Russia's roadmap for annexing eastern Ukraine 'leaked from Vladimir Putin's office'

[Geee]

UK Independent:

Moscow has been planning to annex parts of Ukraine for more than 12 months, according to sensational claims made in a Russian newspaper.

 

Vladimir Putin’s office reportedly compiled a detailed roadmap of how a "pro-Russian drift" could allow it to seize Crimea and some eastern provinces, just a few weeks prior to the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych and the start of the Ukrainian crisis.

 

According to a document allegedly leaked to the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Russia had identified Mr Yanukovych as “politically bankrupt”, and outlined a plan by which a “coup” would set in motion events ultimately leading to Russian expansion.

[Valin]

Don't they realize this is the 21st century? You can't do that!

[Valin]

Unhappy Anniversary

The slow-motion betrayal of Ukraine.

George Weigel

February 24, 2015

 

In late 1990, a year after the Revolution of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples of the newly self-liberated countries, who had suffered under the Soviet jackboot since the endgame of World War II, could look back on a year of solid achievement while looking forward to a more prosperous future.

 

(Snip)

 

Twenty-five years, three months, and two weeks after the enlarged West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, another anniversary was at hand, just this past week: the first anniversary of the most dramatic moments of the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine. Just a year ago, Russian snipers, under orders from President Putin in Moscow, opened fire on peaceful demonstrators in Kyiv’s Independence Square, in a desperate attempt to save the corrupt regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian czar, Vladimir Putin, a KGB elitist to the core, had little use for Yanukovych, who had begun his tawdry career as a petty thief, snatching old ladies’ handbags in railway stations. But Putin needed an acquiescent Ukraine for its energy resources and as a transshipment route for illegal economic activity: thus his veto of Ukraine’s next steps toward incorporation into the E.U., which triggered the Maidan revolution in November 2013; and thus his efforts to save the crumbling Yanukovych regime in February 2014.

 

It didn’t work. Yanukovych scuttled, fleeing to Russia. A new Ukrainian government was formed, and the Maidan revolution was later validated by democratic elections. Putin, in response, invaded and annexed Crimea a month later, in violation of every applicable international law and of Russia’s commitments in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to preserve Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty as a condition of Ukraine’s giving up the nuclear weapons it inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed.

 

(Snip)

 

A close friend in Ukraine has said that the greatest challenge to the Maidan Revolution of Dignity right now is the challenge of belief: the challenge to continue believing that the sacrifices of the past have not been in vain, and that the power of moral conviction — what Vaclav Havel once called the “power of the powerless” — can still win out over brute material force. The same applies to the West. For Ukraine is not just about Ukraine; Ukraine is about us. And it is long past time for the West to be the West that Ukrainians laid down their lives a year ago to join, thinking that in doing so they were joining something fine and good in history.