Moscow’s mirth

This began as a serious piece on the politics by sanctions, with the G8 getting reduced to G7 with the expulsion of Russia from its ranks. Then satirist Borowitz of the New Yorker wrote of how Putin announced the full attendance of the G1, with Putin declining the honor bestowed on him to be considered as its titular head!
The late Ruth Tighe once wondered, after reading a response from one of our readers on an article I wrote, if the writer ever heard of satire. Admittedly, I tend to be gentle and subtle when turning on my sardonic sense of humor (though undiplomatic colleagues call it caustic, but we are mild compared to the blatant in-your-face scathing rage normally shown in Western media, so satirical we tried to be and it seemed like only Ruth noticed).

After the EU neo-colonials and the US of A (dominated by neocons who has Obama’s ear and an undying allergy versus Russia, according to a former national security adviser of Bush Sr.) cancelled the G8 meeting that was to be hosted by Russia at the Olympiad site of Sochi, and instead issued economic sanctions as a consequence of the referendum in Crimea, Russia “retaliated” by prohibiting the issuance of visas to three members of who would have been on Obama’s entourage. The humor in the act was lost on the media and the policymakers of Brussels and Washington, D.C. No wonder Putin has been uncharacteristically full of chuckles of late.

This month is turning up to be full of “eMs.” We started with our own memorial circa 1945-2031, followed by the season’s Mardi Gras, pleasantly watched the making of crepes at The Shack, the MH/MAS370 mystery with Malaysia finally pronouncing absolute loss of all lives, now with Moscow’s mirth, and ending (spilling into April) with the March madness of NCAA basketball.

For now, it is the Mona Lisa smirk on Putin’s face that is of consummate delight to us. So, we hear Putin saying, whereof does defensive EU-USA speak of after what it’s NATO did with the breakup of Yugoslavia, particularly with the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo (some, possibly even Merkel, calls it Kosova) after Bill Clinton was done interfering in the ethnic violence that followed minority-majority relations?

Ah, but the Western point is constitutionality. Say what? Pray tell, who is minding the constitutional store after the bullying out of the duly elected President of Ukraine who ran over to Russia when Kiev convulsed with street protests? Crimea, traditionally a part of Russia, handed over to Ukraine after Khrushchev (a Ukrainian) had a pleasant lunch and surprised everyone with the sudden shift in administrative lines (geographical lines were not altered since, at the time, Ukraine was part of the USSR), held a referendum that is deemed unconstitutional? Does anyone care to raise the question of Kiev’s constitutionality?

The Kiev-Moscow axis had been indivisible since the 13th century. Kiev had been home to the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christendom and had served as the Kievan Rus kingdom capital until it was wise to move it to Moscow to administer the Tsar’s far-flung regions of the Asian Far East.

Putin traces his continuing lineage to the Eastern Orthodox Church, not perhaps adhering to Ptolemy’s cosmology, nor the theistic language of the tradition, but he crosses himself on occasion, if only for the cultural practice of his upbringing. The conflict in Crimea and Ukraine is not fundamentally a political one as it is a cultural disjunction of old patterns being pulled down by forces that wish to control finances, particularly as it relates to oil and other natural resources. (I hear murmurs of, “There goes Jaime with his politics of oil all over again,” so we will not go there.)

Still, a cursory glance at Ukraine shows the division of the folks west and east of the Dnieper River, and with the people between the two rivers of the Dnieper-Pietinis Bugas as the mainstay of the Kiev-Odessa axis. Not unlike any other large geographical configuration in the world, Ukraine is hardly homogenous. After NATO’s handiwork on former eastern European lands after the 1991 Soviet Union breakup, we are not surprised that Putin is drawing the line in the sand.

Ukraine was nuclear hot in the USSR, and one of the areas where the U.S.-Russia cooperated was the dismantling of warheads and Ukraine’s capability to produce weapons-grade uranium. The nuclear disarmament conference ongoing in Brussels—an early Obama initiative—is ironically getting some attention from an unlikely quarter: China. For all the language of containing Chinese possible military aggression in the China Sea, the PLAs have been good boys in making the manufacture, or the absence thereof, of weapons-grade uranium transparent. We cannot say the same of our northern neighbor Japan that constitutionally forsook war as an instrument of diplomacy but allegedly hoards 4,000 tons of weapons-grade uranium.

Maybe, the EU-US guardians of nuclear armaments might be harping at the wrong tree! As to constitutionality, say what?

Jaime Vergara previously taught at SVES in the CNMI. A peripatetic pedagogue, he last taught in China but makes Honolulu, Shenyang, and Saipan home. He can be reached at pinoypanda2031@aol.com.