Wealthy and powerful who wanted us to replace Yanukovich in Ukraine are learning they were wrong.

[Chan790]

21. All meaningless...

for a country that imports in excess of 75% of its food.

They can't eat oil or natural gas so sanctions mean a starvation-purge. Who other than Europe and US has the excess-food-production to sell them that much food? Nobody. The only reason Russia doesn't appear higher on lists of food-poor nations is because those lists are generated by % of GDP and for all the food Russia imports, it's a small portion of their large GDP compared to Algeria and Libya. As I told another poster last night, this is hot air and a game of chicken for Russia. (China barely produces enough food to feed China. China cannot be Russia's breadbasket through a long embargo.)

They need to bully us out of sanctions and into a Crimean referendum because they can really only hold out for so long (months, not years) before they have to concede in-full and let Crimea go...strategic naval ports and all. I don't care what energy resources they have, the Putin regime will not survive a mass-starvation event of even a few months any more than Czar Nicholas survived the last one.