Quote Originally Posted by kaur View Post
Fuchs, I was used to your good habit to call things with their right names and your attempts to go to the roots of problems. Now you have twice rejected my comments, that there were Russian toops in Crimea (even Putin admitted this), you still have word "paramilitary" in your blog, I just don't understand you.

About cadre. Crimea case is best case study, which shows worst case scenario. This took place in favourable circumstances. In less favourable circumstances this cadre acts just like spoiler among allies in EU and NATO. There are several scenarious between those I named. I just don't understand why some European countries underestimate Russians. Today we see that Russians can act very efficently. In January Barroso and van Rompuy told Putin "Mind your own business" and told him about Ukraine's independent choice. Today Europe is happy that OSCE observers are freed in Slavyansk by FSB guy. How can you say that Putin is happy or unhappy? Do you know what makes him happy? It would be really intersting to hear.
Oh, you meant the blog.
Well, again - I don't see much of a difference between paramilitary and military. Neither was legally allowed to be there, so I'm not downplaying anything. I wonder why you see much of a difference between a military man with an AK-74 and a paramilitary man with an AK-74. The difference is especially marginal in Russia with its USSR traditions. The KGB operated a coast guard that included anti-submarine and air defence systems, after all. Warsaw Pact 'worker militias' were always meant to be auxiliary military forces in the event of war.
German paramilitary Cold War border guards were by defined as becoming combatants in the event of war.
There's really not that much difference between military and paramilitary.

And frankly, I'm not inclined to look up unreliable sources only to see whether the one or the other word is more accurate.
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The Slawjansk hostage episode was a show for the media. I doubt that the foreign politicians were stupid enough to fall for it and spend much time and effort on it.

What's going to be interesting is what the Ukrainians do once they have FSB guys captured. We might see some old school "confession"-style videos which could be very dangerous to Putin's racket and I think he might be very concerned about this.
I noted that the reports about the fighting in that town mentioned that the town was encircled. I wonder whether the encirclement is tight enough to really use it as a trap for the FSB personnel. They will likely not fight to the last man, after all.


I suppose right now it's about time to offer Putin a face-saving way out. He's already at his culminating point.
Let him build some more on his Crimea success (for Crimea is gone for good anyway), give him some political victory (such as Svoboda kicked out of government, something which the EU should like to see as well) and then he gets to write off the continental Ukraine.

Then in the next years the West can demand concessions from Putin for not inviting the Ukraine into NATO (but merely equipping its army). Such as a satisfactory (to us) solution to the Abchasia and South Ossetia conflicts, ratification for the border treaty with Estonia, withdrawal of Russian troops from Transnistria, no S-300s for Iran and no arms exports to the Caucasus that could fuel a new war over Berg-Karabach.
The best about this is that the threat of inviting them could be held up indefinitely. It's a self-regenerating bargaining chip.