Following a surprise invasion of Crimea, Russia declared war on Ukraine on Saturday.
Vladimir Putin hardly needed the approval of his rubber-stamped Federation Council, the Senate of Russia’s parliament, to grant him war measures to deploy Russian military forces abroad but, as if only for form’s sake, that’s what he sought.
In a quick and easy session convened Saturday — one devoted mainly to vilifying the U.S. for its supposed shadowy role in fomenting revolution in Ukraine and toppling the criminal and corrupt government headed by Viktor Yanukovych — the council voted unanimously to “authorize” Putin to deploy troops not just to Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula where Russia has its Black Sea Fleet, but to any and all part of the “Ukrainian territory.”
As many as 10,000 Russian soldiers are said to have landed in Crimea, which is now controlled exclusively by Moscow. Russian proxies in the form of armed militiamen are now in control of whole swaths of Crimea’s regional capital, Simferopol.
The Kremlin has so far rejected a U.S.-floated mediation effort to resolve through diplomacy this illegal act of aggression, which violates international law. So despite President Obama’s warning that military invasion of Ukraine would incur “costs,” Putin has decided to take a gamble and pursue war anyway.
This leaves Washington in the awkward position of not only having failed to anticipate this conflict but now groping with the proper definition for what has just transpired in the space of 36 hours.
Yet there are American options. One would be to coordinate with our allies in Europe and announce sanctions against Russian officials who would be involved in attacking Ukraine. The nice thing about one of the world’s most corrupt countries is that most of the elites running Russia keep their cash and real estate abroad in democratic jurisdictions.
A new U.S. law allows for putting pressure on Russian human rights violators by threatening to freeze or confiscate these assets.Names of those with money and mansions to hide in the West ought now to be named in advance of tanks rolling into Donetsk, Kharkiv or, as may well happen, Kiev.
Michael Weiss is a foreign policy columnist and editor in chief of interpretermag.com
