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Putin warns Ukrainians against implementing EU deal, so… Vladimir Putin has warned the Ukrainian government against getting closer to the EU, threatening their access to Russian markets.
So the Ukraine has to decide between losing their access to 142 million Russians with a total GDP of $2.1 trillion (official), or improving their access to 511 million people with a total GDP of $16.95 trillion (official).
Hmm, yes I can see how that might be a difficult decision 😀
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The Ukraine has to choose between the bureaucratic thuggery of the EU or the criminal thuggery of Russia, so that is really an easy choice. Whatever people say about the EU, it bears no resemblance to Russia as a place to do business.
However, the scope that the Ukrainians have for replacing Russian markets with EU markets will depend upon what they can buy from and sell to the EU member states. There won’t be a lot of gas coming from Europe to the Ukraine this winter methinks, and are the European farmers’ lobby in the EU prepared for the potential breadbasket of Europe with its (radioactive*?) produce to have full access to EU markets? Let us hope the latter is so.
* The fallout of Chernobyl is not a valid pretext, even within the terms of those who would do so, for blocking imports of Ukrainian produce, the fallout went as far and wide as Norway and Cumbria.
$2.1 trillion GDP and how many tanks and willingness to use them?
I don’t know Bruce, how many? Vlad Putin says he can be in Kiev in two weeks if he wants to, so what is stopping him I wonder?
I think that the Ukraine might be grateful if they didn’t have access to Russian Meerkats. How best to go about that is another matter.
Ukraine has its own natural gas reserves – although I’d await Tim’s input on their viability.
It’s a point I’ve made before, but Putin can’t get too militarily involved in the West without inviting a Chinese move into Siberia.
I think that a rather more serious worry is that even if he was “in Kiev in two weeks”, the Russian Army would be fighting an intractable, incredibly bloody and mind bogglingly expensive insurgency in Ukraine for the next 20 years, or when the Russian economy collapses, whichever comes first.
Well, there IS that whole natural gas pipeline valve thingie.
I expect that Ukraine’s industries, geared to the Russian markets, will end up like those of communist East Germany after the wall came down – completely destroyed. Germany will not pump in the sort of money which it sent to its own newly reunited compatriots and Brussels is skint. So the outlook for the Ukrainians is bleak indeed unless some form of continuing trade with Russia is cobbled together.
Then like East Germany they’ll adapt, and as no one will be pumping dosh into them, may they’ll do it faster and with less distortions than the Osties. No good can come of being linked to the Russkies. Anyone who depends on them is a mug.
If I was Ukraine I’d be pushing hard to sell weapons to the world (hey, Kurds have oil and need weapons) as they have quite a lot of military related factories and component manufacturers. And guess who else needs those components? Russia. I wonder if Vlad will put up tariff barriers to make the stuff they need from the Ukraine for expensive for themselves? haha
Ukraine only has to sit tight and let its shale gas deal come to fruition and then it can tell Vlad to p*ss off.
The Russians can do fuck all. They haven’t won a war for quite some time and to show war is bad economics, how big is the Ukrainian economy?
The economic choice is to join the EU. But joining the EU will end political independence. They own you.
Not joining would appear to let Ukrainians actually rule Ukraine. But Russia would still be next door meddling and Ukraine would be even weaker. Who would choose that?
So, the choice is to freeze to death this winter, or someday, somewhere, somehow, sell something to someone out west.
From my warmish, sorta-safe, well-fed, well-hydrated mid-American home I can urge the Ukrainians to stand fast against Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin.
That’s because I can see the light from the fire, but can’t feel the heat from the fire.
But the fire has caught, and the flames lick ever higher.
Being ‘owned’ by the EU is a bit like being ‘owned’ by a tearful and habitually stoned girlfriend. But I think you misunderstand, it is not EU membership that is being offered here, just a closer trading relationship.
The LAST thing the EU wants is an economic basket case like the Ukraine any time soon. They need a massive amount of internal political and institutional restructuring before that can happen, and they know it.
Well razorback, I know people in the Ukraine right now and speak with them often, and they seem to be made of sterner stuff.
Always good when a statue of a communist murderer goes down
http://twitchy.com/2014/09/28/bye-vlad-protesters-in-kharkiv-ukraine-topple-largest-lenin-monument-in-europe-video/
The EU is never going to fight for Ukraine.
Reagan didn’t want ’em. GHWB didn’t want em’. Clinton didn’t want ’em. GB2 didn’t want ’em. Merkel doesn’t want ’em. Marine & Farage sure as FUCK don’t want ’em. Osama bin Kenya the Boy King has no clue anyway.
