“Even the hottest heads in Washington now admit that the Crimea question is completely settled, a fait accompli,” observed Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. The tug of war between Russia and the West has played out in a rather disconcerting manner. Russian President Vladimir Putin is unperturbed by Western threats. Russia's economy has undergone tremendous changes in the past 15 years. Even so, according to Reuters, Russian Deputy Economy Minister Sergei Belyakov warned at an economic forum there are “clear signs” that the Russian economy is currently in crisis. Yet, other Russian officials sound optimistic about the country's economic prospects. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin kicked off the Global Entrepreneurship Congress — an annual event designed to prop up investment in Russia — Monday sounding upbeat. To press the point, more than 4,500 entrepreneurs from 156 countries participated. European investors have pleaded with their governments to lift sanctions against Russia and a Finnish participant at the Moscow conference aptly summed his peers' fears when he ominously declared: “Europe is dead.” Putin's pomp years in which the West's worst nightmares reared into reality has come at a time when the economic clout and military might of the West is on the wane. Do the Russian authorities know more than they are letting on? Is Ukraine seriously contemplating joining a “dying” Europe? The crisis of the euro spotlighted the truism that joining the EU is no panacea for economic woes, at least not for all European economies. Putin, meanwhile, suspects that the real prize for anti-Russian western Ukraine is joining NATO, and not necessarily the EU. Mikhail Malyshev, head of Crimea's referendum organising commission, maintains that the turnout in the secession vote was 82.71 per cent. A landslide 95.5 per cent of the Crimean electorate voted for unification with Russia. Malyshev added that 3.5 per cent of Crimeans had voted to remain in Ukraine with wider autonomous powers and 1.0 per cent was “spoiled ballots”. “We were hoping for Russia to de-escalate, but instead the annexation is proceeding. We need to show solidarity with Ukraine,” conceded Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski. But the integration of Crimea into Russia will continue unabated, regardless of what Sikorski says. Poles apart, one difference between the former Warsaw Pact countries and Westerners who tend to have mystical, surreal and unrealistic imaginations of Russia is that Westerners tend to be far less informed about contemporary Russian politics, including the dynamics of domestic Russian concerns. Peoples like the Poles have made Herculean efforts to become “Western”. Certain Central and Eastern European countries are actual incarnations of the skeletons in the historical closet of the Russian-style state security apparatus, or what Westerners describe as oligarchies. Even among states that joined the European Union after the collapse of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1991, the notion of “the oligarchs” is hard to shake off. Ironically, Russians, in spite of embracing capitalism Western-style, are still suspicious of Western multinational corporations that many see as corporate oligarchies pulling the strings of Western political institutions (and needless to say democratically elected officials). Mutual mistrust is punctuated by the fact that Putin deeply distrusts the West and that Western leaders in turn still see him as the very embodiment of the KGB. Matters came to a head with the current crisis over Crimea. Crimea, until Sunday's referendum, was considered an autonomous republic within Ukraine, electing its own parliament, with a prime minister appointed with approval from the Ukrainian capital Kiev. But now Crimean MPs have appointed a pro-Moscow leader, Sergei Aksyonov, who insists that Crimea reunites with Russia, and was a key champion of the referendum. He is now blacklisted by Western powers. US Secretary of State John Kerry met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in London to iron out differences over Ukraine. It all came to naught. The US and the European Union protested that Sunday's referendum on whether the Crimea should join the Russian Federation violates international law and the Ukrainian constitution, and sure enough they imposed sanctions against Russian officials since the Ukrainian crisis did not ease. Those blacklisted include Putin aides Vladislav Surkov and Sergei Glaziev; Dimitri Rogozin, Russian deputy prime minister; and Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of Russia's Federation Council, or upper house of parliament. Also, top Crimean officials such as Sergey Aksyonov, the new pro-Russian prime minister of Crimea, and the speaker of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov. But it is beside the point: these are politicians who come and go. They are actors who will, in all probability, be neglected in the annals of Russian and Ukrainian history. The critical question is whether a city like London can do without wealthy Russian investors? Kerry told Lavrov that the