Another, even more important history lesson lies in Weimar Germany.
After the WWI, Germany was made a scapegoat, at the insistence of French. The conditions where the following:
huge reparations ban of German submarines and airplanes ban on German troops west of Rhine ban on unification with Austria ban on annexing Sudetenland big swaths of land transferred to other countries (Poland, Austria, etc)
All of this imposed upon Germany even though Germans were lured to the negotiation table by the Americans promising there "would no losers". All of this led to rapid impoverishment of Germany and the rise of lunatic Hitler.
More recently, the historians labeled the 1990s Russia as a Weimar Russia. Even though Russia withdrew from East Europe unilaterally, the west has done nothing to help Russians deal with the turmoil following the transition to market economy and democratic institutions. When it came to loans, the west simply fleeced Russians. NATO also didn't waste time and move into Poland, and then former Soviet republics in the Baltics. NATO started the war in Yugoslavia and separated Kosovo from Serrbia despite Russian protests. All of this created great conditions for people to accept the autocratic Putin who nonetheless brought stability into Russians economy and politics, at the expense of rolling back the democracy and setting up a new police state.
At the same time comparing Putin with Hitler because of Sudetenland and Crimea is quite primitive. Hitler also advocated racial hatred and never made it a secret that he want to push the German nation to conquer Poland and Ukraine. With all its current problems, Russia is an multi-ethnic multi-cultural country with ethnic Russians constituting about 80% of overall populations. Even though, Putin used the nationalist rhetoric of helping Russians from abroad, the annexation of Crimea has broader goals. First, it's a demonstration of power, and a clear punishment of Ukraine for stepping out of line. Second, Putin just got another frozen conflict at the border, which means its unlikely Ukraine could join NATO any time soon.
AT&T doesn't want to charge Netflix extra for the same connectivity they get right now. What AT&T and other telecoms want to be able to do is to offer Netflix a higher priority (higher bandwidth and lower latency) service than what the rest of internet traffic gets for an additional fee. Netflix always refused this idea, and just hoped that telecoms upgrade their infrastructure which would benefit everyone at once.
I don't see a problem with telecoms charging Netflix extra for a higher priority service, but there is one big conflict of interest here. AT&T not only provides the pipes, they also provide the TV content with the U-Verse service. So AT&T is in direct competition with Netflix. Without net neutrality, AT&T is now in prime position to make sure that Netflix doesn't hurt their TV cable business. Either they charge Netflix so much that it stays uncompetitive, or perhaps Netflix stays competitive but AT&T will skim its profits through the fees anyways. Huge conflict of interest. FTC should look into this.
By far not the most significant one though, in single threaded tests the i7-4770K beats the FX-8350 by 62% in Cinebench R11.5, 73% in Cinebench R10 and 47% in POV-Ray 3.7RC6 and that's when the AMD core is not competing for resources with its sibling. With turbo the picture is a bit more complex than that but 4 Intel cores already equals 6-7 AMD cores. Then you add in cache contention, shared FPU, overhead of more threads for the last 1-2 cores of difference as in the most ideal benchmarks for AMD they're roughly equal
I believe though, the cache design was also blamed for the poor performance of AMD CPUs even in single threaded loads. I heard this could be because, the L2 cache is something like 8-way associative on Intel CPUs but on AMD, it's only 2 or 3 way associative, increasing the possibility that the data you need in cache is constantly overwritten by something else.
Certainly, I think the poor single-thread performance is that at the core of AMD's problems. AMD CPUs actually do well in benchmarks and applications that are heavily multithreaded, such as handbrake (e.g. the 8-core FX 8350 can slaughter the latest Haswell Core i5s). So sharing some devices between the cores is not as much of the issue as is the poor single threaded performance.
Nonetheless, benchmarks show that there are new games that will take advantage of say 8-core CPU. I think it's measurable when you look at 6-core AMD FX vs 8-core AMD FX of the same generation. Nonetheless, a lot of people and magazines do not recommend buying anything more expensive than an unlocked quad-core Haswell i5 ($220-240). Anything faster gets too expensive.
