Month: March 2014

Jeremy Lott expects the peninsula’s referendum on annexation to Russia to pass:

You don’t have to buy Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public spin this was a far right coup to see why most residents of the Crimea might prefer the stability and familiar corruption of Russia to the protests and uncertainty of the Ukraine.

Russia was able to take the Crimea without firing a shot. The military has been able to hold it so far with only warning shots because Turchinov’s government is disorganized and torn. It is unwilling to risk a wider war over this pariah region, and this reluctance is only bolstering Russia’s claim.

It’s hard to gauge the sentiments of an occupied people, but many locals have spontaneously told reporters they are not unhappy with the outcome. “If the Russians weren’t here, the government of Ukraine would come and occupy us,” retired stage actor Vladimir Sukhenko told the AP. “They would make us speak Ukrainian.”

But Tomila Lankina believes the Crimeans might come to regret it:

The first point to note is that given Crimea’s strategic importance for Russia, the region is, and is very likely to remain, heavily militarized. Russian federal legislation has special provisions for governance of localities with substantial military, scientific, or strategic significance.

These entities are referred to as science cities, “Naukogrady,” closed territorial formations (Zakrytoe administratvno-territorial’noe obrazovanie), or closed military towns (Zakrytye voennye gorodki).  The Crimea and its municipalities with particular strategic significance are therefore likely to be subject to some form of direct administration or, at the very least, high levels of de facto central control over their politics and governance.

Ian Bremmer does some math and wonders whether the region is worth fighting for:

Between balancing Crimea’s budget and fulfilling its pension obligations, Ukraine shells out $1.1 billion a year to prop up its southern peninsula. And that’s not including the $3 billion investment Crimea needs to repair its crumbling infrastructure. This is all for a region with a gross product of around $4 billion—just 0.2 percent the size of Russia’s $2 trillion economy.

Posner argues that if Crimea secedes, it won’t violate international law:

Ukraine could certainly try to stop its territory from seceding–just as the United States fought to prevent the South from seceding–but if it fails, it can’t complain that the secession violates international law. Ukraine’s best argument is that the secession was driven by Russian meddling–Russia’s invasion of Crimea did violate international law, and the occupation violates Ukraine’s sovereignty. But if the referendum is free and fair, that argument will lose much of its force. Perhaps, Ukraine is owed some remedy by Russia (good luck), but that remedy could not be an injunction on Crimean secession, which would injure the Crimeans themselves.

Ilya Somin counters:

I am sympathetic to this view myself.

But even this relatively expansive vision of secession rights is not enough to justify what may soon happen in Crimea. The reason is that Crimean secession for the purpose of joining Russia is likely to result in human rights violations. It is safe to assume that Russian rule in Crimea will be at least as oppressive as it now is in Russia itself. And that rule has included numerous severe violations of human rights, including censorship of opposition speech, intimidation and imprisonment of dissidents, and persecution of gays and lesbians, among others. Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia exactly as one would expect from a former KGB officer. There is no reason to believe that he would rule Crimea any differently.

As for the rest of eastern Ukraine, Ralph S. Clem points out that it is unlikely to follow Crimea’s path:

Owing to a surge of ethnic Russian in-migration before and after World War II and population losses among Ukrainians and many of the ethnic minorities (in particular Jews and Crimean Tatars) in the interwar and World War II periods, the proportion of Russians in the oblasts of eastern Ukraine increased. Figures from the last Soviet census in 1989 reveal that the ethnic Russian component of eastern Ukraine’s population had increased to 36 percent; again, the lure was primarily jobs in the rapidly expanding coal and metallurgical complexes in the region. The ethnic Ukrainian share for eastern Ukraine dropped to 58 percent over this period. Importantly however, the first post-Soviet census count in Ukraine in 2001 showed a dramatic decrease in the number of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine — probably through a combination of low natural increase and changing self-identification from Russian to Ukrainian — and a growth in the numbers of Ukrainians, such that the Russian proportion of the region’s population dropped to just under 30 percent and the Ukrainian share grew to 66 percent. Thus, since independence, eastern Ukraine has become more Ukrainian.

Fred Kaplan thinks the sanctions the US imposed on Russia last week were a mistake:

[I]f Putin had been looking for some way out of this mess, he certainly wouldn’t be looking any longer, because de-escalating now would make it seem that he was backing down under Western pressure. Obama has had two long phone conversations with Putin in recent days, but as long as he insists on preconditions for renewed diplomacy (Putin must return his troops to their base, he must sit down with Ukrainian officials), Putin has no reason to comply. Russia has deeper interests in Ukraine than the West does—and more localized sources of pressure to make those interests felt.

That being the case, Putin can sit and wait. He has the upper hand in this game—and the more the West plays on his terms, the stronger his hand will seem. Sanctions won’t change his behavior, except to stiffen it—and once that becomes clear, Putin will seem stronger, the West will seem weaker, and a solution to the Ukraine crisis will recede in the distance.

Larison questions the utility of sanctions:

In general, trying to bludgeon another government into changing its behavior very rarely achieves anything positive, and the danger in trying this against a larger power is that it could then retaliate with punitive measures of its own. That would make the crisis harder to resolve and inflict damage on Western economies in the process, which would in turn spur demands for still harsher measures. Russia is already threatening to block inspections for the current arms reduction treaty, and it could choose to make things more difficult for the U.S. on other issues as well. Many Westerners seem very eager to demand economic punishment of Russia, but I suspect very few actually want to pay the price that could be associated with it.

Drezner approaches the issue from a different angle:

The first thing to understand about sanctioning Russia over its incursion into Crimea has nothing to do with the impact of the sanctions and everything to do with what is being demanded of Moscow. The United States wants Russia to withdraw military forces from a piece of territory they have long coveted. However much Russia has contravened international law over the past week, they’ve changed the facts on the ground. They control Crimea, and public opinion in that autonomous republic is pretty Russo-friendly. The current status quo for Russia is that they control that territory. In world politics, there is no greater demand to ask of a government than to make de facto or de jure territorial concessions. The domestic and international ramifications of such a concession are massive — especially after force was used to occupy the territory. So recognize that the demand being attached to the sanctions is so large that success is extremely unlikely.

Drum agrees:

For my money, the biggest price Putin is paying comes not from any possible sanctions, but from the very clear message he’s now sent to bordering countries who have long been suspicious of him anyway. Yes, Putin has shown that he’s not to be trifled with. At the same time, he’s also shown every one of his neighbors that he can’t be trusted. Two mini-invasions in less than a decade is plenty to ramp up their anti-Russian sentiment to a fever pitch.

Wise or not, sanctions are the most popular course of action, a new poll finds:

While almost 59 percent of Americans do support the U.S. and its allies imposing sanctions on Russia slightly over half oppose sending economic aid to Ukraine, and over 75 percent are against sending military supplies to Ukraine.

When it comes to possible military responses to the Ukraine crisis Americans are overwhelmingly opposed, with only 12 percent of respondents saying they would support having American troops on the ground in Ukraine and 17 percent saying they would support U.S. airstrikes on Russia forces in Ukraine.

Previous Dish on sanctions here, here, and here.