referendum and Russia's military intervention in Crimea could trigger concerted US and EU sanctions. Slapping sanctions on nations deemed to be pariah has a long pedigree in the West. Nevertheless, contemporary Russia is hardly bothered. The imposition of Western sanctions on Russia would in all likelihood prove a futile exercise. A conciliatory Lavrov called his London meeting with Kerry “constructive”. “Many events have happened and a lot of time has been lost,” Lavrov told reporters in London. He stressed, however, that Russia was not interested in going to war with Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended Crimea's decision to stage the referendum as “based on international law”. To Ukrainians in the western part of the country, as to Western leaders, the Crimean referendum is a violation of international law. British Foreign Secretary William Hague also met Kerry, but there is little either of them can do to undo the results of the Crimean referendum. The West wrested control of Kosovo by Serbia deploying precisely the same arguments now put forward by Russia as far as the Crimea is concerned. Elite histories prevail, whether Russian or Western. Russia has called on Ukraine to institute a federal state, one that guarantees the rights of those Ukrainian subjects who speak Russian, especially in the eastern part of the country. Russian speakers are up in arms in cities such as the industrial hub of Donetsk and Kharkov, Ukraine's second largest city. Putin played his hand and astutely obtained parliamentary approval for troop deployments not just in Crimea, but Ukraine as a whole. Moscow, which regards the new authorities in Kiev as fascists, could send troops to “protect” ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Again, there is unlikely to be any Western military intervention in such an event. Whether Western powers strongly condemn the Crimea takeover or not is immaterial and inconsequential. NATO acted in Libya and Iraq primarily because of oil, but it is unlikely to react militarily in Ukraine, even though NATO has sent extra fighter jets to Poland and Lithuania and is conducting military manoeuvres in the two countries considered closely aligned, ethnically and linguistically, to Ukraine. Russia, in contrast, has outmanoeuvred NATO and it has vital strategic interests in Crimea. Russia has a major naval base in Sevastopol, where its Black Sea fleet is based. The Crimean War of 1853-1856, remembered in Britain for the Siege of Sevastopol, is back in view. Revisionist histories have been written galore of that war, but from a Russian perspective Crimea cannot any longer be subjected to Western imperialism. The jargon of the Cold War is back in vogue. In his historic address at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin denounced what he saw as a “unipolar world”, charging the US with behaving as the sole superpower. Now it appears that Russia and China are emerging as potential rivals in the international arena. Russia has been the dominant power in Crimea for most of the past 200 years, since it annexed the region in 1783. But it was transferred administratively to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Under the Ukrainian constitution, “issues of altering the territory of Ukraine are resolved exclusively by an All-Ukrainian referendum”. Both Crimea and Russia pointedly ignored this clause. Ethnic Ukrainians made up 24 per cent of the population in Crimea according to the 2001 census, compared with 58 per cent Russians and 12 per cent Tatars. Thunderstruck or stiff upper lipped, British Prime Minister David Cameron was quoted as saying that he was prepared to “hit the City” — London's financial and commercial hub — in order to “punish Putin”, as he hysterically put it after meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Hanover ahead of an EU “emergency summit” over Ukraine. Conceding their ineffectual response to the Russian takeover of Crimea, Western leaders are likely to allow Russia to have its way in Crimea as they did with Georgia. “The fact that so far Russia hasn't taken any actual action to de-escalate tensions makes this a formidably difficult task today,” British Foreign Secretary Hague told reporters in London. Reminiscent of the Georgian war of 2008, Western powers in spite of the bravado are not prepared to intrude into areas considered “Russia's backyard”. Georgia was abandoned by the West. Georgian forces were routed by the Russian military when trying to retake the Georgian breakaway territory of South Ossetia. Russian forces are still in control, and Moscow considers both South Ossetia and a second Georgian region, Abkhazia, as independent from Georgia. The West was impotent and did not intervene on Georgia's behalf. So where that does leave ousted Ukrianian President Viktor Yanukovych, who still considers himself the democratically elected leader of the country? Remember the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, and the Orange Revolution in Kiev the following year? Many Russians suspect that the West masterminded both. Yanukovych is most likely blotted out by both realpolitik and history.
