How Bad Might It Get In Ukraine?
Mar 17 2014 @ 2:20pm
by Jonah Shepp
Very bad, says Paul Hockenos, who
compares the situation today to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s:
[A]nyone who followed the unfolding of the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo is surely horrified today by the dynamics between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian leadership, the people of Crimea, and citizens in the rest of Ukraine. The similarities to the Balkans of the 1990s are, in many ways, striking: Just as Serbia and Croatia cynically exploited the presence of their compatriots outside the borders of their republics, so too is Putin manipulating the welfare of the Russophone Crimeans as justification for cross-border military operations, the seizure of territory, and a phoney referendum. As in the Balkans, the media has been turned into the mouthpiece of extreme nationalists. Once again, there’s inadequate security architecture to defuse tensions; and then there’s the radicalization of nationalism which, when fanned so fiercely, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and, in the Balkans, led to Europe’s worst bloodshed since World War II.
Alexander Motyl
fears ethnic strife in Crimea:
Unsurprisingly, Ukrainians are terrified by Putin’s warmongering. A friend in Lviv, which is as far as one can be from Ukraine’s eastern border (or is it front?) with Russia, tells me that “people are petrified and believe war is inevitable.” So are Crimean Tatars, whose ancestral land has already been occupied by Putin’s troops and who remember Stalin’s genocidal policies in 1944, when the entire Tatar population was deported to Central Asia and half died.
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you're hilariously out of your depth.
