The issue here is that the protesters are far less controllable; they're violent and liable to attack the Russians, and when that happens, the Russians are liable to respond by attacking en masse and indiscriminately, calling on the Ukraine military. If Russia goes to a full scale mobilization of Ukraine then there's the obvious issue of it being a clear war.
How putin sells it to Russia idk; but, I do know it will prompt invasion by the U.N. and U.S.
Regardless of what some may think, fossil fuels really aren't that important. There are numerous sources in the world and Russia has no power if it's primary source of revenue is cut off, of which they're already facing hard economic times as is. They make up, maybe, 5% of the GDP of most countries, all considered; they're more or less easy to pay for. At the worst, America has sources secured in the middle east including Iraq and Afghanistan that we aren't using (and the U.S. gets pretty much no oil from Russia), and Canada has more than enough that it was directing towards the U.S. that it isn't anymore (such as the failed keystone pipeline deal) which it really doesn't want to give to China as evidenced by their delay to do so and worrying U.S. rejection.
If anything, it means more money for current oil suppliers not on the Russian side I.E. western sources. So, I doubt that will be a major issue for them.
What's really important, politically, is this makes Russia looks horrible.
If we come in for the Rescue to the Ukraine, Syria, Chechnya, and so on, we'll more or less have the lee way to do whatever we want when it comes to Russia, who has stood in our way on many issues. They now appear to be bad guys. Although in my opinion it's obvious they are.
Anyways, the one good thing Russia has going for it are they're Spetsnaz, but their leaders are too incompetent to know how to use them. In Chechnya they lied to them and sent them out on the front line, claiming they were fighting measly bandits, when their enemies clearly had knowledge of tactics and were extremely motivated, in fact suicidal. They have little to no air support, artillery, or other kinds of things, and they often were wiped out just due to bad intel, despite their training and skill, since they were sent in to missions with often, purposely bad or covered up intel, and followed intel to the letter which was more or less a bad operating procedure (such as entering an area over open terrain and such). They not only caused failure for the Spetsnaz, but ended up wiping out huge chunks of their most valuable troops.
We saw the same kind of thing in Georgia and even in Afghanistan. Hannibal, with unloyal, poorly equipped, poorly trained, poorly motivated, exhausted mercenaries who had lost about half their forces crossing through the alps fought against the largest army Rome had ever assembled, and crushed them, despite being half their size, and lost about 3000 troops, while practically wiping out all the Romans (over 70,000), leaving a few thousand as captives. Strategy and tactics, above all else, won the day. With the incompetent military leadership we've been seeing at the top it's liable to end the same way.
Edited by Manoka, 03 March 2014 - 10:37 PM.
