Has Russia really just invaded Crimea?

US intel agencies insist Russia is bluffing in Ukraine, reports @elilake. http://t.co/eEag0QR2hw
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) February 28, 2014

Despite US intelligence this morning apparently concluding that Russia was bluffing in its stance towards Ukraine and Crimea, within the past 10 minutes the BBC are reporting that a column of Russian APCs is advancing on Simferopol, while at least 5 Russian military planes have apparently already landed there.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26380336

This is despite a warning just a short while ago from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that Russian intervention in Ukraine would be a "grave mistake".

It would appear that Vladimir Putin is setting out to demonstrate the limits of American power and European influence.

When the Russian bear farts...

Tim Stanley has a good blogpost in The Telegraph, although I find his use of the phrase "new Cold War" as a lazy shorthand for "a standoff between Russia and America" almost as irritating as misplaced analysis that try to portray the current crisis in Ukraine as some sort of relic from the original Cold War.

His conclusion had a definite Mao Zedong character to it, and I am sure was what set off my train of thought:

Russia is a paper tiger. Why we're wasting time hunting it, I cannot imagine.

The Ukrainian crisis becomes an international crisis

My blog post on Sunday about Ukraine disagreed with a New York Times analysis of the driving factors behind the crisis there, particularly the (US-centric) view that it was a hangover from the Cold War.  The writer and historian Anne Applebaum had an article in The Telegraph on Sunday that on the one hand supported my argument, and on the other disagreed with some of my other conclusions, her central argument being that it had nothing to do with ethnicity, geography or language.

With respect to Anne Applebaum, a distinguished historian and writer on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, I disagree, and feel that her focus is too immediate term and ignores, as did the NYT piece, the larger structural factors.

What has happened in recent days in Crimea (an issue I touched upon in my original post) has shown that in that part of Ukraine at least, language and ethnicity are a factor, and a potentially explosive one at that.

Admittedly, what makes Crimea different is that the majority of the population is Russian, as opposed to Russian-speaking Ukrainians that dominate the west and south of the rest of Ukraine, and sovereignty over Crimea was transferred by the USSR from Russia to Ukraine only 60 or so years ago.  Nonetheless, it has the potential, even if not the likelihood, to ignite Ukraine into a full-blown ethnic or linguistic conflict, should Russia continue in its support for Yanukovich and, more dangerously, take military action from the naval base that it continues to operate in Crimea in support of the Russian separatists.

The State of Missouri Just Can't Wait to Kill

I had previously mentioned the case of Herbert Smulls, a man executed by the State of Missouri before the United States Supreme Court had even finished deciding on his petition for a stay of execution.

CBS and The Atlantic's Andrew Cohen (a must-follow for anyone interested in the U.S. criminal justice system) has written a follow-up piece on Smulls, and it appears that the behaviour of Missouri officials has not gone unnoticed by either the 8th Circuit or the Supreme Court.

Is the Ukrainian crisis really a leftover from the Cold War?

In today's New York Times ($) David Herszenhorn concludes that, in part, the current crisis and violence in Ukraine is a leftover from the Cold War.  I find the argument thoroughly unconvincing.

In fact, I think that his whole 'primer' does a pretty lousy job at explaining what is going on in Ukraine, missing as it does the key structural, demographic and cultural drivers that divide the nation.

But I'll begin with 'core factor' number two, as this was the one that initially caught my eye.

Second is a lingering Cold War-era fight between Russia and the West for influence over countries in Eastern Europe still suffering from political and economic problems rooted in the Soviet era... Perceiving a threat to its big military and economic interests in Ukraine, Russia exerted enormous pressure to scuttle the accords with the European Union.

The are a number of problems with this analysis.

Firstly, during the Cold War Ukraine was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union and in no way shape or form part of any fight over influence in Eastern Europe.

(Fun fact: Ukraine, even when part of the Soviet Union, was a founder member of the United Nations and had a seat in the United Nations General Assembly, agreed by accident during discussions between the USSR and USA as WWII came to a close).

Can we get over the ice skating sour grapes?

I didn't expect myself to be writing a blog post about figure skating, but sour grapes really are very unedifying.  Slate.com reports that 1.7 million people (unsurprisingly, mostly South Korean) have signed a Change.org petition alleging that the voting in the Sochi competition was rigged in favour of the Russians (a charge rather distastefully put to the American public last night on NBC by figure skater Gracie Gold).

It's all a bit pathetic really; and although Jessica Winter's article, also in Slate, starts off sounding like it is on the side of the tin-foil hat brigade, it is actually worth reading, explaining the conspiracy theory, how the voting system actually works, and the problems that are associated with it.

