Monday 3 March 2014

Official crisis versus "what crisis?"

According to A Very Important Statesman™, the unpleasantness in Ukraine is Europe's biggest crisis this century, which strikes me as a bit premature, given that the crisis that the finance industry and the Euro-technocrats inflicted on the Euro periphery isn't played out yet.

Memo to the foreign secretary:

The world can just say it is OK, in effect, to violate the sovereignty of another nation. Here's how the "Troika", consisting of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, routinely intervenes to bring its own "near abroad" back into line, as summed up by Derk Jan Eppink, a Belgian Member of the European Parliament:
The Troika acts like a governor and visits its colonies in the south of Europe and tells them what to do.
Ukrainians seem to hope that the European Union will be a potential saviour of a small, poor nation and a guarantor of its independence.

Good. Luck. With. That.

Putin's a bully and a jerk, but that isn't exactly news. Neither, apparently, is the continuing crisis on our own doorstep.

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