In plain sight Putin's doing-in Kremlin's star Critic .

Who Will Save Alexei Navalny?

Michael Weiss on Yahoo News

Thu, April 22, 2021

“If you saw me now—maybe you would have a good laugh,” Alexei Navalny wrote on Facebook April 20. “Look at him! A skeleton walking, wobbling around his prison cell. In his hands he is holding his court ruling, rolled up in a tube. With that tube he fervently swings away at mosquitoes covering the walls and the ceiling of his cell. Those buzzing stinging monsters can finish up a man faster than any hunger strike.”

The tone is characteristic of the world’s most famous political prisoner: comic stoicism in the face of approaching death combined with a Gogolian fascination for all the absurdities and trivialities still imposed by a cruel Russian system responsible for its arrival.

Navalny has been starving himself for three weeks. It is a feeble protest, perhaps, against being an involuntary guest of a 21st century gulag, but at least it is wholly his own. For someone who eight months ago was almost killed with a weapon of mass destruction (Novichok), Navalny seems determined to go on being Navalny until the very end, which could be “any minute” now, according to his physician who has not been allowed to examine his patient and can only make diagnoses from afar, based on blood test results.

Navalny risks kidney failure and cardiac arrest owing to abnormally high levels of potassium and creatinine in his blood (“After Novichok,” Navalny wrote, “potassium is not a biggie”). He has been transferred from one miserable penal facility to another where he is now on a regimen of “vitamin therapy.”

No one believes Navalny is being treated; rather, he is being gradually murdered in an internationally exhibited snuff film executive produced and directed by Vladimir Putin.

“I think they will kill him,” a former senior U.S. official, someone I typically turn to for good news, not bad, told me this week. “I don’t think they’ll do a last-minute release back to Germany [where Navalny recuperated from his Novichok poisoning last August] or something like that. Their goal is to watch Navalny slowly die in prison.”

And what can the United States do, or better yet, what is it willing to do to stop “them” and this obscenity? Judging by President Joe Biden’s rhetoric, not much. Navalny’s plight, Biden told reporters last week, was “totally, totally unfair, totally inappropriate,” which is something one says of a lousy referee call on the pitch, not live-streamed, slow-motion homicide.

The messaging, however, is clear: Putin may be a soulless killer but he nevertheless runs an aggressive nuclear hyperpower with which the United States seeks to have “a stable and predictable relationship,” as the White House readout of Biden’s call with him on April 13 stated. Good luck with that, you might say, but the readout ended by telegraphing Biden’s openness to a “summit meeting in a third country in the coming months.” It made no mention of Navalny, who may well be dead by then.

The backdrop to this cautiously extended olive branch is also obvious: the Russian Army could very well be in a “third country” uninvited in the coming days: Ukraine.

As of this writing there are reportedly anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 Russian troops currently deployed to occupied Crimea and the Russian border of the Donbas, itself occupied by undeclared Russian soldiers and intelligence officers masquerading as “separatists.” These troops are joined by a steady increase in warplanes, attack helicopters, tanks, cruise missiles and all the other matériel necessary for a conventional invasion.

Is one forthcoming or is this just a well-choreographed intimidation exercise intended more for Washington’s sake than for Kyiv’s? Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered a partial withdrawal from the border a day after Putin’s annual press conference April 21, in which the Russian president spoke of “red lines” against “insults and interference, including in elections,” and he darkly insinuated that the U.S. had just failed to assassinate his client, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a claim White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said has “no basis in fact.” Last year, the fear among Russia watchers from Washington to Tallinn was that Putin might intervene militarily in Belarus, if not annex the entire country in a definitive move to quell a rising protest movement over stolen election and expand Russian hard power closer into NATO’s backyard. Now, he threatens to re-invade Ukraine.

Biden would no doubt think it more than “unfair” and “inappropriate” of his having to navigate any hot crisis in Easter Europe within the first year of his presidency. A pandemic still rages, China rises, and the U.S. has to withdraw from a 20-year campaign in Afghanistan, to say nothing of roiling domestic cultural crises.

