divorce.

There is of course the possibility that Putin may have in mind the occupation of most or all of Ukraine. But this is difficult to envision. Not only would the international response be ferocious. More importantly, recent events have shown that sustaining and normalizing such an occupation in the vast portions of the country where ethnic Ukrainians predominate would be difficult and debilitating.

The real levers Obama or more specifically the US and Europe have are the ability to make the price of a Russian land grab some version of international pariah status, through a mix of economic and diplomatic exclusion. Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas and oil significantly complicates that option. But the combined economic might of the US and the EU is vast in comparison to Russia's. There are numerous areas of military cooperation, participation in international institutions, venues where Russia enjoys observer status, where the US and the EU can put the screws to Russia. The US should also be sending visible signals that the participation in Europe of countries like Poland is permanent. Indeed, we are treaty-bound to that proposition. These are powerful tools. Let's hope it's used wisely.

Kremlin Clears Way for Force in Ukraine; Separatist Split Feared

By ALISON SMALE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN NY TIMES


　

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Russian armed forces effectively seized cont

rol of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula on Saturday, as President Vladimir V. Putin had the Russian Parliament grant him broad authority to use military force in Ukraine in response to deepening instability there.

Russian troops stripped of identifying insignia and military vehicles bearing the black license plates of Russia’s Black Sea force swarmed the major thoroughfares of Crimea and occupied major government buildings, closing the main airport and solidifying what had been a covert effort to control the largely pro-Russian region of Ukraine.

In Moscow, Mr. Putin convened the upper house of Parliament to forcefully denounce President Obama and obtain authorization to protect Russian citizens and soldiers stationed in Crimea as well as other parts of Ukraine.

Both actions, military and parliamentary, were a direct rebuff to Mr. Obama, who on Friday pointedly warned Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. In the south, in Crimea, scores of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across the center of the regional capital, Simferopol. They wore green camouflage uniforms with no identifying insignia, but they spoke Russian and were clearly part of a Russian military mobilization. In Balaklava, a long column of military vehicles blocking the road to a border post bore Russian plat

Launch media viewer Armed men guard a government building in Simferopol, in the Crimea region of Ukraine on Saturday. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Large pro-Russia crowds rallied in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv, where there were reports of violence. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, fears grew within the new provisional government that separatist upheaval would fracture the country just days after a three- month period of civil unrest had ended with the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally who fled to Russia.

President Obama accused Russia of a "breach of international law" and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a "clear violation" of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Mr. Obama, who had warned Russia on Friday that "there will be costs" if Russia violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, spoke with Mr. Putin for 90 minutes on Saturday, according to the White House, and urged Mr. Putin to withdraw its forces back to its bases in Crimea and to stop "any interference" in other parts of Ukraine.

　

In a strongly worded statement after the call, the White House said the United States would immediately pull out of preparations for the G8 economic summit meeting scheduled for Sochi in June. The statement warned of "greater political and economic isolation" for Russia if the country’s "violation of international law" continued.

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron said that "there can be no excuse for outside military intervention" in Ukraine. "Everyone must think carefully about their actions and work to lower, not escalate, tension. The world is watching."

Mr. Yanukovych’s refusal, under Russian pressure, to sign new political and free trade agreements with the European Union last fall set off the civil unrest that last month led to the deaths of more than 80 people, and ultimately unraveled his presidency.

While Western leaders grappled for a response on Saturday, a Ukrainian military official in Crimea said Ukrainian soldiers had been told to "open fire" if they came under attack by Russia troops or others.

In addition to the risk of open war, it was a day of frayed nerves and set-piece political appeals that recalled ethnic conflicts of past decades in the former Soviet bloc, from the Balkans to the Caucasus.

On Saturday morning, the pro-Russia prime minister of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, declared that he had sole control over the military and the police in the disputed peninsula and appealed to Mr. Putin for Russian help in safeguarding the region. He also said a public referendum on independence would be held on March 30

The Kremlin has denied any attempt to seize Crimea, where it maintains important military installations, including the headquarters of its Black Sea Fleet. But the Kremlin quickly issued a statement saying that Mr. Aksyonov’s plea "would not be ignored," and within hours the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, had authorized military action.

