A democratic decision

So now we inch forward to an economic freeze between the West and Russia with all the implications for everyone. The financial health of the western world is still precarious and requires a great deal of confidence between nations to allow the huge interlinking deficits, held by mostly western banks to work themselves through over time. 

This sort of potentially seismic spike in the financial world will be difficult to contain, given the fragile condition of the banks and the linked economies can the ideological positions on both sides take into consideration the overall picture.  

As with so much of our past, national boundaries have been drawn as part of a quid pro quo,  a quirk of of back room deals or a wider consideration and not a reflection of the actual needs or the ethnic make up of the land to be partitioned. 

The Crimea was a part of Russia until handed to the Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 50s.    It has a predominantly Russian speaking population and in yesterdays referendum it naturally chose to belong to Russia. 

This seems to me to be a perfectly "democratic" outcome arising from the threat by the Ukrainian government in Kiev to make the Russian language, in Crimea the second language of what in effect are Russian people. The bulk of the people rejected the move, particularly from a government that its self had come into power by ousting the sitting President, ostensibly by a right wing putsch supported by the West, the President having chosen Russia as its benefactor not the EU. 

The blatant policy of the US to interfere with sovereign nations where ever they are and particularly in its containment of Russia by the encroachment of NATO forces around the boarders of Russia has at last produced a backlash from the Russians. I have little or no sympathy with President Putin, he has been guilty of outright suppression in his own country throwing opposition into jail and worse. He is a throw back to the type of politician that ran the old USSR and yet the ordinary Russian respects strong autocratic leadership, its built into their history perhaps their genes.