Moreover, Biden already has his hands full with peaceful Europe. See Czechia’s recent disclosure that in 2014, a team of Russian military intelligence operatives blew up an ammunition depot in a village in the east of the country. And not just any operatives: two of them, Col. Alexander Mishkin and Col. Anatoly Chepiga, were the assassins responsible for later trying to murder Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian arms dealer in Sofia in 2015 and the former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018. Mishkin and Chepiga’s weapon of choice in both instances was Novichok in what may have been proof of concept for the later operation to kill Russia’s opposition leader, at least the first time around.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN there would be “consequences” if Russia eliminated Navalny in prison. What kind? Sullivan did not elaborate. Nor do we know if he relayed them to Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of the Russian Security Council, with whom he has his own phone call this week, this one ending with “let’s keep in touch.”

Presumably Navalny would rather Sullivan got his retaliation in first, as a form of deterrence. But neither the U.S. nor E.U. seems eager to impose sanctions before Navalny’s demise. And Angela Merkel, once Navalny’s primary caretaker-in-exile, has reaffirmed her commitment to Russia’s controversial Nord-Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Europe, which the U.S. opposes.

What about sanctioning those hemisphere-hopping Russian oligarchs Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation named when he was first arrested upon his arrival back in Moscow from Berlin in January? That list was divided in three categories, the last two consisting of Russian human rights abusers and those specifically linked to Navalny’s persecution. But the first category is the one that would rattle the Kremlin the most: “Oligarchs upon whom Putin has bestowed wealth and power, and who wield it on behalf of the regime.”

The official excuse I hear from U.S. policymakers is that designating “oligarchs for being oligarchs isn’t how sanctions work.” Washington has to establish a predicate offense. The unofficial excuse I hear is that going after foreign billionaires who act as agents or plenipotentiaries of the Kremlin abroad is embarrassing because they’re so deeply entrenched in the Western financial system—banks, media companies, sports clubs, and real estate. Doing so would only expose the West’s see-no-evil policy with respect to money-laundering, lobbying and kleptocracy, the taints of which should now be obvious to anyone who survived the Trump era.

Putting our own house in order might make it more difficult for Putin to destroy his since there’s no use stealing in Moscow what you can’t spend in London, Paris and New York. As Navalny’s aide Vladimir Milov told me recently, “You don’t have to separate the human rights agenda from realpolitik. They’re inextricable now.”

And so, all across Russia’s eleven time zones, the people have done what they can and turned out to demonstrate for the dying hunger striker who has spent a decade telling them with blog posts and YouTube videos that they deserve better. Again we have seen the stirring scenes of young and old defy riot police and arbitrary detention in an authoritarian state. The solidarity and support have already made a difference to the prisoner. “[T]here is no better weapon against injustice and lawlessness,” Navalny wrote. “This is what keeps me alive right now. Despite the very high level of potassium.”

We in the West are left to hope it will work—while secretly suspecting, like the former U.S. official, that it won’t.

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Voting At Gunpoint in Crimea?

By David Edwards

 Prior to the March 16 referendum, the BBC website reported:

'Crimeans will vote on whether they want their autonomous republic to break away from Ukraine and join Russia.'

The title of the news report indicated the focus:

'Is Crimea's referendum legal?'

The answer:

'Ukraine and the West have dismissed the referendum as illegal and one that will be held at gunpoint, but Russia supports it.'

Legality was not an issue in BBC coverage of the January 2005 election held in Iraq under US-UK occupation. This was accepted on the main BBC evening news as 'the first democratic election in fifty years'. (David Willis, BBC1, News at Ten, January 10, 2005)

And the Iraq election was not merely 'held at gunpoint'; it was held in the middle of a ferocious war to crush resistance to occupation. Just weeks before the vote, American and British forces had subjected Iraq's third city, Fallujah, to all-out assault leaving 70 per cent of houses and shops destroyed, and at least 800 civilians dead. ('Fallujah still needs more supplies despite aid arrival,' www.irinnews.org, November 30, 2004)

The US 1st Marine Division alone fired 5,685 high-explosive 155mm shells during the battle. The US 3rd Marine Air Wing contributed 709 bombs, rockets and missiles, and 93,000 machine gun and cannon rounds. There was much else besides, of course, and not just in Fallujah.

In the same month as the election, an Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, reported of the city:

'It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn't see a single building that was functioning.' (Fadhil, 'City of ghosts,' The Guardian, January 11, 2005)

The BBC made no mention of the argument that the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis as a result of the invasion over the previous two years made a nonsense of the claim that the election was free and fair.