There are plenty of specialized applications that use that many cores. Media encoding comes to mind. An average desktop doesn't need these chips, but there are some users more than willing to pay a premium price for this.
If Russia gets away with this, it will essentially mean that anywhere in Europe where there is an ethnic Russian population of any note, the country in question will be forced to either tow Moscow's line, or risk a Russian invasion to "liberate" the ethnic Russians.
But, there are only two European countries who are not NATO members with significant Russian population, Belarus and Ukraine, and Belarus is already a Russian satellite.There is certainly a possibility that Russia will try to stir up more trouble in eastern Ukraine. There is a question though about whether Eastern part of a poor and chaotic country is worth risking to create a second Cold War.
6. America is the only country in the world to have used nuclear bombs while sweeping under the rug the issue that indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians as long with a nearby military-industrial personnel may have constituted a war crime.
If the US gets missile defense systems into the Ukraine they could theoretically win a nuclear war with a first strike. This is what has Putin's panties in a bunch. This is also why Russia was so upset with the US considering putting their missile defense systems in Poland.
Wouldn't the missile defense systems in Europe just protect Europe? It's also no clear if the missile defense actually works, and if it works, how hard/easy it would be to wipe out with a strike by conventional weapons as Poland is a stone throw away from Belarus.
Nations do shit things, sometimes for perceived benefit, or simply out of greed. If we allowed every ill actions we had done in the past hold us back, no one would ever intervene when some other nation state violated the general rules of international conduct?
This is such a great philosophy to live by. Let's enforce the international law when it's convenient to us, but ignore it when it does not suit us. Let's always do that.
Russia signed an agreement in the 1990s guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine's nuclear stockpiles. Thus, even excluding any notions of territorial integrity that have been a part of international law since the end of WWII, Russia is in violation of its own treaty with Ukraine.
Putin argues that the treaty was between Russia and the legitimate government of Ukraine, not those who are in power in Kiev right now. Sounds like a shaky legal ground, but then, where is the "global court of justice" to decide the legality of his actions? International law was always something that was always selectively applied by the strong countries.
I really hate drawing parallels between Russia now and Nazi Germany, but there is one that's hard to overlook: the concept of Weimar Russia. Allies, such as France, after the win in WWI insisted on placing impossible and humiliating sanctions on Germany which directly led to the creation of the humiliated and angry Weimar Germany and its impoverished populations, and this created all the right conditions for a lunatic like Hitler to come to power.
Yes, the writing has always been on the wall that those Russian fascizoids are real. I really used to think that the far right Russian nationalists or simply ultra-nationalists like Zhirinovsky, Limonov, Rogozin, Zyuganov, etc were simply a breed of clowns who would eventually die out. Instead of dying out, their views are now mainstream to most of Putin's ruling elite and Duma politicians.
The question is though, why did the West allow the situation in Russia to deteriorate so much without providing any real economic aid in the 90s? The former Eastern European satellites of USSR received massive economic support in the form of foreign direct investment, foreign aid, military aid, speedy admission into EU, NATO, and WTO, but Russia was left by the wayside to rot. Watching the 20 year long saga of Russian accession into the WTO was ridiculous. All participants in the talks clearly wanted to extract as much as they could out of Russians. And where were the angry US and EU politicians and their threats of economic sanctions at the time when a small group of Yeltsin's cronies pillaged the Russian economy, stole billions, and created the infamous class of Russian Oligarchs? Instead of placing sanctions on them and their ill-gotten money, the way the West would treat a central African ex-dictator who stole billions, places like London met the Russian Oligarchy and their money with wide open arms.
It's not an act of desperation, just an average populist TV host/politician on TV.
If EU moved its forces quickly to Ukraine's eastern border, Russia could be contained. However, I don't see it happening.
1. Just like in the case with Crimea and Georgia, Russians have already pre-planned and rehearsed the Russian occupation of east Ukraine. Right now, they already sitting along Ukraine border en masse waiting for a provocation you're talking about. The NATO troops probably won't get past Kiev or maybe even into Kiev.
