Look Out, Toronto

The Russians have showed up in the Ukraine.  Well, we think.  No one seems to want to take off their balaclava long enough to answer any questions and let us know for sure.  Yanukovych is broadcasting from inside Russia.  He'll be back, he says.  No he won't; not unless the Russian army brings him back -- and while they were happy enough to take a few extra steps into Georgia in the South Ossetia War (2008), they do risk someone responding if anyone drives a tank the 900 kilometers from Moscow to Kiev.  Kiev is, says Yanukovych, where "bandits" are in charge.

Enough about a leader about whom we'll soon hear no more.  True, it is dangerous for Russia to extend its sabre rattling too far beyond its borders; though a resurgent nationalism seems to be empowering Putin to take distinctly controversial stances on a wide range of domestic and international issues -- controversial from European and North American perspectives anyway (though some issues might not be so controversial in Arizona) -- there still seems to be an expectation that no one will transgress too far over the post-Cold War norm that, in fact, the Cold War is over (in other words, the nuclear guns are put away, and the U.S. and Russia will both show up and shake hands at G8 summits).  Barak Obama is "deeply concerned" about the men in balaclavas.  Not exactly DEFCON 1 -- or even the DEFCON 2 America's Air Force sat at for a few moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin might win this one.  A few troops in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea?  Even more than a few, yet in places many in the West can't quite make sense of?  No problem; the borderlands ("Ukraine" literally means "borderland") are a site of impunity; only regional actors themselves might do something.  Even more disorientingly, it might only be paramilitaries of some kind or another that show up for the fray -- scruffy men in beards doing things in names of ancient blood fueds connected to pasts modern political ideologies try to get rid of.  About to run into a serious financial crisis in the midst of a national unity meltdown, Kiev won't be able to do much either.  The EU is like the UN; it's great at wagging fingers.  Maybe it will sanction someone.

There was a time when, if one superpower grabbed a piece of turf somewhere, the other was ready to ride in somewhere else.  Had the U.S. invaded Cuba when Castro and Khrushchev decided Havana had just the right number of palm trees and sugar cane for nuclear missile launches, there was a good chance the Soviets and their allies would have moved on Berlin.  Putin's going to take the Crimea?  I say America, take Toronto.  The borderlands are, after all, a site of impunity.