The US had in fact rigged the rules to ensure US-friendly Kurds had 27% of the seats in the national assembly, although they made up just 15% of the population. In a rare departure from mainstream propaganda, Naomi Klein commented in the Guardian:

'Skewing matters further, the US-authored interim constitution requires that all major decisions have the support of two-thirds or, in some cases, three-quarters of the assembly - an absurdly high figure that gives the Kurds the power to block any call for foreign troop withdrawal, any attempt to roll back Bremer's economic orders, and any part of a new constitution.' (Klein, 'Brand USA is in trouble, so take a lesson from Big Mac,' The Guardian, March 14, 2005)

Washington-funded organisations with long records of machinating for US interests abroad were deeply involved in the election. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) were part of a consortium to which the US government had provided over $80 million for political and electoral activities in Iraq. NDI was headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine 'We think the price is worth it' Albright, while IRI was chaired by Republican Senator John McCain. (Lisa Ashkenaz Croke and Brian Dominick, 'Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote,' www.newstandardnews.net, December 13, 2004)

In January 2005, our search of the Lexis media database found that there had not been a single substantive analysis of press freedom in occupied Iraq - obviously a key requirement for a free election - in any UK national newspaper in the previous six months. The issue had simply been ignored.

And yet a Guardian editorial lauded the vote as 'the country's first free election in decades', a 'landmark election' that would be 'in a way, a grand moment'. (Leader, 'Vote against violence,' The Guardian, January 7, 2005; Leader, 'On the threshold,' The Guardian, January 29, 2005)

The editors added:

'It is in the interests of all - Iraqis, the Arabs, the US and Britain - that something workable be salvaged from the wreckage as Iraq stands poised between imperfect democracy and worsening strife.' (Ibid, Leader, January 29, 2005)

By contrast, a Guardian leader commented on the referendum in Crimea:

'The legality of this vote is at best highly questionable: the region is under armed occupation, the Crimean prime minister was deposed when gunmen took over regional government buildings last week and, according to Chancellor Angela Merkel, the referendum is incompatible with Ukraine's constitution.'

A second leader was more direct:

'The referendum that took place in Crimea yesterday is both irrelevant and deeply significant. Irrelevant because it has no standing in the law of the country to which it applies, and because it took place while the autonomous region was under military occupation.'

Making Bush And Blair Pay?

In 2004, the Daily Telegraph looked forward to 'the first democratic elections' in Iraq. (Leader, 'Mission accomplished,' Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2004) The Sunday Telegraph wrote of 'the first democratic elections there for more than 50 years'. (Sean Rayment, 'Britain poised to send 1,000 more soldiers to Iraq,' Sunday Telegraph, November 28, 2004)

Of Crimea, the Telegraph commented earlier this month:

'Russia's campaign to gain control of Crimea will culminate on Sunday with an illegal referendum conducted at gunpoint.'

The editors added:

'The aim of sanctions, in other words, would not be to save Crimea, but to deter Mr Putin from going further... Hence the overriding importance of making Mr Putin pay for Crimea.'

What kind of nutbar working within the UK press establishment would conceive of proposing sanctions against Britain and America, or discuss 'the overriding importance of making Mr Bush and Mr Blair pay for Iraq'?

The Independent quoted David Cameron:

'It is completely unacceptable for Russia to use force to change borders based on a sham referendum held at the barrel of a Russian gun.'

In 2004, the Independent's reporters told readers that 'democratic and free elections can bring a hope of peace' in Iraq. (Borzou Daragahi, 'Bin Laden backs deputy Zarqawi and urges boycott of elections,' The Independent, December 28, 2004)

A Times leader commented:

'The referendum was absurdly hasty. It was conducted with Russian special forces barricading Ukrainian soldiers into their bases and regular Russian troops massing on their western border.'  (Leading article, 'Russian Pariah,' The Times, March 17, 2014)

In 2004, the same newspaper commented of Iraq:

'The terrorists will do all they can to destroy democratic elections.' (Leader, 'Send more troops,' Sunday Times, October 10, 2004)

The Financial Times observed:

'Iraq's first democratic election is unfolding under the shadow of a deadly insurgency.' (Steve Negus and John Reed, 'Allawi runs on claim of "strong leadership",' Financial Times, December 16, 2004)

A recent FT editorial was titled: 'Crimea poll will be divorce at gunpoint.'

The editors of the Express observed:

'So Vladimir Putin has won his so-called referendum in the Crimea. It was totally predictable because it was comprehensively rigged. Those who did not wish to vote for separation from Ukraine and annexation by Russia were threatened by the columns of imported Russian thugs.'

