Ten Years After Crimea's Illegal Annexation
Russia's unchecked aggression has led a more dangerous and deadly world
Sunday marked a particularly dark anniversary. Ten years ago yesterday, the world awoke to a fundamentally new reality:
Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine in a referendum that most of the world has condemned as illegal. Early results – when 50% of the votes were counted – showed that 95.5% of ballots were in favour of joining Russia.
The now infamous sham referendum followed weeks of unmarked Russian special forces masquerading as self-organizing Crimeans while taking control of the peninsula’s airports, military installations, and government buildings:
The internet has no shortage of photographs and videos showing armed men in Crimea who look like members of the Russian military. Their guns are the same as those used by the Russian army, their lorries have Russian number plates and they speak in Russian accents. Yet according to President Vladimir Putin, they are in fact members of "self-defence groups" organised by the locals who bought all their uniforms and hardware in a shop.
An invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region followed shortly thereafter, with Russia standing up the puppet Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics to wage a low-grade war against Kyiv for the next eight years. The February 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine was a natural progression of Putin’s long history of internationally uncontested land-grabbing campaigns.
In response to Russia’s illegal actions in 2014 the West slapped a few sanctions on Moscow, shrugged, and called it a day. Meanwhile between the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the beginning of the 2022 “Special Military Operation”, Russia began its deadly intervention in the Syrian Civil War (continuing to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s Damascus regime to this day) and China’s Xi Jinping cribbed from Putin’s Crimea playbook to Anschluss Hong Kong. It’s pretty obvious that the Axis of Autocrats can smell timidity from the West and will continue to exploit the moments that our governments blink in the face of their aggression.
Yesterday, Russia announced the results of another completely staged election:
Vladimir Putin tightened his grip on power, claiming another six-year term as Russian president after a brutally distorted election in which all serious challengers were wiped out before voting began. With 30 percent of ballots counted, Putin’s tally stood at 87.68% of the vote, election officials announced on Sunday.
Putin is now Tsar in all but title and will spend every wretched moment he has left on this Earth dedicated to imperial conquest of formerly occupied lands. His inner circle, media apparatus, and personal statements all have a common refrain: “countries on our border are not real countries and we have a right to forcibly occupy every square inch of the Soviet Union’s former borders”.
This man must be defeated and our best chance to do it is right now in Ukraine.
Hungary
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continues to rhetorically attack his country’s security guarantors and make excuses for Russia’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman made clear in remarks delivered in Budapest last Thursday that Washington’s patience with the Magyar autocrat is rapidly running out:
The US ambassador to Hungary has said Washington will act in response to Budapest’s “dangerously unhinged anti-American messaging” and “expanding relationship with Russia”. In a landmark speech in Budapest on Thursday, David Pressman took direct aim at the controversial foreign policy of Hungary’s longtime prime minister, Viktor Orbán, while also accusing the Hungarian government of rampant corruption and undermining independent institutions.
As if responding to a challenge to further up the ante, the next day Orbán gave a speech comparing Westerners to “locusts” and doubled down on the idea that anyone other than Vladimir Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine:
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán blasted the West in a fiery anti-European Union speech Friday, urging his supporters to “occupy Brussels” during the upcoming European election. “They start wars, tear down worlds, redraw borders, and graze like locusts,” Orbán told a crowd in Budapest, referring to the people of the Western world. “We Hungarians live differently, and we want to live differently.”
Orbán has been in power for the past fourteen years and doesn’t appear interested in retiring to work on his putting game anytime soon. As long as this contemptible wannabe despot leads Hungary, NATO should seriously consider suspending Budapest’s membership. Orbán’s personal threat to Western security doesn’t stop with his infatuation with Moscow—he’s also recently invited the Chinese to set up Police patrols in Hungarian cities which will undoubtedly facilitate the harassment of expatriate Chinese dissidents.