2. Maybe if EU could quietly package all of its mobile troops and ship them to Ukraine by train or air, they could have some element of surprise, but such massive operation can not be coordinated and executed quietly and quickly. Russians will be aware of what's going on long before NATA troops arrive.
3. The majority of population in East Ukraine speaks Russian and many are ethnic Russians. Putting NATO troops among them will only radicalize them and decidedly divide Ukraine. Unless the NATO troops plan to linger around forever, this rift will turn Ukraine apart eventually.
You cannot expect a nation with centuries of undemocratic and authoritarian rule to suddenly embrace the ideals of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and say federalism.
It's quite interesting to contrast Russia against Ukraine, which despite all of its internal problems seems to have some kind of democratic processes in place. That's not a coincidence. Ukrainians trace their roots to the quasi democratic republics of 17-18th centuries such as the Cossack Hetmanate and Zaporozhia Sich which had free peasants at the time when Russia was an absolutist monarchy and all peasants were serfs of the landowners.
George Bush and Obama were also very popular at times. Is the majority of the USA suffering from mass psychosis?
I think Americans did experience a mass psychosis during the 2001-2003 drum up for the second Iraq war. Nobody questioned the White House claims/intelligence and everyone felt we need to go into Iraq to avenge the 9/11 and to take away his WMD. The second mass psychosis and mass hysteria was experienced during the first two weeks of the Russian-Georgian War in 2008. The information warfare employed by the White House was quite disingenuous, but all the news outlets did not question anything and it was pretty sad to observe.
Putin is popular because the economy of Russia has recovered a lot since he took power. There isn't really anything magical about this. It's the same with China. Leaders that make poor populations a lot wealthier get a lot of slack in the authoritarianism department.
Having a stable economy is very important for the popularity of the leaders. However, Putin did quite a bit more to earn his popularity. He projected an image of a strong, healthy man and a strong leader with guts who is not afraid to defend the interests of Russia internationally. The win in the Second Chechen War was also a big boost to the morale of the Russians. When Russia suffered a big loss in the war against the Japanese in 1905, widespread rioting that's known today as "The Revolution of 1905" (probably more correctly labeled as the revolt of 1905) lasted for months, so boosting the morale of people is very important. Another thing that he did was cracking down on the highly loathed Russian oligarchs. After several demonstration exiles and imprisonments, it was understood by the rest of oligarchs that they cannot use their wealth to bring down Putin, making sure that Russia can't have a well-funded political opposition. The west viewed these moves as a political persecution, but crackdowns were somewhat popular among ordinary Russians, who felt robbed during the unequal privatization of the 1990s. It also didn't help that many of those oligarchs were of Jewish descent, adding more fuel to the fire. And finally, cracking down on the independent media was part of the equation. Putin understood that controlling the main TV networks was the key.
I place the place the blame on the inept, corrupt, and drunkard Yeltsin. He was never a strong leader, specially at the time when Russia needed one the most. Putin, with all his faults, defined himself as a strong, healthy man and a leader.
I would like to see evidence for your claim that Ukraine is not really a divided country and that's all Putin's propaganda. Everything else I've seen suggests that Ukraine really is a highly divided country with a large population of people who would prefer to be a part of Russia than the EU. I'm not convinced this is something Putin is just making up.
Ukraine is a divided country, but not in the sense that you speak off. When Ukrainian nationalists are in power, they try to Ukrainize the Russian-speaking East and glorify controversial and deeply loathed historic figures such as Stepan Bandera. On the other hand, when East regions have influence in Kiev, the more nationalist West regions do not accept Kiev's authority. I think the primary issue here that in such a diverse country, people do not want their local politics to be dictated from Kiev. If Ukrainian politicians have the guts, they should change Ukraine's political organization into a federation. As soon as people have enough of local power in their hands, most of arguments for the division of Ukraine would disappear.
Even with a majority of 58% of ethnic Russian origin in Crimea most of those ethnic Russians still identify their nationality as Ukrainian, even though their ethnicity is Russian.
