This is a long recurrent saga over the last 2000 years. The young man in the White House is experiencing an education on the Russians. Simply, they lie.
As the Tatar leader has indicated this alleged invitation for Russian help was manufactured, there was no civil strife in Crimea which is an autonomous republic (headed by a Russian) with significant Tatar and Ukrainian minorities. There was no threat to the local government (which is in Russian hands, anyway) nor to the majority Russian population.
If anyone had concern about civilians it should have been the Tatars and the Ukrainians, but even that would have been specious (basically nothing was going on in this autonomously run zone until Putin asked for them to request help creating a pretext for a Russian invasion).
Putin did learn something from the Abkhazian/Georgian experience in that there his performance was heavy handed. Here he is using special forces and paratrooper elite troops (with the decals removed) to effectively seize Crimea, while Kiev is in turmoil forming a new government, and unprepared for conflict.
The real play or invasion is to be in the East, where a manufactured crisis for Russians in the Ukraine will again be declared as a pretext for military activity. The point of the Crimean move is to create 2 fronts (militarily speaking) to begin with.
Historically, the Russians are the experts in forced population migrations (ask to Tatars, who had always been the majority in the Crimean peninsula) and in ethnic cleansing (ask 11 million dead Ukrainians from the artificial famine {with filled and locked grainaries.}
They also have had centuries of expertise in cultural sanitation, i.e .you needed to speak Russian to go to a good school, to go to the University or to get a decent job. This was particularly aggressively done in the provinces in the EAST near Russia proper, along with regular cleansing (execution) of the intelligentsia (professionals, officers, professors, etc.) to eliminate non-Russian cultures, particularly the Ukrainians, as this region was most desirable. This was coupled with regular mass forced exoduses to Siberia of, um, undesirable elements.
The President has a unique opportunity to act in a clear and forceful way (without troops). Our friends should be disinvited from the G8, trade agreements should be scrapped (in coordination with the EU) and all travel for the Regime and its Italian suit dressed thugs restricted, along with restriction of their financial transactions.
Perhaps our KGB rethread would notice this.
