What Russia's intentions for Ukraine are is still unknown. We don't even really know if any of this is planned or improvising on the fly. Putin's blatant--if subliminal--aggression against Ukraine has stripped away the illusion that Putin is a partner and not the ex-KGB autocrat who wants to rebuild the Russian Empire. (Tip to Instapundit)
But that clarity will not last:
The biggest cost to Putin of his Crimean adventure may not be the western sanctions, but rather the way that his Ukraine policy makes it harder for him to go back to gulling a complacent west. Not that he won’t try. Once he’s taken as much of Ukraine as he thinks he can get at this point, he is likely to launch a peace offensive, aiming to separate the Germans and the other Europeans from the Americans and let time weaken the outrage that now rolls through the west. Unfortunately, there will be people who are ready to be gulled yet again, but the quick vision the world has seen of the real nature of Putin’s policy and his ruthlessness will make at least some of the people harder to fool once more.
Yes, there are people in the West ready to be gulled again by Putin's soothing words to come--or to act as if they are to avoid the price of facing reality.
But worse, there are people in the West who see the real Putin and like what they see:
We live in strange times. The Cold War is over, yet when it comes to Russia seeking to maintain its control of Ukraine, a new group of apologists for Vladimir Putin has emerged. Once again, the group in the West supporting the hegemonic attempts of control of Ukraine by the authoritarian Putin regime is made up of stalwarts on both the Right and the Left. ...
[From the Right, in] his book Suicide for a Superpower, [Patrick] Buchanan titled two chapters “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” He seems to be saying, “if only we had a leader in the United States with the vision of Vladimir Putin.” Indeed, he asked in one column “Is Putin One of Us?” His answer, as you have undoubtedly guessed, is yes[.] ...
On the Left, leading the charge that the neo-cons are again trying to push us into war- a charge they assert whenever anyone makes an analysis with which they do not agree, is The Nation magazine and its writers and editors. And the number one supporter and apologist for Putin is the historian of modern Russia, Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University. ...
In Cohen’s cover story in a recent issue of The Nation, of which his wife Katrina vanden Huevel is both publisher and editor-in-chief, he claimed that American media coverage of Putin and Russia “are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.”
Both of these sides of the spectrum are repulsive. Both embrace Putin for being right when we are wrong (as they see it).
Buchanan embraces Putin because Buchanan wishes Putin's policies on so many things were our policies.
Cohen and vanden Huevel despise America and our policies so much that they embrace Putin for opposing us.
But by whatever path they traveled, they arrive at siding with Putin even with his mask stripped away. They like what they see. And that's the scary part.
And you wonder why some in Ukraine sincerely wish to be "protected" by Putin from threats we see as imaginary and by a protector we see as a predator?
