Will Putin Send in the Tanks? [View all]
By Bill Powell
Filed: 2/20/14 at 11:01 AM | Updated: 2/20/14 at 1:01 PM
---clip
This divide has been at Ukraine’s core for centuries. What’s unfolding now is nothing less than the violent struggle for a nation’s soul. To some current and former diplomats, what is surprising is not that Ukraine appears to be coming apart, but that it has taken this long into the post Soviet era for something like this to happen.
At its origins, more than ten centuries ago, what was known as “Kievan Russia” was, as James Billington wrote in his classic study of Russian culture, “closely linked with Western Europe—through trade and intermarriage with every important royal family of Western Christendom.”
---clip
What we’re witnessing now, make no mistake, is the latest chapter of that struggle. And it is one in which Moscow has an important, inherent and obvious advantage: Ukraine matters more to President Vladimir Putin, and Russia, than it does to Barack Obama, or German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union is the central, disastrous geopolitical fact of Putin’s life (See Newsweek cover story February 13, Putin’s Games). And among the new states that were created when the empire imploded, Ukraine was first among equals. It was, as Walter Russell Mead, professor and author at Bard College wrote recently, ``the largest and most important republic within the Soviet Union.”
If Putin dreams of reassembling a reasonable facsimile of the Soviet empire—and he does—then, as Russell wrote, ``everything pales beside the battle for Ukraine.”
more...
http://www.newsweek.com/will-putin-send-tanks-229631
= new reply since forum marked as read