Without question I do believe this to be the case. If Ukraine plunges into a civil war in the near-term I can see both sides intervening as "peacekeepers" in their respective spheres of influence and essentially locking in a Solomon solution. At that point it moves into the active phase of building two competing power camps and more direct efforts to obstruct each side's advances.
America has had its fingers in the Ukrainian pie since the collapse. The name of the game in these countries for America has always been to identify the dissidents, who exist in every country, and then devote as many resources as possible to help them fundraise, organize, and campaign. I don't doubt for a moment that there are people being moved into these organizations as soon as possible who are either CIA operatives or CIA assets to manage perceptions and monitors loyalties. Outside of the covert agency power you have proxies in private NGOs and business using their networks and connections to aid in these causes. Such groups inevitably are looping in the Agency as is the case with the Shell corporation parallel state in Nigeria. His actions are another interesting question. There has been an odd frequency to see glimmers of peaceful shifts away from conflict in Ukraine suddenly ending as snipers end up shooting at both sides for no apparent reason. Perhaps Russia would engage in such false flag actions, though it seems the U.S. had more to gain. After all, what happened in Kiev on February 20th assured Yanukovich's downfall.
You make the U.S. seem so noble. Except, an aggressive foreign policy towards Russia begin in the midst of the collapse. That makes it seem less like what you say and more like a power/resource grab, which is ultimately what it is more like. As the Soviet Union collapsed we set up a banking unit through a spook bank that was essentially just about letting Russian officials and future oligarchs empty state coffers overseas into a slush fund for later use. Many of those same mafia-linked oligarchs then moved in to take over Russian industry flush with cash and made various powerful Western financiers their silent partners. Russia's crackdown on oligarchs, portrayed in Western media as a politically-motivated consolidation of power, was more directly understood as their effort to expunge a cancer of foreign corruption introduced by the proxies of Western industry and replace it with good old-fashioned domestic corruption subservient to Mother Russia. Putin's victory over the robber barons of Russia was about restoring the authority of the Russian nation over its own borders. His aggressive efforts to stamp out the Islamist insurgencies in the North Caucasus, which were also a product of covert Western machinations, was the culmination of Putin's efforts at restoring national unity. Since then he has sought to re-assert Russian authority overseas because while he was focused on the internal consolidation of power, the U.S. had pressed its gains right up to Russia's doorstep.
That is rather silly. He was not plotting some action in Ukraine before there was even a reason to plot some action in Ukraine. I do imagine he was hoping that making his involvement crucial in various issues important to the U.S. would give him some cover in the event of incidents such as this one. No doubt Russian planners have also spent years developing contingency plans depending on various outcomes in Ukraine.
The war will be over by Christmas!!!
Simpleχity;1063057390 said:
I've been to Crimea many times and I never witnessed nor heard of any "oppression". What you did have was a constant agitation by pro-Russian political parties. Even so, the current pro-Russian Crimean Prime Minister (installed by Moscow) received only 4% of the vote in the last Crimean election. With the turmoil in Kyiv, Putin saw an opportunity and pounced. Truth be told, Ukraine is better off without Crimea. It is a sinkhole economically that is now Russia's problem. As the Crimeans are about to discover, life under Russian law is very different than living in an autonomous republic. About the only population segment that will benefit are pensioners (~500,000) who will see their pension checks double in size. Tourism - which supports the peninsula - is about to take the toilet plunge that befell Egypt. There are no flights and all booked Ukrainian and foreign tour groups have cancelled. The service sector (hotels, spas, car rental agencies, souvenir shops, tour guide agencies, etc) is about to take a very significant and painful hit.