And there would have been even less support for the union with Russia if Russian Black Sea fleet was not based in Crimea. Ukraine had lost a historic opportunity to remove much of Russian influence there when they extended the lease of the Black Sea Fleet ports past 2017.
So I don't think it's the Crimean Russians who want a union with Russia. It's Russia's Russians who had been told for decades by nationalists that Crimea must be Russian and that Sevastopol is the city of "Russian Glory".
Yes, Kosovo was quite different from Crimea. The government in Kiev may have been trying to "Ukrainize", quite ineffectively, the non-Ukrainian population of Crimea but there was no violence or ethnic cleansing there. On the other hand, I think the independence of Kosovo may have set a valid precedent for the future independence of the autonomous regions Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh since those were the sites of actual or attempted ethnic cleansing of the local minorities by the central governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan respectively in the early 90s. One difference though is that Kosovo is independent because the international community wanted this, but they don't really want to interfere with the other case.
I have been reading a lot about the turmoil going on in Ukraine, from both English and Russian language sources. I still don't get it why Putin invaded Ukraine. I get it that returning Crimea back to the mother Russia will strike the chord with the Russian nationalists. One thing is certain that his popularity is hitting another high right now, so he and the rest of his ruling elite can sail through the next round of elections. But could Putin and other politicians in Russia be so shirt sighted that they would risk labeling Russia and starting the next Cold War for this simplistic short term goal? It's quite shocking to think that today in 21st century, a European country is invaded by its neighbor, and on on quite dubious grounds. Sure, I don't think any really costly sanctions will be applied to Russia again, but I think from now on Russia will simply be tolerated because other countries still have to do business with it. No one will harbor any illusions about Putin's regime from now on.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, under duress Russians rarely do any of that pinpoint smart bomb stuff.
Another, even more important history lesson lies in Weimar Germany.
After the WWI, Germany was made a scapegoat, at the insistence of French. The conditions where the following:
huge reparations
ban of German submarines and airplanes
ban on German troops west of Rhine
ban on unification with Austria
ban on annexing Sudetenland
big swaths of land transferred to other countries (Poland, Austria, etc)
All of this imposed upon Germany even though Germans were lured to the negotiation table by the Americans promising there "would no losers". All of this led to rapid impoverishment of Germany and the rise of lunatic Hitler.
More recently, the historians labeled the 1990s Russia as a Weimar Russia. Even though Russia withdrew from East Europe unilaterally, the west has done nothing to help Russians deal with the turmoil following the transition to market economy and democratic institutions. When it came to loans, the west simply fleeced Russians. NATO also didn't waste time and move into Poland, and then former Soviet republics in the Baltics. NATO started the war in Yugoslavia and separated Kosovo from Serrbia despite Russian protests. All of this created great conditions for people to accept the autocratic Putin who nonetheless brought stability into Russians economy and politics, at the expense of rolling back the democracy and setting up a new police state.
At the same time comparing Putin with Hitler because of Sudetenland and Crimea is quite primitive. Hitler also advocated racial hatred and never made it a secret that he want to push the German nation to conquer Poland and Ukraine. With all its current problems, Russia is an multi-ethnic multi-cultural country with ethnic Russians constituting about 80% of overall populations. Even though, Putin used the nationalist rhetoric of helping Russians from abroad, the annexation of Crimea has broader goals. First, it's a demonstration of power, and a clear punishment of Ukraine for stepping out of line. Second, Putin just got another frozen conflict at the border, which means its unlikely Ukraine could join NATO any time soon.
AT&T doesn't want to charge Netflix extra for the same connectivity they get right now. What AT&T and other telecoms want to be able to do is to offer Netflix a higher priority (higher bandwidth and lower latency) service than what the rest of internet traffic gets for an additional fee. Netflix always refused this idea, and just hoped that telecoms upgrade their infrastructure which would benefit everyone at once.