In the same month (October 2004) that the Lancet reported 100,000 deaths as a result of the US-UK invasion, the Express commented:

'It is Britain and America that want to give the besieged people of Iraq their true freedom, to hold free elections and elect a democratic government.' (Leader, 'Nothing short of insulting,' The Express, October 6, 2004)

The Sunday Express wrote of 'Iraq's first free election in decades.' (Simon Belgard, 'Marine rescuer pays the price of courage,' Sunday Express, December 19, 2004)

The Mirror wrote:

'The people of Crimea have a right to self-determination. But there was nothing normal about the referendum when you consider Russia had sent armed troops into the region, which remains, for now, part of Ukraine.' (Leading article, 'A cold sweat,' The Mirror, March 18, 2014)

In 2005, the Mirror reported that Iraq was approaching 'its first democratic elections on January 30'. ('Police chief and son assassinated,' The Mirror, January 11, 2005)

Michael White, an associate editor at the Guardian, wrote:

'Vladimir Putin is a KGB professional who shows every sign of being a bad man, quite possibly a prodigious thief as well.'

We note, first, that there has probably never been an example of a senior reporter describing a serving US or UK leader in comparable terms. White continued:

'Offensive though it is to the memory of millions of Russians murdered by Hitler (far more even than his hero Stalin killed), Putin's orchestration of Crimea's defection from Ukraine offers a disturbing comparison with the German annexation of the Czech Sudetenland with Neville Chamberlain's connivance in 1938.'

Again, an unthinkable comparison for 'our' actions.

White added:

'A Crimean referendum staged under what amounts to Russian military occupation – navy and soldiers – and boycotted by the minority Ukrainians and (12%) Tatars (expelled and butchered by Stalin) is pretty bogus.'

In November 2004, as Iraq's bloodbath overflowed, as Fallujah burned, White painted a happier picture:

'The elections are one issue which unites most MPs, and the anti-war Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell, also stressed how "essential" it was that they are held.'

White noted:

'Successful elections would quieten some of the international criticism of US involvement in Iraq.'

There was 'US involvement in Iraq', much as there was German 'involvement' in France in 1940 and Iraqi 'involvement' in Kuwait in 1990.

We wrote to White and confessed our discombobulation. Given the illegal US-UK invasion, the subsequent mass death, the demolition of Fallujah, how did he account for his contradictory analyses? Why had he written in terms of potentially 'successful elections' in Iraq but of a 'pretty bogus' referendum in Crimea? White replied on March 20:

'thanks for the note and points which I will ponder.

'I try to be aware of the double standards issue and think I acknowledged as much in the piece in question.'

This was a surprisingly forthright and friendly reply from White who, for reasons best known to him, refers to us as 'the two Lens'. He of course completely failed to answer the question. But then, the propaganda system runs on unexplained silences the way an engine runs on oil.  (Source:  Media Lens)

Russia right to take Crimea?

from Trevor Hoyle

If Russia was Israel, the annexation of Crimea... 

...would be taking place without the slightest Western, by which I mean American, objection. And our media and commentators would be bending over backwards to justify the take-over as the righting of an historic wrong. Think of how it would look if we weren't talking 'nasty, nasty Russians' but 'wonderful, wonderful Israelis': Crimea's history, ethnicity, culture and religion would be *instantly* adduced as justifications for the annexation -- as would the presence of hostile states on Russia's borders, and anti-Russian sentiment within Ukraine. And that referendum wouldn't be 'sham' or 'illegal' -- it would be the icing on the legitimating cake: proof of the oh-so-touching way that an oppressed people had kept alive their sense of identity and their traditions over all these years of separation and oppression... In short, we'd see a narrative in our media that presented Crimea as a region that was being 'rejoined with its rightful owner', as part of the 'correcting of an historic mistake'...

Crimea another view: E-mail to Channel 4!

Dear Mr Frei (journalist on Channel 4),

In reference to tonights 'Snowmail' (1).

It is indeed instructive to watch and listen to western hacks sniping, sneering and twisting themselves into Gordian knots of hypocrisy over the Crimean referendum. The spectacle of the great and the good and their lapdog hacks in their absurd efforts to square the circle of one minute condemning Russia for interfering in Crimea and then the next minute condemning them for not interfering is something to behold.
 

