Russia's Munich moment

Balaclavas in Balaklava, at least the guy on the right: Ukrainian border guards at the Crimean town. Photo by Sergey Ponomarev for the New York Times.

Unexpectedly, the first hack to come out crying "Munich" over Russia's ongoing adventure in Crimea seemed not to be one of the usual wingnuts (except clearly fascist commenters at The American Interest) but Dr. Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński (McGill, Harvard) on CNN.

But here's Forbes [jump]
Alarm: Putin Will Not Stop With Crimea. Paper-Tiger Obama Will Do Nothing
with an article by anti-appeasement crusader Paul Roderick Gregory,

Paul Roderick Gregory

a member of the International Academic Advisory Board of the Kiev School of Economics, with whom Munich also comes up in the comments, and here's the inevitable National Review coverage,
Cotton Slams Obama’s ‘Trembling Inaction’ on Russia’s Ukrainian Incursion

By Eliana Johnson

offering the considered views of noted foreign policy expert Arkansas Republican freshman congressman Tom Cotton, who goes the full Godwin:

Tom Cotton, who is challenging incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor for his senate seat, slammed President Obama for his “trembling inaction” to Russian aggression and criticized American officials who have reportedly shied from calling the Russian incursion into the Crimea an invasion, referring to it instead as an “uncontested arrival.” 

“The same was said about the Anschluss,” Cotton said in a statement.

("Trembling inaction" is pretty literary, huh? Better watch out for this guy.) Giving me my opportunity to point out that if there's been a Munich moment in the history of the post-Soviet Russian territorial grab, it would be in the Bush administration.

And for once I don't mean George W. Bush and his presumably non-trembling inaction when he failed to stop Georgia from invading Russia leading Russia to invade Georgia in 2008 (as Putin explained it; apparently Bush and Putin were actually hanging out together at the Beijing Olympics when the crisis erupted), described by Andrew Cockburn in Harper's as a cacophony of conflicting instructions:

Bush warned the Georgian leader that if he persisted, “The U.S. would not start World War Three on his behalf.”

This was not the only signal Saakashvili was getting from imperial headquarters, however. According to a former U.S. national-security official who has closely followed the relationship between Georgia and the United States for many years, Dick Cheney saw much to be gained in a Russo-Georgian conflict. “At best Georgia would win, in which case Russia would fall apart,” the official told me, “and at worst the spectacle of Russia crushing little Georgia would reinforce Russia’s reputation as the cruel Goliath. So Cheney was telling Misha, ‘We have your back.’ ”

To add to the mixed messaging, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi on July 9, 2008. While she reportedly reiterated Bush’s warning to Saakashvili in private, in public she proclaimed defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure, emphasizing the friendship between the two countries, which was precisely what Saakashvili wanted to hear.

Though of course

In the London Telegraph, Aug. 15, 2008, John Bolton declared that Russia had conducted an “invasion,” that Georgia had been a “victim of aggression,” that America had “fiddled while Georgia burned,” that we had played the “paper tiger”when faced by the snarling Russian Bear. As for the European Union, in bringing about a ceasefire, it had achieved results “approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich.”

No, I'm thinking about George Herbert Walker Bush way back as the Soviet Union was still collapsing and Vladimir Vladimirovich was no doubt still shaking down old ladies or selling KGB cookies or whatever it was he did in Leningrad. Because that was when Russia first installed those breakaway regimes not only violating the territory of Georgia, with the enclaves in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but also poor little Moldova, and the hiving off of the east bank of its Dniestr (Nistru) River as the "Dniester Soviet Socialist Republic", later "Transnistria"; because after the USSR was entirely gone and Boris Nikolaevich was the president of Russia there was in fact a pretty serious little war—

in June 1992 the political ambitions of nostalgic forces and the personal interests of the corrupted elite led to a three-day bloody war between separatist military forces comprising former Russian officers (fighting as mercenaries), Cossack paramilitary formations, and criminal elements from all corners of the former Soviet Union on one side and police forces of Moldova on the other. Direct intervention of the former 14^th Soviet Army located in Transnistria since Soviet time but now under Russian command, on behalf of the separatist side brought an end to this war that cost 1,500 lives and displaced thousands of people. 

And kept the territory in Russian-puppet hands, where it remains 22 years later, an example of how the Russian Federation can move against its neighbors with complete impunity. And yet I find no evidence that President Bush ever said a single word about it to anybody.