Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbigelow76 | Hacker News Reader

Tough situation for the Ukrainians to be in. I wonder what Russia's response would be if the Ukrainians pulled out as demanded but then cut electrical power from the peninsula. It would put Russia in a serious bind with no shots fired.

View on HN

Well what did they expect throwing out an elected government? While it had its problems it was still the legal government, its not like Tymoshenko is better than those driven off, there are many who think she is worse.

My only concern is, why are so many in the West so keen on countries overthrowing their elected leadership? Granted most of the EU's concern is probably with natural gas, the US is probably hoping for some Putin embarrassment after the US's botched Syria approach

The election was criticised quite harshly. But that is not Russia's problem, anyway... [Or do you think elections in Europe is Russia's problem to "correct"?]

Consider the scary thing here:

To AGAIN start invading and taking pieces (Transnistria, Georgia, etc) of countries in Europe is not just small meaningless realpolitik, as you imply.

Especially since the motivation is "Protecting Germ... Russian speaking populations"... :-(

What will happen now is that the West will continue to say "Peace in our time" while starting to also rearm.

Are you seeing the obvious parallels here? You need to wait for Putin to get a moustache first? :-(

How so? Doesn't Crimea have any power plants? I would imagine there was enough power available for all the critical infastructure. Besides, wouldn't it be just the civilians suffering from that anyway? The Russian military must have plenty of generators for their own use with them.

From what I have read, although trying to find the source is proving difficult so maybe it was incorrect, all of the peninsula's electricity comes from the mainland.

Ceding Crimea to Russia may just make things more difficult to be honest. There are many other parts of eastern Ukraine that are primarily ethnic Russians and I would think Russia, at least, would consider the ceding of Crimea as justification for their further involvement.

It would also really hurt the civilian population, while not particularly hurting Russia's military. I'm impressed so far at Kiev's maturity in not rising to Russia's provocations.

But it would force Russia to deal with the actual populace instead of the government, if the region is as heavily pro-Russian as Russia claims the truth will come out real fast. Would it then be a Russian crisis or a Ukrainian crisis?

You seem certain that the truth would favor Ukraine ;) If we hypothetically assume the population ends up celebrating their liberation, how is Ukraine ever going to have any credibility demanding the region back?

However, it would lend an awful lot of legitimacy to Russia's claims of just being their to protect the people if Kiev did such a thing, while not endearing anyone in the peninsula to the Kiev based government. Kiev would prefer to have the world view this purely as an issue of sovereignty; introducing questions about the ethnic makeup of the area poses a decent argument for self determination, which Kiev would like to avoid. Of course, none of this condones Russia's actions, but someone needs to tell RT that, as they continue to spout their propaganda.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com