I have never quite understood how or why Russia and Putin got cast as the "bad guy" and the Ukraine as the "good guy" in the eyes of most "Western" governments and media. Let's look at it objectively: A lawful, democratically elected government gets overthrown by mob rule, orchestrated, in no small measure, by Neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalist elements from the western Ukraine inimical to the Russian speakers in the east and south of the country, but somehow the victorious mob are good guys because they are "pro-Western." (Do we still have to see everything through a Cold War prism?) When the Russian-speakers then wish to separate and rejoin their natural motherland, they are cast as villains and "terrorists." The residents of the Crimea were fortunate that decisive action by Putin reunited that peninsula to Russia with little difficulty and almost universal rejoicing. The people of Donbas have had much harder slugging, sad to say, but I wish them well.
The hypocritical cant from both the Obama administration, the Republicans in Congress and various leaders of NATO countries that national boundaries are somehow sacrosanct these days is pretty outrageous, considering that "the West" gleefully acquiesced in and abetted the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and then the rump state of Serbia in the recent past...or, for that matter, when our great NATO ally Turkey conquered a large part of Cyprus, just to give a couple of examples. And why should any freedom-loving American be solicitous about boundaries drawn by V.I. Lenin and Nikita Kruschev, of all people?
Frankly, if Putin restored all of "New Russia," from the Don to the Dniester to Russian rule, leaving the true Ukraine to the Ukrainians who want to be separate, it would be okay with me. As long as the USA doesn't get involved in an actual or proxy war over this business, it really matters very little to me whether a blue and yellow or a red, white and blue flag flies over these territories.