You, who said absolutely nothing about the rigged elections in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, you who said absolutely nothing to condemn those who refused to recognise the democratic wishes of the Palestinians when they voted in Hamas in fair and internationally observed elections, have the brass neck to tut and cluck your tongue as you sneer:

'On Sunday the people of Crimea (that would be all the Russians in the peninsula) voted by 96.7 per cent - in a majority reminiscent of the old Soviet Union to join the Russian Federation.'

Your malicious implication is clear but as you well know, it is based on nothing. Nada. Zilch. These elections were also well observed and no malpractice occurred. But such is the arrogance of our western press that you think you don't have to provide any evidence for your dirty slurs. Such is the state of your 'profession' these days.
You plough on with:

'Moscow and Crimea ploughed on with the referendum thumbing their nose at the west.'

Again, the implication that everyone should listen to 'the west', as if it has some moral high ground from which to pontificate to other sovereign countries. Are you serious? The west has no moral authority to dictate to anyone, no matter what they do! The illegal wars the west has prosecuted and the absolute hell in those broken countries they have left behind makes your kind of reasoning perverse in the extreme.

As to sanctions, you continue to lament that: 'None of those on the list belong to Vladimir Putin's inner circle'. The west, and you, as their trusty echo chamber just won't forgive Putin for his part in saving Syria from yet another western bombing campaign.  It is truly sickening to see such double standards on show and being contorted and massaged to demonise Russia and Putin and portray our blood soaked leaders as 'good guy' humanitarians.
It's full on hypocrisy. I know it and you know it.

Ed Murray.

(1)  US and EU impose sanctions on Russia
Good evening it’s Matt here tonight with Cathy Newman and we start off with the dramatic events around the Ukraine crisis. On Sunday the people of Crimea (that would be all the Russians in the peninsula) voted by 96.7 per cent - in a majority reminiscent of the old Soviet Union to join the Russian Federation.

Russia immediately declared it was delighted to embrace Crimea and the EU and US immediately went into crisis mode. Despite all their threats of sanctions in recent days and weeks Moscow and Crimea ploughed on with the referendum thumbing their nose at the west. And so Washington and Brussels had to come good on their word to impose limited sanctions against Russia after several hours of talks. The EU has decided to put 21 individuals from Russia and Ukraine onto a list that would prevent them from travelling and will freeze any assets they have in the west.
None of those on the list belong to Vladimir Putin's inner circle, so are these first sanctions going to have any bite at all especially when Moscow has so far been blithely indifferent to the gnashing of western teeth?

We have a report from International Editor Lindsey Hilsum in Simferopol. Our Political Editor Gary Gibbon looks at the diplomacy and we have an interview with a worried sounding Estonian foreign minister.

Crimea: The Price of Annexation!

THE tears of the Russian elite were dripping yesterday, as President Putin delivered a speech in St. Georges Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace in which he claimed to put right an error of history: thus marking the return of Crimea to Russian control.  Mr. Putin reached out deep into the souls of the Russian people regaling his auduence with historic moments beginning with the 10th-century baptism of Prince Vladimir, whose conversion to Christianity transformed the kingdom known as Rus, to the final collapse of the Soviet Union.  A moment of extreme patroitic pain for many Russians: when as Putin declared:  'Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad, [and] overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest - if not the biggest - divided nations in the world.'

As the proud tears of the bosses of mother Russia fell in Moscow the contents of the A.T.M machines emptied in the sunny seaside resorts of Crimea, and banks that still have cash have been imposing tight restrictions on withdrawals.  All flights, other than those bound to or from Moscow remain cancelled as the Crimean tragedy unfolds.  The markets and the God of Mamon are about to speak, and Crimea which lacks a self-sustaining economy depends heavily on the Ukrainian mainland for vital services, including electricity and fresh water.

One economist, Oleksandr Zholud, pointed out that the 'Ukraine can quite easily cut off Crimea' and '[f]rom the economic point of view it looks like a sinkhole.'  Crimean officials hope now that Moscow will come to their aid.

Igor N. Slyunayev, Russia's regional development minister, has been gloomy about the Crimean peninsula's infrastructural needs, and he says:
'The peninsula is not self-sufficient when it comes to the entire group of virtually important resources - first of all, electricity and water,' and '[a]bout 80% of its territories water comes through the northern Crimean canal from the Dnieper river.  Also, 80% of Crimea depends on imports of electricity.'

