In case you missed, here’s my initial take on the crisis in Ukraine. It’s from the weekend but still captures my basic thoughts on the what it means, what we can do.
Juliet S. Sorensen points out that natural disasters can be breeding grounds for corruption: “each additional $100 per capita in FEMA relief was correlated with a 102 percent increase in corruption in a state.”
So who exactly was behind that spasm of “religious liberty”/”all good to hate on the gays” bill that suddenly cropped up all over the country? We got to the bottom of it.
Some sensible and sensibly restrained suggestions from three former Ambassadors to Ukraine (two Bush II, one Clinton) on how the Ukraine crisis might be walked back from the brink. A central point is that Ukraine not make the mistake Georgia did and be baited into shooting first.
As the Ukraine crisis has progressed I’ve gone back to the books to get as accurate a picture as I can of the territorial evolution of Ukraine over the last few centuries. We know that the country has a rough but persistent division between a more western-oriented and more thoroughly ethnic Ukrainian west and a more Russified east. At least some of that is due to the fact that significant parts of western Ukraine were ruled by Austria-Hungary and its successor states as recently as the first half of the 20th century.
This map doesn’t go back centuries. But it’s a helpful illustration of the territorial expansion of what is now Ukraine going back to World War I.
Click this post’s title to see a larger version of the map.
I had thought of the immediate previous post as a meditation on history rather than food blogging. But ‘death of the author’ and all that, a lot of readers have seen it differently and have been writing in in droves, saying, ‘Dude, where’s the recipe?’ So recipe coming after the jump …
Meanwhile, my wife (in part because we love the taste and healthfullness and in large part to give our crazy young sons – 5 and 7 – something to do on a freezing cold day) is cooking this cabbage soup which is the inheritance of her maternal grandmother.
She was a pre-World War II immigrant to Palestine, traveling alone, from a city in what was then and again now in southeastern Poland, today not far from the Poland-Ukraine border. She lived most of her life in Haifa.
As usual, David Remnick has some of the wisest insights and most tightly crafted writing on the situation in Ukraine. And, unlike virtually everyone else writing and talking, he has a deep knowledge of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Worth your time to read.
This opinion piece by Charles King in the Times also made a lot of sense to me, not for taking a clear position but unfolding many the complexities and extreme dangers of the situation.
Meanwhile my friend Garance Franke-Ruta put together this curated twitter list of various people you’ll want to hear from about the situation in Ukraine – journalists, foreign policy hands, observers, historians, activists.
This article in the Times has details on just how Ukraine’s military would stack up against the Russian Army in battle. In Crimea, Ukraine had only token forces. It was Russia’s for the taking. And Ukraine has no realistic way to dislodge them. The Times piece seems contradictory though on how Ukraine would fare in the rest of the country.
They quote Western sources saying that Ukraine’s military could hold its own and even expose deficiencies in the Russian Army which the one-sided fights in the Caucasus did not. But they have Russian sources suggesting Ukraine’s military is hollowed out and saddled with obsolete weaponry.
One part of the unfolding crisis in Ukraine that in part obvious but can also escape notice is that a key driver of the current situation is the lack of any effectively functioning government in Kiev. There is a nominal head of state in place. In practice there is a power vacuum at the apex of the Ukrainian state. Its ability to react effectively to the situation in Crimea, given the huge Russia military presence already there and the pro-Russian population, would be quite limited in any case. But the fact that the state structure itself is still half-decapitated gives the Russians an even greater ability to dictate the course of events than they might otherwise have.