Tuesday, September 16, 2014

strategic patience

The gloomiest scenario involves a complete partition of the country with 100,000 Russian troops controlling the industrial east. "All of these are realistic. It depends on the timescales," Giles Keir of the Chatham House think-tank in London told AFP. The Royal United Services Institute, a British military think-tank, has long warned of similar scenarios, saying that Russia's huge arms industry depends on Ukraine for 30 percent of its essential components, particularly for aircraft and missiles, which might tempt Moscow to intervene. Keir said Putin held the advantage because of his "strategic patience" -- largely because Western democracies must worry more about domestic political cycles. "Russia does things while people are looking away," for example the invasion of Georgia during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he said.

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