A half-assed cease-fire was eventually reached, and the world forgot about the Russian Bear and began worrying about ISIL. The cease fire was almost immediately broken, but there was no real news coverage of it.
The West doesn’t even bother to tut-tut or admonish anymore. No arms are supplied to Ukraine.
Gorbechev stood up in Berlin on the anniversary of the tearing down of the Wall the Soviet Union built to stifle the flood of refugees trying to escape their brutal regime and had the temerity to blame the West for Russia’s endless intransigence. He said there is a New Cold War, and that the democracies that freed his people from dictators like him are the reason it is happening.
In the meantime Russian forces abducted at gunpoint Estonian Internal Security Service official Eston Kohver from a border checkpoint. This is part of their broader plan to threaten other Balkan nations, sometimes denying resources, other times expressing sinister “concerns” about the treatment of ethnic Russians within their borders (the opening refrain in both the Crimean and Southeastern Ukrainian shadow wars). Russia sent at least one nuclear-armed submarine to harass Sweden and conducted mock bombing raids on Stockholm. They invaded Finnish airspace. Putin arrived at the G20 Summit with a naval battle group spearheaded by the Varyag, the 11,000 ton flagship of the Russian Pacific Fleet. Russian bombers began flights over the Gulf of Mexico – something not done even during the height of the Cold War.
All of this is done because no one believes, or wants to believe, it is happening. While Russia has a mere sliver of the power of the Soviet Union, they are many times more powerful than the sniveling, cowardly jihadists tromping around Iraq and Syria. The damage Russia can do will have consequences that stretch decades into the future.
Putin shows no sign of slowing down, and all these terrible things will continue to happen, as long as we keep pushing topics like Ukraine to the back page. The West should have stood up to Russia the day it marched into Crimea. It is already long beyond the time to let Russia know the West means business. We need to immediately arm anyone willing to fight Russia, and the Ukrainians seem like the perfect first candidates.