Ukraine “joining the EU” is as likely as Mexio joining the CIS. Never going to happen, for basically the same reason.
Ukraine is between a rock and a hard place, between the thuggery of Putin’s Russia and the totalitarian EU.
The economic benefits of joining the EU may be greater but Western Europe has been thoroughly poisoned by a nihilistic Cultural Marxism, a disease to which Russia at least, has so far remained somewhat immune.
Only a truly independent Ukraine has any hope of real autonomy and liberty, but is sadly unlikely due to the reality of geo-political power games.
AngryTory: The EU is never going to fight for Ukraine… Ukraine “joining the EU” is as likely as Mexio joining the CIS.
Firstly the EU does not fight for anything, that would be NATO. And I don’t think anyone really expects NATO to or that NATO would even need to. Secondly, this is not about the Ukraine “joining” the EU, it is about getting better access to EU markets. That *is* going to happen.
Ragingnick: between the thuggery of Putin’s Russia and the totalitarian EU.
Hyperbole much? I am well known for my anti-EU stance, but ask yourself this: can any component of the EU simply depart the EU if there is sufficient internal political desire to do so? Like, say, the UK? Well the answer is YES of course. So please, do not call the EU ‘totalitarian’. It is not even close. It is a regulatory dogs dinner, but it is also a free-ish trade area. To call it totalitarian bends to meaning of the word into meaninglessness.
I do not like the E.U. or Putin’s regime either.
I wish there was a third option – such as real independence for the Ukraine.
Alas – the world is not an ideal place.
Yes I think that pretty much sums it up Paul. And given a choice between which of the two to move closer to, well…
As I wrote earlier:
H
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m41Tdl5mvdg
Actually it is very close, just listen to former Soviet dissidents such as Vladimir Bukovsky.
The only difference between Soviet style totalitarianism and the ‘soft’ EU sort is the insidious and subtle way that the latter operates, under cloak of a superficial spectacle of democracy and the stupefying effects of a popular culture and mainstream media captured completely by the forces of neo-Gramscianism.
Shopping malls and pop music do not indicate the absence of totalitarianism, if you don’t believe me look at China.
It is the West’s overwhelming military and political power combined with its aggressive expansionist policies that make war in Europe possible. And because Russia cannot hope to defeat the US/EU/NATO conventionally, such a war is of necessity nuclear. Russia has repeatedly stated it would use nuclear weapons first in any European war. Europe would not recover from such a war, and neither would the US or Russia. Bon chance China!
The present crisis is the direct and predictable result of the US/EU’s engineering the coup d’etat that overthrew Ukraine’s only democratically elected government. Without the coup, Crimea would still be part of Ukraine, there would be no insurgency in the east, and Ukraine’s economic problems might have been soluble. The crisis has been expertly exploited by Russia to its advantage. A greater failure of US/EU policy cannot be conceived.
The correct, third, choice for Ukraine is exactly what Putin has been promoting: a nonaligned neutral Ukraine with economic ties to both Russia and the EU, and a federal state structure that protects the rights of minorities, which include Jews, Tatars, Turks, Greek, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians as well as the more common Russians.
Historians like to talk about how Europe’s leaders stumbled unawares into WW I, but today’s US/EU leaders are demonstrably more stupid, more ignorant, more arrogant and less aware than those who produced WW I.
Expect the worst.
Hmm, no offense bob sykes, but your comment may be proof that Paul Marks is not the only person in the West who is watching too much RT…
Delusional propaganda from the Kremlin, every single word of it. A fountain of barefaced lies. Seriously, I hope you are getting paid for remarks like this, in which case you are perfectly rational and just working at your job. Otherwise…
ragingnick… oh dear, where to start?
I am anti-EU. Indeed as well as talking about it, I have been involved in more than a few ‘activities’ working against the EU. I think Britain would be better off out of the EU. Presumably you think I, and indeed Nigel Farage, is in real danger of being ‘disappeared’? Ok, even if Farage is a bit too high profile, how about me then? You keep using that word but…
Indeed Alisa, but it has the opposite effect on Paul Marks, because he knows they are full of shit, whereas Bob Sykes actually thinks it is true. Sykes is essentially saying we have to be accommodating to Russia or they will commit suicide and take us all with them. It really is that crazy. He is also saying Russia does not actually want the Ukraine as a client state, they want it ‘non-aligned’. Seriously.
Yep.
That said, and as much as I detest Putin to a much greater degree than I detest the EU, I really can’t see any choice the Ukrainian people can make which would remain viable and relatively stable in the longer run. That, not because I think that the EU is just as thuggish and ruthless as Putin is (far from it), but because I’m afraid that as a regime, the EU is much less viable than Putindom is (by which I do not necessarily mean Putin and his current team, but Russia and its political culture in general and in the foreseeable future). In that sense, Ukraine truly seems to be stuck between the rock and the hard place.