I don't see a problem with telecoms charging Netflix extra for a higher priority service, but there is one big conflict of interest here. AT&T not only provides the pipes, they also provide the TV content with the U-Verse service. So AT&T is in direct competition with Netflix. Without net neutrality, AT&T is now in prime position to make sure that Netflix doesn't hurt their TV cable business. Either they charge Netflix so much that it stays uncompetitive, or perhaps Netflix stays competitive but AT&T will skim its profits through the fees anyways. Huge conflict of interest. FTC should look into this.
By this logic, every exchange that trades in international currencies should be closed down.
Maybe that's why we don't see many PCs with Iris Pro graphics. The OEMs know that comparable dedicated GPUs cost less.
By far not the most significant one though, in single threaded tests the i7-4770K beats the FX-8350 by 62% in Cinebench R11.5, 73% in Cinebench R10 and 47% in POV-Ray 3.7RC6 and that's when the AMD core is not competing for resources with its sibling. With turbo the picture is a bit more complex than that but 4 Intel cores already equals 6-7 AMD cores. Then you add in cache contention, shared FPU, overhead of more threads for the last 1-2 cores of difference as in the most ideal benchmarks for AMD they're roughly equal
I believe though, the cache design was also blamed for the poor performance of AMD CPUs even in single threaded loads. I heard this could be because, the L2 cache is something like 8-way associative on Intel CPUs but on AMD, it's only 2 or 3 way associative, increasing the possibility that the data you need in cache is constantly overwritten by something else.
Certainly, I think the poor single-thread performance is that at the core of AMD's problems. AMD CPUs actually do well in benchmarks and applications that are heavily multithreaded, such as handbrake (e.g. the 8-core FX 8350 can slaughter the latest Haswell Core i5s). So sharing some devices between the cores is not as much of the issue as is the poor single threaded performance.
Nonetheless, benchmarks show that there are new games that will take advantage of say 8-core CPU. I think it's measurable when you look at 6-core AMD FX vs 8-core AMD FX of the same generation. Nonetheless, a lot of people and magazines do not recommend buying anything more expensive than an unlocked quad-core Haswell i5 ($220-240). Anything faster gets too expensive.
There are plenty of specialized applications that use that many cores. Media encoding comes to mind. An average desktop doesn't need these chips, but there are some users more than willing to pay a premium price for this.
I believe cache is shared, and is believed to be one of the bottlenecks of the current AMD CPUs.
Yeah, but slashdot is not coindesk. I still appreciate this gets posted on /.
If Russia gets away with this, it will essentially mean that anywhere in Europe where there is an ethnic Russian population of any note, the country in question will be forced to either tow Moscow's line, or risk a Russian invasion to "liberate" the ethnic Russians.
But, there are only two European countries who are not NATO members with significant Russian population, Belarus and Ukraine, and Belarus is already a Russian satellite.There is certainly a possibility that Russia will try to stir up more trouble in eastern Ukraine. There is a question though about whether Eastern part of a poor and chaotic country is worth risking to create a second Cold War.
Another comical note:
6. America is the only country in the world to have used nuclear bombs while sweeping under the rug the issue that indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians as long with a nearby military-industrial personnel may have constituted a war crime.
If the US gets missile defense systems into the Ukraine they could theoretically win a nuclear war with a first strike. This is what has Putin's panties in a bunch. This is also why Russia was so upset with the US considering putting their missile defense systems in Poland.
Wouldn't the missile defense systems in Europe just protect Europe? It's also no clear if the missile defense actually works, and if it works, how hard/easy it would be to wipe out with a strike by conventional weapons as Poland is a stone throw away from Belarus.
Nations do shit things, sometimes for perceived benefit, or simply out of greed. If we allowed every ill actions we had done in the past hold us back, no one would ever intervene when some other nation state violated the general rules of international conduct?
This is such a great philosophy to live by. Let's enforce the international law when it's convenient to us, but ignore it when it does not suit us. Let's always do that.
Russia signed an agreement in the 1990s guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine's nuclear stockpiles. Thus, even excluding any notions of territorial integrity that have been a part of international law since the end of WWII, Russia is in violation of its own treaty with Ukraine.