In a bleak assessment Mr. Slyunayev told the Russian newspaper Kommersant:  'Today, our Crimea looks no better than Palestine.'

Today, in the International New York Times', the journalist David M. Herszenhorn reports:
'Fully absorbing Crimea is a potentially herculean undertaking, which would require issuing new passports, changing the currency to rubles from hryvnias, and intergrationg completely distinct systems for property records, taxes, legal disputes and more.  The process is frought with risks, including the possibily that the Ukrainian government could move to futher isolate the geographically remote peninsula by shutting vital transportation lines.  There is no overland transportation link between Russia and Crimea, and building a bridge across the shortest waterway, near the Crimean city of Kerch, would take years and cost an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion.'

Ukraine & Russia: Sanctions in our time!

IT has been said that rats when they find a carcass, take watchful bites at its extremities; then prudently withdraw to see whether any ill consequences ensue before starting to chew at the main course.  It is clear that President Putin and his Russian henchmen are applying a similar foreign policy strategy in Crimea and very likely in eastern Ukraine. What may now be devoured up with impunity in Crimea may later be relished elsewhere at leisure without as to repercussions.  It is a process that was used by Putin elsewhere, and one used by other statesmen in the last century:  a frontier incident at Wal Wal in the 1930s provided the excuse for the Italian government under Mussolini to demand territorial and other concessions from Abyssinia. 

Last week, Russia deployed more troops on its eastern border with the Ukraine ready, we are told, 'to intervene in Ukraine at any time'.   Today the Crimean referendum was confirmed to be as expected in favour of its amalgamation with Russia.  At the time of the Italian-Abyssinian conflict the League of Nations (an unfortunate forerunner to the UN) pondered and investigated; Anthony Eden even promising that, if necessary, they would trace its origins back to the Flood:  the world was told that no effort would be neglected that offered hope of a peaceful settlement.  Mr. Eden then, like Mr. Hague now, threw himself into his labours and while he and the League laboured in their efforts to find a settlement, Mussolini and the Italian army proceeded with their military preparations:  on the 2nd, October 1935, a telegram was dispatched by by Hailé Selassié declaring that Italian troops had crossed the Abyssinian frontier.  Then with Mussolini, as now with Putin in Crimea, the international policy makers declared that the aggressor had breach its obligations with regard to international law. 

Now Mr. Putin, the Russian President has signed a decree recognising Crimea as a sovereign state, paving the way for it to be absorbed into Russia.  This decree says has taken into account Sunday's referendum in Crimea, in which officials said 97% of voters backed breaking away from Ukraine.  The EU and United States say the referendum is illegal and is imposing sanctions on 21 officials from Russia and Ukraine.

Crimea, which has been part of Ukraine since 1954, was apparently taken over by pro-Russian gunmen in late February.  Most of its population is ethnic Russian.  The official position of the Kremlin is to deny that the gunmen are Russian soldiers, but concedes that MPs authorised Mr Putin to use force after a formal plea for help from Mr Yanukovych, the ousted former President of the Ukraine.  

The US sanctions target 11 people, including several Russian officials and Viktor Yanukovych 'by far the most comprehensive sanctions applied to Russia since the cold war'. 

Meanwhile, an editorial in the Financial Times yesterday declared:   'Nobody should assume that these sanctions will be enough to curb the Kremlin.  It is far from clear that Mr. Putin's thirst to revenge the toppling of his ally in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, has been sated.'

In the case of Abyssinia, the League of Nations avoided ill-consequences by leaving Hailé Selassié with a fragmented kingdom connected to the sea by a slim desert strip, and giving Mussolini the effective control of most of the country.  With this historical example in mind one must fear for the territorial integrity of the Ukraine.  Malcolm Muggeridge, commenting later on the Italian-Abyssinian conflict in his book 'The Thirties' on the idea that a 'spirited David with his accurately aimed pebble sanctions' may lay low the 'Goliath of  ruthless, overbearing force'  was to write:  'Sanctions, which had already been in operation... had prove somewhat disappointing' and that 'in the public mind' they represented 'a means of engaging in warfare innocuously, a play-way or substitute war; enough war to cover a sixpence'. 

I fear it will be the same in the Ukraine in the time of Putin, as it was in Abyssinia in the time of Mussolini;  Sanctions in our time, oh Lord!