Did you know?
The Independent (London)
Coaches carrying US Marine reservists have been stoned, the Ukrainian Socialists have demanded the resignation of the Defence Minister, Anatoliy Hrytsenko, and Russian MPs have called for Crimea to be taken away from Ukraine and incorporated into Russia.
(...)
The Marines were supposed to help refurbish a Ukrainian naval base for the exercise but their arrival has instead triggered a firestorm of protest that shows no sign of abating. The Marines have been stoned, subject to bomb hoaxes, been trapped in their accommodation, ridiculed in the Russian press, and construction supplies have been blocked at the port. Opposition has been led by die-hard Communists, Russian nationalists and by the neo-Communists, headed by the MP Natalya Vitrenko.
Inspired by a thread on European Tribune, with information provided from Russian sources as well as Western ones.
For the time being, this amounts to no more than posturing and grandstanding by most "participants" to these incidents, but there is a serious underlying context.
- the US administration has been pushing aggressively for Ukraine to join NATO - and thus isolate it from Russia;
- this comes in a context of a war of words between Russia and various Western leaders (mostly the Blair/Cheney axis) about Russia's oil& gas resources, access to Russian pipelines and energy security. (As I have argued, that "new cold war" has been started by Blair to hide his panic over the UK's brutal switch from a net exporter of gas to that of a net importer, in need of Russian supplies but with no national company to negotiate them properly, and Cheney has pitched in to try to gain access to Russia's oil&gas resources for his big oil friends);
- the Ukrainian context is that of tension and unstability after the recent parliamentary elections which has seen 3 main factions (President Yushenko's, Ms Timoshenko's - a former ally of the President during the Orange revlution but now in conflict with him, and the pro-Russian faction of Mr Yanukovich, the former prime minister). There is a lot of jockeying and posturing linked to the domestic political situation, as described in this article;
- the early arrival of US soldiers in Crimea, a majority-Russian province on the Black Sea, has stoked tensions, especially after it was confirmed that their ship carried weapons, and not just the announced construction materials.
Demonstrations against the US soldiers and NATO have turned violent in the past week, with politicians of all stripes blaming one another or foreign intervention, alternatively by Russia or the US.
The situation is pretty volatile, and US behavior seems to have done little to calm things down, to say the least.
What will happen if a US soldier is accidentally killed?