She also notes that Yuna Kim herself admitted that she didn't have the passion to win she had four years ago (something that couldn't be said about Adelina Sotnikova, the reigning Russian champion), which chimes with Johnny Weir's observations that Kim's performance was a bit wooden, and that she performed one fewer jump than Sotnikova.

For me, the conspiracy theory is all highly circumstantial, based mostly on the assertion that there is a pro-Russian bias among the judges, given that one is Russian and married to the Director of the Russian Figure Skating Federation (ok, you may have something there), one is Ukrainian, and one an ethnic Russian Estonian.  Others also point to the fact that one of the other judges is also "Eastern European", being from Slovakia, which is in central Europe not Eastern Europe.  Slovakia is also strongly anchored in the EU, and a pro-Russian bias is only slightly more likely from her than from the Italian or French judges.

Chilling effect on the internet?

This story originally caught my attention when I saw a tweet from Niall O'Dowd as I boarded a plane for a week's holiday in the U.S. Virgin Islands (that's not relevant to this post, I just like rubbing it in).

@NiallODowd Have you taken down the John Spain article?
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) February 15, 2014

O'Dowd's tweet linked to a story in Irish Central (his U.S.-based news website), outlining the circumstances under which a story by John Spain relating to the salary of the Chief Executive of the Irish charity REHAB had been taken down after legal threats from Ms. Kerins' solicitors.  I have made reference to Angela Kerins in a previous post here (REHAB this week released her salary, just FYI: €240,000.  No, I did not accidentally slip on an extra digit.)

O'Dowd stated that the site's host, Clickability, had been warned to take down the story, but didn't actually say that it had been taken down (which would have been, from a legal perspective, a very surprising decision on their part.)  After having read the story I was surprised to notice that the story O'Dowd was referring to was no longer on the site, particularly given O'Dowd's statement in the article "Thank God for the First Amendment" and so tweeted to him asking about it.  I received no reply, so was therefore interested to see this article in Tuesday's Irish Times.

Niall O’Dowd to seek legal advice after online opinion article about Rehab taken down - The Irish Times - Tue, Feb 18, 2014

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

This classical Latin question of 2,000 years ago has no greater relevance than to Ireland today.  The national police force, An Garda Síochána (the Guardians of the Peace), is commonly referred to in English as 'the Guards'.  After a series of policing scandals, in 2005 an Ombudsman was established, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC), to provide an answer to Juvenal's question of who will guard the guards.

The Commission was partly modelled on the equivalent office in Northern Ireland, but with fewer and blunter teeth.  Its relationship with the Gardaí has been, it has to be said, a tense one (€) over the years, characterised by suspicion (€) and misunderstanding.  GSOC has made some mistakes along the way that caused little love to be lost (€) between the two organisations.  This sits atop the natural loathing that any police organisation has for a body designed to oversee it.  It is just the nature of the beast.

Nonetheless, from a human rights perspective, to have a permanent police ombudsman is something of which Ireland should be proud, and places it in a very small number of jurisdictions in the world to have such a set-up.

It is natural, therefore, that Irish people should be concerned by reports in the press, first broken by The Sunday Times, that GSOC became concerned that the security of its offices had been breached.  They employed a British security company to sweep their offices, in the course of which they discovered three 'anomalies'.  Gavan Reilly outlines what they were in an excellent blogpost, that gets to the heart of a lot of this puzzling issue, or Sunday Times subscribers can recap on the detail from John Mooney here, a screengrab from which I have included below (click to zoom).  It should also be noted that Ireland should be grateful to the 'British' Sunday Times (as members of the Government have repeatedly referred to it) and John Mooney in particular, for pursuing this issue when other Irish media outlets sucked up the Government spin and spat it out again to its readers and viewers.

There are a lot of questions remaining, but to distil what they are, I want to go back through the chronology of what happened, and add my own thoughts and speculation.

BNP leader's lovechild to be Italian PM

The world seems remarkably nonchalant about the fact that British National Party leader Nick Griffin's love child by Mr. Bean appears poised to become Prime Minister of Italy.

Above, Mr. Bean and Nick Griffin.

Below, the fruit of their secret love, Italian Democratic Party leader, Matteo Renzi.

The judge with an eye on history

The Washington Post today has an interesting profile of Judge Arenda Wright Allen who penned the historic judgment (covered in my last blogpost) overturning Virginia's ban on gay marriage, surely, with an eye in its place in the history books.

              Arenda L. Wright Allen

Click here for the story.