The Fate of the Ukraine

I suspect that Vlad Putin is only waiting for the Olympics to end before ordering tanks into the Ukraine to "restore order." The former KGB apparatchik in Putin has never accepted the breakup of the Soviet Union and he has used everything short of tanks to keep nations like the Ukraine and Belarus in his soviet orbit.

Putin will probably use the same excuse that Hitler used when he invaded Czechoslovakia before World War II, that he has to act to protect ethnic Russians in Ukrainian territories. Putin will certainly take the Crimea with its valuable Russian Black Sea naval base and probably also the eastern four provinces of the country with significant Russian populations.

The question is whether Putin will be satisfied with only a piece of Ukraine, squeezing the rest with severe economic sanctions. Instead, will he drive his tanks all the way to Kiev and install deposed President Yanukovych as a puppet leader of a Ukraine effectively reabsorbed into a new Union of Putin Republics?