Putin argues that the treaty was between Russia and the legitimate government of Ukraine, not those who are in power in Kiev right now. Sounds like a shaky legal ground, but then, where is the "global court of justice" to decide the legality of his actions? International law was always something that was always selectively applied by the strong countries.
I really hate drawing parallels between Russia now and Nazi Germany, but there is one that's hard to overlook: the concept of Weimar Russia. Allies, such as France, after the win in WWI insisted on placing impossible and humiliating sanctions on Germany which directly led to the creation of the humiliated and angry Weimar Germany and its impoverished populations, and this created all the right conditions for a lunatic like Hitler to come to power.
Yes, the writing has always been on the wall that those Russian fascizoids are real. I really used to think that the far right Russian nationalists or simply ultra-nationalists like Zhirinovsky, Limonov, Rogozin, Zyuganov, etc were simply a breed of clowns who would eventually die out. Instead of dying out, their views are now mainstream to most of Putin's ruling elite and Duma politicians.
The question is though, why did the West allow the situation in Russia to deteriorate so much without providing any real economic aid in the 90s? The former Eastern European satellites of USSR received massive economic support in the form of foreign direct investment, foreign aid, military aid, speedy admission into EU, NATO, and WTO, but Russia was left by the wayside to rot. Watching the 20 year long saga of Russian accession into the WTO was ridiculous. All participants in the talks clearly wanted to extract as much as they could out of Russians. And where were the angry US and EU politicians and their threats of economic sanctions at the time when a small group of Yeltsin's cronies pillaged the Russian economy, stole billions, and created the infamous class of Russian Oligarchs? Instead of placing sanctions on them and their ill-gotten money, the way the West would treat a central African ex-dictator who stole billions, places like London met the Russian Oligarchy and their money with wide open arms.
It's not an act of desperation, just an average populist TV host/politician on TV.
If EU moved its forces quickly to Ukraine's eastern border, Russia could be contained. However, I don't see it happening.
1. Just like in the case with Crimea and Georgia, Russians have already pre-planned and rehearsed the Russian occupation of east Ukraine. Right now, they already sitting along Ukraine border en masse waiting for a provocation you're talking about. The NATO troops probably won't get past Kiev or maybe even into Kiev.
2. Maybe if EU could quietly package all of its mobile troops and ship them to Ukraine by train or air, they could have some element of surprise, but such massive operation can not be coordinated and executed quietly and quickly. Russians will be aware of what's going on long before NATA troops arrive.
3. The majority of population in East Ukraine speaks Russian and many are ethnic Russians. Putting NATO troops among them will only radicalize them and decidedly divide Ukraine. Unless the NATO troops plan to linger around forever, this rift will turn Ukraine apart eventually.
You cannot expect a nation with centuries of undemocratic and authoritarian rule to suddenly embrace the ideals of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and say federalism.
It's quite interesting to contrast Russia against Ukraine, which despite all of its internal problems seems to have some kind of democratic processes in place. That's not a coincidence. Ukrainians trace their roots to the quasi democratic republics of 17-18th centuries such as the Cossack Hetmanate and Zaporozhia Sich which had free peasants at the time when Russia was an absolutist monarchy and all peasants were serfs of the landowners.
George Bush and Obama were also very popular at times. Is the majority of the USA suffering from mass psychosis?
I think Americans did experience a mass psychosis during the 2001-2003 drum up for the second Iraq war. Nobody questioned the White House claims/intelligence and everyone felt we need to go into Iraq to avenge the 9/11 and to take away his WMD. The second mass psychosis and mass hysteria was experienced during the first two weeks of the Russian-Georgian War in 2008. The information warfare employed by the White House was quite disingenuous, but all the news outlets did not question anything and it was pretty sad to observe.
Putin is popular because the economy of Russia has recovered a lot since he took power. There isn't really anything magical about this. It's the same with China. Leaders that make poor populations a lot wealthier get a lot of slack in the authoritarianism department.
