"You just don't ..."

"You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext," said our Secretary of State on Face the Nation yesterday.

Well, Vladimir Putin does, so now the question is: what are we going to do about it?

That didn't take long!

It took Hitler three years to invade Poland after his showcase Olympics. Putin didn't even need three weeks before invading Ukraine.

Russia takes a bite out of Ukraine

Armed and masked gunmen took over the parliament building in the Ukrainian province of Crimea (famous in British legend for the Valley of Death and the charge of the Light Brigade). The occupiers were probably Russian special forces operatives.

Just as Russia seized a chunk of the breakaway nation of Georgia a while ago, so it appears ready to wrest the Crimea from the government in Kiev. Will President Obama declare a "red line" that Putin must not cross? Will Putin laugh at it, just as his proxy did in Syria? And if he gets away with seizing the Crimea, will Putin then latch on to the rest of eastern Ukraine? Certainly there won't be much opposition from this American administration, to judge by its fecklessness in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and even Israel.

A reprieve for Ukaine

Congratulations to the brave people of Kiev and western Ukraine, who with their blood and determination seem to have checked Vladimir Putin's drive to reclaim their country for his new Russian empire.

The irony of this new revolution is that it wouldn't have been possible if Putin's predecessor, Joseph Stalin, hadn't overreached in 1939 and again in 1945. What we know as western Ukraine -- the pro-European party of the country -- was part of Poland between the first and second World Wars. Stalin invaded Poland in 1939, in concert with Adolf Hitler, and sliced off half the country for the Soviet Union. When the Red Army reoccupied those lands toward the end of World War Two, he made sure that they were ethnically cleansed, with native Polish speakers driven out. Yet even the ethnic Ukrainians seem to have retained the Polish yearning to be part of Europe rather than the totalitarian empire that Tsar Nikolas lost in 1918, that Stalin spent his life refashioning, and that Putin is doing his best to build again.

One of the interwar residents of eastern Poland -- now western Ukraine -- was Basia Deszberg, whom I knew when we were students together at the University of Manchester. Her story is told in Poland's Daughter, published last month.

The Gray Lady discovers perverse incentives

From the New York Times today:

Happy Year of the Horse!

Last year I drove down to Natick, Massachusetts, to meet Joe Poshefko and a crew filming (videoing?) for a Chinese documentary about the Flying Tigers. Evidently it has come to pass! Alas, Joe died before the year was out, so he'll never have a chance to see himself dubbed into Chinese. I hope I will!

It's the Year of the Horse, and it begins today (or many hours ago, in China).

Keeping the lights on in Lwow

A friend assembled this picture of Lwow, the formerly Polish city that in 1945 reverted to Ukraine, as it continues its historic opposition to Russian rule:

"Lwow has been running its own affairs, teaching its own pro-European [school] curriculum etc since November when the central government effectively cut off funding. Salaries are being paid, services are running, people are going to work and people have been encouraged to report any government intimidation, or local activity by [Kiev] security services to the city council. Its not too fanciful to speculate that Poland or the EU are "keeping the lights on" in Lwow behind the scenes.

"The people of the city are well organised and are blockading army bases in the city to prevent troops going to [Kiev] to put down the demonstrations [in the capital]. Today they forced the resignation of the pro-Yanukowych governor of
the city. which gives them more room to organise. The situation is broadly similar in the other formerly Polish cities in the west. Rowne has just announced 'official mourning' for the demonstrators killed in Kyiv. Radio & TV are broadly taking the side of the protestors against the government."

Though ignored by western (and certainly by American) media, the story of Lwow's resistance has come out by way of Twitter.