A critical week for the 'missing' Putin

Yesterday the news was filled with speculations about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. These ranged from "Putin is dead" to "Putin has cancer" to "Putin has had a stroke", ending with "Putin is in Switzerland by the bedside of his young gymnast lover, who has given birth to their love-child".

Yet again has he grabbed the headlines only, this time, it is about something rather more serious.

Ukraine conflict: Putin 'was ready for nuclear alert'

So ran the headline of BBC News Europe yesterday.  We are told that in comments in a documentary aired on Russian state TV on Sunday,

"President Vladimir Putin has said he was ready to put Russia's nuclear weapons on standby during tensions over the crisis in Ukraine and Crimea" (BBC News Europe : 15th March 2015)

Now Putin has not been seen in public since March 5th, and clips of this documentary was released just over a week ago. So we can assume that the documentary was actually filmed prior to March 5th.

The clips that were released included Putin informed us that "weeks before the creation of his 'deceptive' justification for trampling all over the international laws governing the inviolability of a country's boundaries, he had already set in motion his plan to " .... begin the work to bring Crimea (right) back into Russia'."

In this documentary Putin spells out his interpretation of the events of Maidan.

“The trick of the situation was that outwardly the [Ukrainian] opposition was supported mostly by the Europeans. But we knew for sure that the real masterminds were our American friends,”Putin said in a documentary, 'Crimea - The Way Home,' aired by Rossiya 1 news channel.
“They helped training the nationalists, their armed groups, in Western Ukraine, in Poland and to some extent in Lithuania,” he added. “They facilitated the armed coup.”
The West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with Russia, “by any means, in any format and under any scheme," he noted.(RT : March 15, 2015)

 And today, the 1st 'anniversary' of Russia invading and annexing Ukrainian Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov (right), its Putin-appointed 'prime minister' has stated that,

" .... the peninsula has returned to its historical Russian homeland and will never again be part of Ukraine. Sergei Aksyonov said the annexation of the peninsula by Russia one year ago had been a "democratic act". (BBC News : 16 March 2015)

However without Mariupol, annexed Crimea is an economic millstone around the neck of Putin. 

Euronews informs us that after 1 year of the Russian occupation of Ukrainian Crimea,

"International sanctions are hitting the country hard, “tougher for Crimea than Russia” contends Alexander Lebedev, a Russian investor......

It’s biggest industry – tourism is suffering. Government data shows the number of visitors declined by a third last year...... ( a decrease of 60% , not 33.3%, from independent observers)
  
Most supplies come from Russia by ferry but bad weather can delay shipments for days. Many products are just not available. Regional government data showed inflation jumped 38 percent and the cost of food increased by almost a half from March through to December. Not a single Russian supermarket chain has opened in Crimea. " (Euronews : March 13 2015)

It is because of this economic millstone that is further aggravating the continual downward spiral of the Russian economy that the Minsk2 'ceasefire' has been breached many times by Putin's proxies and his Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

As John O'Donnell reports, Poroshenko (right) has stated that,


"Ukraine has fulfilled every single point of the Minsk agreement. The ceasefire has been implemented immediately on our part, but the Russian fighters have done the exact opposite," Petro Poroshenko told the Bild newspaper.
"Every day, there is shooting from the Russian side, often more than 60 times a day. In total, the ceasefire has been broken 1,100 times," he said. "The truth is that the agreement is not working." (Reuters : Sun Mar 15, 2015)

"At a summit in Brussels [this] Thursday and Friday, European Union leaders will discuss the sanctions imposed on Russia's financial, energy and defense sectors last July over Russia's annexation of Crimea and supporting the separatists in Ukraine." (ibid John O'Donnell)

Will they heed the call of Poroshenko,

" ... for additional sanctions against Russia for breaking the ceasefire."? 

As reported by Andreas Rinke and Adrian Croft,

"Germany and other countries want European Union leaders to endorse a declaration saying that EU sanctions on Russia will not be eased unless Moscow complies with a Ukraine ceasefire deal, two officials said on Saturday." (Reuters : Sun Mar 15, 2015) 

The sticking point, however, is that this 'endorsement' has to be unanimously agreed upon by the EU leaders. With e.g. Italy's Matteo Renzi and Cyprus's Nicos Anastasiades running to Putin, cap-in-hand for an economic handout, the chances of unanimous agreement at the EU leaders meetings this week seems rather slim.

Unless, of course, Putin is 'falling from grace'.

(to be continued)