Having a stable economy is very important for the popularity of the leaders. However, Putin did quite a bit more to earn his popularity. He projected an image of a strong, healthy man and a strong leader with guts who is not afraid to defend the interests of Russia internationally. The win in the Second Chechen War was also a big boost to the morale of the Russians. When Russia suffered a big loss in the war against the Japanese in 1905, widespread rioting that's known today as "The Revolution of 1905" (probably more correctly labeled as the revolt of 1905) lasted for months, so boosting the morale of people is very important. Another thing that he did was cracking down on the highly loathed Russian oligarchs. After several demonstration exiles and imprisonments, it was understood by the rest of oligarchs that they cannot use their wealth to bring down Putin, making sure that Russia can't have a well-funded political opposition. The west viewed these moves as a political persecution, but crackdowns were somewhat popular among ordinary Russians, who felt robbed during the unequal privatization of the 1990s. It also didn't help that many of those oligarchs were of Jewish descent, adding more fuel to the fire. And finally, cracking down on the independent media was part of the equation. Putin understood that controlling the main TV networks was the key.
I place the place the blame on the inept, corrupt, and drunkard Yeltsin. He was never a strong leader, specially at the time when Russia needed one the most. Putin, with all his faults, defined himself as a strong, healthy man and a leader.
I would like to see evidence for your claim that Ukraine is not really a divided country and that's all Putin's propaganda. Everything else I've seen suggests that Ukraine really is a highly divided country with a large population of people who would prefer to be a part of Russia than the EU. I'm not convinced this is something Putin is just making up.
Ukraine is a divided country, but not in the sense that you speak off. When Ukrainian nationalists are in power, they try to Ukrainize the Russian-speaking East and glorify controversial and deeply loathed historic figures such as Stepan Bandera. On the other hand, when East regions have influence in Kiev, the more nationalist West regions do not accept Kiev's authority. I think the primary issue here that in such a diverse country, people do not want their local politics to be dictated from Kiev. If Ukrainian politicians have the guts, they should change Ukraine's political organization into a federation. As soon as people have enough of local power in their hands, most of arguments for the division of Ukraine would disappear.
Even with a majority of 58% of ethnic Russian origin in Crimea most of those ethnic Russians still identify their nationality as Ukrainian, even though their ethnicity is Russian.
And there would have been even less support for the union with Russia if Russian Black Sea fleet was not based in Crimea. Ukraine had lost a historic opportunity to remove much of Russian influence there when they extended the lease of the Black Sea Fleet ports past 2017.
So I don't think it's the Crimean Russians who want a union with Russia. It's Russia's Russians who had been told for decades by nationalists that Crimea must be Russian and that Sevastopol is the city of "Russian Glory".
Yes, Kosovo was quite different from Crimea. The government in Kiev may have been trying to "Ukrainize", quite ineffectively, the non-Ukrainian population of Crimea but there was no violence or ethnic cleansing there. On the other hand, I think the independence of Kosovo may have set a valid precedent for the future independence of the autonomous regions Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh since those were the sites of actual or attempted ethnic cleansing of the local minorities by the central governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan respectively in the early 90s. One difference though is that Kosovo is independent because the international community wanted this, but they don't really want to interfere with the other case.
Are you starting to realize why he did it now?
Yes. Thanks for clearing it up. He did it for the chicks ;)
I have been reading a lot about the turmoil going on in Ukraine, from both English and Russian language sources. I still don't get it why Putin invaded Ukraine. I get it that returning Crimea back to the mother Russia will strike the chord with the Russian nationalists. One thing is certain that his popularity is hitting another high right now, so he and the rest of his ruling elite can sail through the next round of elections. But could Putin and other politicians in Russia be so shirt sighted that they would risk labeling Russia and starting the next Cold War for this simplistic short term goal? It's quite shocking to think that today in 21st century, a European country is invaded by its neighbor, and on on quite dubious grounds. Sure, I don't think any really costly sanctions will be applied to Russia again, but I think from now on Russia will simply be tolerated because other countries still have to do business with it. No one will harbor any illusions about Putin's regime from now on.
Another funny observation is that UDAR is the party of the world famous former Ukrainian boxer Vitali Klitschko. Also, UDAR means "a punch".