Turkey
Turkey will apparently launch a new military campaign against the PKK in northern Iraq in the coming months after Baghdad officially designated the insurgent group of militant Kurds a terrorist organization after meeting with Turkish officials:
Turkey intends to use a military assault in northern Iraq this summer to push the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) south and secure a new trade route, sources familiar with the plans told Middle East Eye. The sources said Turkey will target the Kurdish armed group with a series of operations. Since late last year, Turkey has lost dozens of soldiers to PKK attacks on Turkish outposts in northern Iraq’s mountainous terrain. Those deaths have triggered a domestic controversy and scrutiny of the effectiveness of Turkey’s tactics.
Earlier this month, Turkey’s longtime leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the country’s upcoming municipal elections would be his “last election”. Color me skeptical. Erdoğan’s current Presidential term isn’t slated to end until 2028 and I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if this turned out to be lip service to publicly deflect from his desire to die on the throne like the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire he reveres so deeply.
Lithuania
Deeply disturbing news out of the Baltics last week—Kremlin operatives ambushed Leonid Volkov, Chief of Staff of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, in a hammer attack outside his Vilnius home. Amazingly, he had just given an interview about the tremendous risks dissidents face even abroad:
Hours before an assailant attacked him with a hammer and tear gas outside his home in Lithuania, the top aide to late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny told Reuters he and other exiles feared for their lives. Leaders of Navalny's organisation knew they were facing "high individual risks", Leonid Volkov said in an interview filmed on Tuesday hours before an unidentified attacker assaulted him outside his home. "They know that Putin not only kills people inside Russia, he also kills people outside of Russia", he said. "We live in very dark times".
How anyone can claim Russia is a bastion of traditional Christian values with a straight face is beyond me. Maybe Tucker Carlson can point me to the Bible verse where God instructs the faithful to violently hammer the heads of peaceful democratic activists. Which book was that in again?
Somalia
The Horn of Africa has been a staple of Son of a Diplomat and Running Threads the past few months for good reason—the region is teeming with violence and escalating tensions. On Friday, the Indian navy managed to liberate a cargo ship that had been under Somali pirate control for four months:
The Indian navy has freed the hijacked MV Ruen cargo ship in Somalia's Puntland region Saturday after a 24-hour standoff and shootout, and it has detained 35 pirates, according to Puntland Ports Minister Ahmed Yasin Salah. The crew is reported to be unharmed. The pirates — who allegedly hijacked the Maltese-flagged bulk cargo vessel on December 14 — exchanged heavy gunfire with the Indian navy Friday.
It’s great news that the ship was recovered but this is beginning to resemble a game of whack-a-mole; last Tuesday a separate group of pirates successfully stormed a Bangladeshi operated cargo ship heading towards the UAE.
Meanwhile the U.S. continues to directly take out al-Shabab insurgents in Somalia, successfully eliminating three militants via airstrike about a week ago. Unfortunately, the Salafi jihadist outfit managed to conduct a terror attack in Mogadishu just four days later:
According to SNTV, five armed gunmen attacked the SYL Hotel in the capital Mogadishu on Thursday night. All five were shot and killed by Somali security forces, SNTV cites Somali police as saying. Three soldiers were killed in the attack and 27 more were injured, SNTV reported, adding that many more people, including government officials, were evacuated from the hotel by security forces.
Venezuela
We finally have a date for Venezuela’s presidential election coronation of Nicolás Maduro: July 28. Opposition leader María Corina Machado looked like a strong contender to dislodge Maduro’s tyrannical grip on Venezuelan power until she was barred from running in the presidential race in January. Regime opponents now find themselves in a difficult position with no officially recognized opposition candidate to support:
Polling suggests that Venezuelans overwhelmingly want to go to the polls and would trounce Maduro if given half a chance. And while Machado is their preferred candidate, a majority of opposition supporters want her to yield to someone else rather than have the opposition essentially sit out the race in which Maduro will be seeking a third six-year term.
As a reminder, this election could have grave consequences for Guyana—Maduro has been publicly salivating over the prospect of annexing Guyana’s Essequibo region for quite some time now.
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