As long as Mr. Putin is making things easy for writers of world history books, then it is most likely that he will rescue more Russians in Ukraine and other areas between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. This will make Easter more of a celebration because they can include a restoration of Russian influence.
One reason for retaking Crimea (and some additional Ukrainian coastline) is to set the stage for exclusive control of the Azov-Kuban petroleum reserves.
It would be quite convenient for Russia to monopolize this field.However, would it not also be wise to share the wealth from this field with Ukraine in order to increase Ukraine’s purchasing power for Russian exports?
Yes and no.
If Ukraine has rights to this field, it can sell the energy to NATO nations, depriving Russia of those revenues from NATO nations. Mr. Putin can prevent this loss of energy revenues.
It leave me wondering if he would like to be remembered as the ruler who kept energy revenues. Is this a correction to the last USSR leaders who may have let Turmenistan oil and gas reserves flow through their hands, reserves “discovered” in 2000, less than a decade after the dissolution of the USSR? If those fields were known in 1990, then the USSR could have continued to fight the Cold War.
What about his statement that Russia had no interest in invading Ukraine? I don’t know Russian but I wonder if he used an archaic conditional verb tense.
Did anyone ask him what he thought the borders of Ukraine are? Which year’s map did he have in mind so that he could claim to tell the truth?Historically,this is merely irridentism, the kind that causes protracted wars with high casualty rates.
Well, Mr Putin may create a monopoly and nickname it the Easter Energy Fields if he rolls his tanks into Eastern Ukraine next week.
profmrobinson 