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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

They have no chance of winning. Putin will not stop until he gets what he's after, he's a power dictator. When you play by the rules you get beaten by someone who cares little for nice rules.

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I'm pretty sure that most countries, when invaded by a foreign power, would mobilize their armed forces regardless of what the odds appear to be. Defending a nation's frontiers is what armed forces are for.

They didn't win Georgia, what makes you think they will be able to conquer Ukraine, a much larger country? At best for Russia, they'll manage to turn Ukraine into another Syria. But they'll never conquer it.

The question is, what are Russians going to do with a Syria-like Ukraine? This whole action seems rather pointless and like a very emotional decision, rather than a rational one.

> They didn't win Georgia

Hahaha... so cute. Your TV simply forgot to tell you that Georgian president was replaced shortly after that farce of a war and Georgia is now again Russia's best friend and ally. They won big time. They will do the same in Ukraine, just give it time.

I don't think they want all of Ukraine, just the Crimean peninsula. Socially and geographically, this is a different situation than Georgia, where ethic Russians are a small minority and the borders are large as opposed to a relatively small choke point on the peninsula.

I think they will pull this off unless massive international pressure comes to bear on Russia AND they decide give a damn about how the world feels.

What rules? Is there a rule that says if you have enough guns and people and can storm the parliament you can usurp a democratically elected president?

Not saying you're wrong but there are many issues with "democracy" in states under Russian control. Yanukovych's main opponent during his first stint as a presidential candidate was "miraculously" poisoned. Federal units within Russia that are clearly against Russian rule regularly give 100% of all their votes to Putin during "democratic" elections (with turnouts reaching above 100%), and so on and so on.

Sure, there are these problems with Chechen region (not Ukrain). But the last presidential elections of Yanukovich, because of the 2004 fiasco, were extremely closely watched by very many groups and were internationally acknowledged as legitimate.

The oldest rule in the world:

http://www.dict.cc/german-english/Faustrecht.html

Doesn't make it right, but we're about to see it in action.

"Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do" -- Thucydides, 431 BC

If the majority of the people agree that they no longer want the elected president to be their president and he does not follow this request, they definitely have the right to remove him. What I don't know is if their was actually a majority in the Ukraine.

They don't. You don't know if they do. The majority of people who voted for Yanukovich are the people in the east, pretty far from Kiev. It is THOSE people, in Crimea, and the rest of the east, who are not acknowledging new Kiev revolutionaries. It is the act of allowing this revolution to transpire, as opposed to a democratic process, that is really inviting war and division.

If they waited a year and then elected a pro-Western president, none of this would have happened.

The people are the state. Whatever the majority of the people wants is what the government has to do. So IMHO the right thing to do in such a situation is to conduct an out of order referendum to establish what the majority wants (and I would argue it should be a clear majority like 2:1 to justify exceptional measures) and if the majority agrees that they want to replace their elected president immediately then the president has to resign immediately. If he does not follow the will of the majority, the people have the right to remove him with force. I am of course aware that it might be quiet hard to conduct a representative referendum about a highly controversial topic and probably even without support of the current government.

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