The Real News Network has the article Crimea Referendum: Self Determination or Big Power Manipulation? (1/2).

Professors Nicolai Petro & Tarik Cyril Amar give their reactions to Crimea voting overwhelmingly to join the Russian federation

What I like about this video is that it does admit of more ambiguity in the situation than TRNN’s previous offerings on this topic. This situation is definitely ambiguous if nothing else.

The Daily Kos has the article Bill Maher attacks Noah’s Ark story. It featuers the video below:

These ideas kind of makes some of us wonder. Knowing a Jehovah Witness or two, I know there is an answer to every question Bill Maher raises. They make as much sense to me as the claim that finding the preferences of 95% of the Crimean population is anti-democratic. Is this what is meant by “Don’t ask, don’t tell”? Why bother having a dictionary or WikiPedia if words don’t mean anything?

Naked Capitalism has the article Jeffrey Sommers/Michael Hudson: Russia, Crimea and the Consequences of NATO Policy.

Russia today has watched covert attempts from the US State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs to break up their country as part of what is becoming a triumphalist global pattern. This threatens to remake their “near abroad” into a neoliberal periphery. Today’s confrontation has taken on an existential character for Russia since it saw NATO’s moves toward Georgia as cutting too close to the bone. The prospects of NATO assimilating Ukraine (Kiev) represents a seizure of Russia’s “heart”: the very ancestral home where Russia was founded and on which it repelled the fascist invasion in the Great Patriotic War–as it had a millennium earlier against the German Crusading Knights pledged to exterminate the Russian-Greek Orthodox population.

Most Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the deal he made with NATO. Russian diplomats have stated clearly that Ukraine is a line that cannot be crossed regarding potential NATO expansion. It is as if foreign agents worked in Texas to mobilize a violent ethnic minority to rejoin Mexico and then place a hostile military alliance on the US border.

My purpose in publishing the links to these articles is not an effort to condone what Russia is doing.  Instead it is an attempt to understand what may be behind their policies.  Whatever actions we decide to take in response to Russian actions, they are unlikely to work if we do not understand the Russians.  An action we might think should encourage the Russians to change course in a direction we prefer, might just have the opposite effect if we do not understand Russian thinking.  In fact, I think this is exactly what is happening.  This is why I urge our own diplomats and leaders to try to understand what is happening from the other sides’ point of view.

The BBC has this article Crimea ballot paper: No option to keep things as they are.

James Reynolds shows us round a polling station in Simferopol, takes a closer look at one of the ballot papers, and explains the voting process.

“There’s no option on this ballot paper for people to keep things as they are,” he notes

What follows is my best attempt to quote the understanding of the two questions on the ballot as explained by the reporter in the video.

Do you want crimea to become part of the Russian Federation?

Do you want Crimea to get greater autonomy under the 1992 constitution

Thanks for Cedric Flower’s comment on my Facebook post about  my previous post, Crimea result makes “a mockery” of democracy says Hague.  The actual wording doesn’t seem to be quite as stark as Cedric said.  You can judge for yourself as to what you think of the voting procedure and the ballot wording.

It’s one thing to have an opinion as to whether or not you think this was the fairest way to vote on the subject, but deciding what we ought to do about that judgment is a wholly different matter.  At the very least, before taking any action on our judgment, we ought to know how this type of ballot wording would compare to other ballot wordings that have been used to get the Ukraine to the current political situation it is in. For instance what was the ballot wording for  the acceptance of the 1992 constitution?

There would still be the irony of taking action against a country based on what we thought of someone else’s democratic procedures.  Might we not be best served by letting the people themselves figure out what they want to do about the situation? (I can’t even figure out if the wording of the previous sentence makes any sense even though I invented that wording myself and it sounds kind of literary.)