The authorization, while citing Crimea, covered the use of Russian forces in the entire "territory of Ukraine," and its time frame extended indefinitely "until the normalization of the sociopolitical environment in the country." Parliament also asked Mr. Putin to withdraw Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Officials in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, reacted angrily and reiterated their demands that Russia pull back its forces, and confine them to the military installations in Crimea that Russia has long leased from Ukraine.

"The presence of Russian troops in Crimea now is unacceptable," said acting Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk. Decrying the Russian deployment as a "provocation," he added, "We call on the government of the Russian Federation to immediately withdraw its troops, return to the place of deployment and stop provoking civil and military confrontation in Ukraine."

Sergey Tigipko, a former deputy prime minister of Ukraine and one-time ally of Mr. Yanukovych, and still an influential member of Parliament, said he flew to Moscow in hopes of negotiating a truce.

For the new government, the tensions in Crimea created an even more dire and immediate emergency than the looming financial disaster that they had intended to focus on in their first days in office.

A $15 billion bailout that Mr. Yanukovych secured from Russia has been suspended as a result of the political upheaval and Ukraine is in desperate need of an assistance package. Mr. Yatsenyuk had said that the government’s first responsibility was to begin negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and start to put in place the economic reforms and painful austerity measures that the fund has requested in exchange for help.

In Crimea, however, officials said they did not recognize the new government, and declared that they had taken control.

Mr. Aksyonov, the regional prime minister, said he was ordering the regional armed forces, the Interior Ministry troops, the Security Service, border guards and other ministries under his direct control.

He added, "I ask anyone who disagrees to leave the service."

As soldiers mobilized across the peninsula, the region’s two main airports were closed, with civilian flights canceled, and they were guarded by heavily armed man in military uniforms.

Similar forces surrounded the regional Parliament building and the rest of the government complex in downtown Simferopol, as well as numerous other strategic locations, including communication hubs and a main bus station.

Adding to the strange tableau, a crowd of about 400 people gathered near the Parliament building in Simferopol to denounce the United States.

One elderly woman held up a photo of President Obama with a red line through it and the caption "Yankee Go Home." She then helped lead part of the crowd in a chant of "Yankees Go Home."

Near the entrance to Balaklava, the site of a Ukrainian customs and border post near Sevastopol, the column of military vehicles with Russian plates included 10 troop trucks, with 30 soldiers in each, two military ambulances and five armored vehicles. The column was not moving.

Soldiers, wearing masks and carrying automatic rifles, stood on the road keeping people away from the convoy, while some local residents gathered in a nearby square waving Russian flags and shouting, "Russia! Russia!"

As with the troops in downtown Simferopol, the soldiers did not have markings on their uniforms. They would not say where they were from.

There were also other unconfirmed reports of additional Russian military forces arriving in Crimea, including Russian ships landing in Fedosiya, in eastern Crimea.

On Friday, American officials said that they had confirmed reports of Russian troop deployments in Crimea including special forces and specially trained marine and airborne units. Ilyushin transport planes were said to have ferried in troops and there were reports of Russian helicopter flights.

Crimea, while part of Ukraine, has enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under an agreement with the federal government in Kiev since shortly after Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union.

The strategically important peninsula, which has been the subject of military disputes for centuries, has strong historic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia. The population of roughly two million is predominantly Russian, followed by a large number of Ukrainians, and Crimean Tatars, people of Turkic-Muslim origin.

Meanwhile, outpourings of pro-Russia sentiment were also underway in eastern Ukraine.

In Kharkiv, pro-Russian demonstrators rallied and then seized control of a government building, pulled down the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag and raised the blue, white and red Russian one. Scores of people were injured as protesters scuffled with supporters of the new government in Kiev.

In Donetsk, a crowd of several thousand people held a rally in the city-center, local news agencies reported, with many chanting pro-Russian slogans and demanding a public referendum on secession from Ukraine.

There were also signs on Saturday of concern among Ukrainian business leaders over an effort by several European countries, including Austria and Switzerland, to freeze Mr. Yanukovych’s assets as well as those of his family members and other prominent associates.

On Friday, Mr. Yanukovych held a news conference at a shopping mall in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where he insisted that he was still the legitimate president of Ukraine and planned to return.

Alison Smale reported from Simferopol, and David M. Herszenhorn from Kiev, Ukraine. Reporting was contributed by Noah Sneider and Patrick Reevell from Simferopol; Andrew Higgins from Sevastopol, Ukraine; Andrew Roth from Moscow; and Michael R. Gordon from Washington