Another major factor here people seem to be forgetting is Islam. Europe is now hopelessly in thrall to Islam and Multiculturalism, and as Mark Steyn has pointed out Islamic revolution in Europe is all but inevitable. Putin and Russia have at least displayed some degree of resistance to politically correct pieties, in particular multiculturalism, that have so infected Western Europe.
For that reason alone allying with Russia rather than the EU could be more rational in the long run for Ukraine.
Upon review this morning I think the very first comment by Mr. Ed makes as much sense as any.
And I would have not used “join” the EU”. My thoughts were more like “align with the EU” or “give the EU and others better trade terms than Russia”. Or something similar; words seldom express thought quite right.
A Ukraine which gives favored ttreatment to the EU and alienates Russia will gradually become the EU’s servant. It will have no alternative as Brussels will steadily add conditions and erode its independence. A strict policy of economic neutrality is probably Ukraine’s best course.
OT. Now, having made a truce with the Separtists, Kiev will find it very difficult to resume military actions to retake that territory. Who will want to relight that fuse?
Steyn went off the deep end a while ago, a sort of Islamist Derangement Syndrome kind of thing, like Bush Derangement Syndrome but for ‘righties’. It is essentially looking at a graph and then just extrapolating it off the page, a bit like the global warming cultists do. It suggests when something like Rotherham happens, people just say “oh well” and nothing can possibly change. Indeed given the grip Islam and the multiculties are said to have, I can only wonder how it made it onto the mainstream media, no?
Yeah because being a client state of Russia will really work to people’s interests in the Ukraine? Seriously? And if it does not work out as hoped, will they be able to hold a vote and call the whole thing off, do you think? Ciao Vladimir, no hard feeling?
But perhaps you really do think I am going to get ‘disappeared’ prior to the run up to the vote on the UK leaving the EU when it happens, so what’s the difference, eh?
If you think the long term economic well being of Ukrainians is safe in the Kremlin’s hands, I can only marvel. And if you think the sort of things the twits in Brussels… Brussels FFS… will do are even vague comparable, I can only urge you to travel more and stop reading Steyn. I really am starting to think some elements of the North American right are as oblivious to reality about Europe as the left are, and that is really saying something.
29th September 2014 is the 76th anniversary of the conference that led to the Munich Agreement, signed the next day. Not that the Ukraine is quite what Czechoslovakia was then, but I just thought that that grim day should be noted.
Cocaine is one hell of a drug.
I think a policy of “We’ll trade with whomever has stuff we want and whoever wants our stuff,” possibly coupled with a “no weapons for Russia” policy, would probably serve Ukraine best. Come to think of it, we should probably try it here.
Does anyone have noticed that when a Kremlin supporter talks about Eastern Europe the first thing he/she does is to erase the Eastern Europe countries from discussion, presenting the case as US/EU vs Russia?
This is a typical debate framing.
For bob sykes of this world Ukraine, Poland, the Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia don’t have any right to an opinion. Erased with it is a history of occupation under Soviets. For them only Russia has a right to be paranoid. The others once occupied by them for 50 years don’t.
Alisa – on a recent trip to Grimsby (once a fishing town – east coast of England, nice place even though it is Labour) I shared a car with someone who also watches RT – we shared notes on what wild propaganda it is (much like people in World War II chatting about Lord Haw-Haw “Germany Calling, Germany Calling….” it was quite fashionable to laugh at his broadcasts but he still got hanged after the war) – and then it stuck me…….
I have often met people who watch RT from time to time – but I have never met (physically met) anyone who actually believes it. So its propaganda may not be as effective as I assume.
Of course the person-in-Kent’s friends believe it – or pretend to, But I do not physically meet them (just as well – as this might prove to be terminal experience for me).
As for the E.U…..
Not to be feared – they are nonentities.
I just walked into Kells – lots of Union Flags and Red Hand of Ulster flags, and 1916 banners (here it means the Ulster Division on the Somme – not the Easter Rising of the watermelons). People round here would respect Mr Putin and his thugs – respect them as enemies (which they are), The E.U. is just a joke
It is not much different back home in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Fewer flags – but Putin is still an enemy, and the E.U, is still a sick joke.
Lucklucky – quite so.
Mr Ed – so you do not believe that Neville Chamberlain was an evil warmonger against that nice Mr Hitler then?
I suspect the Rothbardians will not be sending you any Christmas cards this year.