The Necessary Martyr Complex

The Russian backed destabilization of Ukraine represents the problem of autonomous regions trying to become nations. Analysts argue over what NATO is willing to do versus what Russia is willing to do to reabsorb the region. NATO, in typical fashion, marches up and down the field with the bagpipes harmonizing over the integrity of national sovereignty without being willing to give Russian re-expansion .a price tag. Putin's team plays spin the bottle in an attempt to reclaim parcels of its former empire. To what end? 

I remember the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a blurry cataclysm during the transition from Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin. There was a Time essayist who emerged during all this heady turbulence to inject a note of caution. Authoritarian regimes could always come back. Al Qaeda and Isis may have emerged as the tumor festering out of Muslim Brotherhood emasculated inferiority, similar to the Khmer Rouge in Southeast Asia. The Communist Party in China remains united. The Castro brothers seem determined that Cuba too remains socialized (as if the US was powerless to change that outcome, because the Bay of Pigs was a blot on Camelot best left buried in JFK's splattered brain), and Putin wants restoration, and yet, this is not the Cold War heating up again. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, these are museum pieces, replaced by Russian war lords and cronies who have ties to Putin's administration, and we've swapped the ominous notion of prescriptive ideology with the gentler concept of state model, yet Ukrainians are dying, and Europeans see the shadow of a fierce some bear on the horizon, as if to distract from more border tensions with the Chinese.

Ukraines have viewed my posts, perhaps marveling that American liberalism is not what it seems, and that it isn't. Few people actually have the luxury of freedom to do as they wish, especially in terms of migration. I do not know what to tell you, and your leaders were perceptive on the issue of  giving up your nuclear arsenal. If you had kept it perhaps Putin would have trekked at a different pace. I do not think you can rely on the European Union, and even if a speculative Republican replaces Obama, that Republican has to acknowledge the reality of your border with your former motherland-- but your blood should not be being shed to restore an imperial mindset no longer applicable. President Nixon's call for a "free Kiev" was strategic. I doubt he envisioned the collateral damage in the embedded feed currently breaking our hearts.