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Twitter / secupp: An interesting readout on Crimea

An interesting readout on Crimea and Putin's outwitting play: NYT: What Putin Really Wants http://nyti.ms/1dp71Sz

What Putin Really Wants - NYTimes.com

THE decision of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to send forces into Crimea provoked a hysterical reaction, but his motives are less ambitious than is commonly assumed.

Mr. Putin’s aim is not a de jure separation of Crimea from the rest of Ukraine. That would be legally problematic and disadvantageous to Moscow in terms of its future influence over Ukrainian politics. The purpose of Russia’s incursion was to obtain the greatest possible autonomy for Crimea while still retaining formal Ukrainian jurisdiction over the peninsula.

The final act in Mr. Putin’s calculated gambit is likely to be a return of Yulia V. Tymoshenko to power. It was, after all, Ms. Tymoshenko, not Mr. Yanukovych, who enjoyed Moscow’s de facto support in the Ukrainian elections of 2010; and in later years, Mr. Putin expressed his strong displeasure with her prosecution by Mr. Yanukovych’s government. Although she was released from prison last month, Ms. Tymoshenko was hardly celebrated by the Ukrainian ultranationalists in control of the Maidan. Now it seems that her hour has arrived.

Mr. Putin’s threat of invading Ukraine makes Ms. Tymoshenko the only national leader with the authority and capability to forge an agreement with Russia. Having made a string of the appropriate patriotic statements, Ms. Tymoshenko has already announced her readiness to talk to Mr. Putin “for Ukraine’s sake.” She is likely to return triumphant, having “stopped” the invasion of the “Russian horde,” and even with some Russian financial aid.

The net result of yet another Ukrainian revolution will be de facto Russian control of Crimea, and a Kiev government commercially and personally bound to Mr. Putin. A weaker and more destabilized Ukraine will continue zigzagging between East and West, until the next cycle of tumultuous Ukrainian politics arrives.

The losers will be those simpletons of international politics ― including the United States ― who mistook the clashes of some Ukrainian neo-Nazis with Mr. Yanukovych’s police force for the dawning of democracy and the beginning of a Ukrainian Spring.