Putin: A Reach Too Far

Lawmakers in Crimea voted unanimously Thursday to split from Ukraine and join Russia instead, and scheduled a referendum in 10 days for voters on the disputed peninsula to support or reject their decision.

Russian lawmakers, clearly savoring the action, said that if Crimea votes to become part of Russia, they plan legislation that would speed up the procedure of making that happen.

International norms for the last several decades have been that land grabs are illegal. The people on this planet pretty much got tired of the idea that there would be a war every few decades over to which nation places like Alsace and Lorraine belong to. So it was settled that the borders between Country F and Country P, regardless of how unfairly they might have been drawn, were fixed unless both countries peacefully agreed to realign them.

That didn't preclude wars for independence, where the people in province X sought to split away. It didn't preclude the breakup of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union. But it's considered to be gauche to send your army across the border because you want a little lebensraum.

The Crimea and, for that matter, eastern Ukraine may well be majority Russian. But that does not give the Russians a reason to invade, for the same reason that the presence of a majority ethnic German population in the Sudentenland didn't justify that land grab.

If anything, the actions of Russia are giving the Ukrainian government a reason to further marginalize its Russian population, if not engage in a bit of ethnic cleansing in the way that the Czechs expelled Germans after 1945.