It's right out of a Monty Python sketch:
While stopping short of singling out Putin himself, Obama sanctioned seven high-ranking Russian officials on Monday. The administration also announced sanctions against separatist leaders in Crimea and former president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. The expanded U.S. sanctions, announced in an executive order, would target the assets of the listed Russian officials and bar them from entering the U.S. These include Putin aides Vladislav Surkov and Sergey Glazyev.
In what would be a brilliant execution of the principle called reciprocity, there's a report claiming that Russia will today unleash its own silly sanctions against members of the US Congress.
Is there any evidence that the 7 Russians and 4 Ukrainians actually had any US assets to seize? I would think we'd be hearing about it this morning, but as far as I can tell there's not a peep.
Is there any evidence that a ban against travel to the US for those 11 will cause them the slightest inconvenience?
Along the lines of the old "if a tree falls in the woods," if a sanction erupts from Washington but nobody actually feels it, is it still a sanction?
Putin's response yesterday was to declare that Crimea and Sevastopol* are independent and wish to become part of the Russian Federation. Today he signed a treaty to that effect that will probably be ratified by the Russian Parliament shortly.
And there you go, it's done. Or is it just the end of the beginning?
In Putin's speech today, he claimed that Russia has no further designs on Ukrainian territory, but he also continued to denounce the new regime and mourn the collapse of the Soviet Union:
“Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,” he said. “Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest — if not the biggest — divided nation in the world.”
That attitude ought to scare the hell out of everybody in the West.
It's good to keep the return of Crimea and Sevastopol to Ukraine as an aspirational goal, even though it is very unlikely, but that's not the game anymore. The real game now is to keep Russia from seizing even more of Ukraine and to be proactive about where Putin may foment trouble next. In particular that means reviewing the situation in the NATO-member Baltic states, specifically the Russian situation, and gaming out various scenarios so that the EU and the US are not caught flat-footed again.
Scoff at the idea of Russia attacking a NATO country if you will, but the old saying "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" applies.
Whatever game Putin is playing, he appears to be ahead of the US and the EU at this point. It's a complicated and dangerous game for everyone, but if the West doesn't catch up, and soon, it could quickly become even more so if Putin thinks the US and EU don't have the will to confront him. That means being willing to inflict some real pain, and receive some back from Russia as well.
Silly sanctions aren't going to do it. In fact, they only make things worse.
*I didn't realize until today that Sevastopol was politically separate from Crimea, but it is.
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