I've been slowly getting through Orlando Figes' recent book about the Crimean War, seeing how relevant that part of the world has become again. What strikes you first is just how much of an anomaly the Soviet experience was, and how quickly Russia jumped back to earlier times. To when Russia was a socially retarded, violent, paranoid feudal state, with a ruthless top-down power structure, a complicit national faith with delusions of being the next Roman empire, and a swaggering sense of racial superiority.
It's often tempting to leave them alone and deal with them as best we can, but what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight yesterday shows what happens when this bullshit spills over. 298 people who had nothing to do with this stupid little farce in eastern Ukraine were blown out of the sky, and setting aside all the usual caveats about what we know and don't know, the moral dimension is very clear. To Putin's power structure this is all a big f-ing game. It's jaw-dropping how creative the bootlicking Russian media has been happy to publicly fantasize about what might have happened.
The news yesterday was a huge shock to those of us who have continued to follow the news from Ukraine closely. It has felt for awhile that the situation was beginning to sort itself out. That with Crimea firmly in hand, Putin wasn't all that interested in a huge flare-up in the east. And the quiet support from Moscow was worrying the separatists enough that they began whining about being abandoned. And the world was beginning to see what was happening — that these separatists were a small, violent minority made up of the usual unemployable lot of track-suit wearing losers you find getting drunk in housing projects all over Eastern Europe.
I hope the world can maintain a sense of outrage about this, and that there will be real consequences for this regime. But I don't expect that will happen. The history of civilian aviation is full of moments like this — when airline passengers have been murdered by misunderstanding — and nothing really changed.
Putin and his crew don't care what the world thinks. Holy Russia is beyond reproach, and all that matters is the integrity of the internal "power vertical." And worse, as David Remnick pointed out on the New Yorker website: "Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control."
It's often tempting to leave them alone and deal with them as best we can, but what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight yesterday shows what happens when this bullshit spills over. 298 people who had nothing to do with this stupid little farce in eastern Ukraine were blown out of the sky, and setting aside all the usual caveats about what we know and don't know, the moral dimension is very clear. To Putin's power structure this is all a big f-ing game. It's jaw-dropping how creative the bootlicking Russian media has been happy to publicly fantasize about what might have happened.
The news yesterday was a huge shock to those of us who have continued to follow the news from Ukraine closely. It has felt for awhile that the situation was beginning to sort itself out. That with Crimea firmly in hand, Putin wasn't all that interested in a huge flare-up in the east. And the quiet support from Moscow was worrying the separatists enough that they began whining about being abandoned. And the world was beginning to see what was happening — that these separatists were a small, violent minority made up of the usual unemployable lot of track-suit wearing losers you find getting drunk in housing projects all over Eastern Europe.
I hope the world can maintain a sense of outrage about this, and that there will be real consequences for this regime. But I don't expect that will happen. The history of civilian aviation is full of moments like this — when airline passengers have been murdered by misunderstanding — and nothing really changed.
Putin and his crew don't care what the world thinks. Holy Russia is beyond reproach, and all that matters is the integrity of the internal "power vertical." And worse, as David Remnick pointed out on the New Yorker website: "Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control."
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