You're right, of course - Putin's speech is mind-boggling stupid, and Zimmerman never came across that daft (BTW - this was supposed to be humor - i.e. Ming the Merciless as kindergarten teacher analogy - will flag this overtly with devil's horns next time - )

For those who want to read just how stupid Putin can be, and how some clueless freaks on the left are cheerleading him, go ahead and read the speech Patrick Smith refers to here - I only made it about halfway through, as it's such a propagandistic self-justifying piece of crap at every step that it makes my coffee curdle. Perhaps I'll address more in depth how stupid this makes Smith (and perhaps Salon and/or certain batshit crazy portions of the left by extension) in a further diatribe.

First, poor Vlad is bitter that the West supported Muslim militants against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus somehow created Al Qaeda. Well tough shit - a $300 billion a year army + nuclear superpower behemoth invading countries like Afghanistan and by-proxy Angola was by far our biggest threat at the time, and the piddling threat of a few Muslims flying airplanes into buildings *22 YEARS LATER* is a cost we could easily absorb - especially if we hadn't overreacted.

Second, Vlad didn't manage to mention Europe once in the portion I read, and funny enough, Europe's greatest security risk at the moment isn't Muslim immigration - it's Russia's holding different countries or the Union itself prey to crazy threats re: energy 100%+ price spikes or cutting off the gas altogether before winter.  This energy gamesmanship started a long time before the recent events. Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of The Wall, the last time Europe was held under a (much more serious) ongoing Russian threat. Had fracking tech not advanced so much though, the threat would be much worse - as it is, Russia's lost quite a bit of bargaining power.

Third, Putin's happy to blame the west for supporting separatists in Central Asia, presumably also including Chechnya which he trashed despite strong years-long local aspirations for independence, but then spins and asserts the rushed Crimean petition for independence was the same as Kosovo's petition. He of course conveniently ignores the expulsion of Crimean Tatars ("ethnic cleansing" in today's terms) that gave Russians a majority on the peninsula, as well as the Stalin-caused Ukraine famine that wiped out millions and leaves quite a bit of hatred there. And he ignores Russia's not dealing with the realities confronting stranded Russian populations in ex-Soviet states. Try this funny line: "This is Part 2 of Article 1 of the United Nations’ Charter – the right of nations to self-determination." - great, and then he sends troops into Crimea and makes them part of Russia with no petition to the UN - much closer to Hussein's solving long-term gripes about Kuwait by militarily annexing it, rather than petitions to the UN by Palestinians or Kosovars or East Timor.

Fourth (yes, I skimmed further down now) - he goes on to describe Yanukovych's fleeing in terms that remind closer of the Soviets holding Gorbachev hostage on the Crimea before Yeltsin led Moscow protests. Somehow he invokes someone holding Yanukovych at gunpoint, and someone in Kiev being wounded by gunshot to try to turn this into a coup, rather than corruption-laden politician finding himself at the end of his grasp after months of popular protests. Really, Putin's spinning of events is shameless.

Fifth - he does address Novorossiya in answer to a question, ignoring of course the 100 year war under early Tsars to steal it & purge it, and presuming the Soviet occupation of Eurasia in the 20's to be purely legal and precedent-setting, makes the Bolsheviks the good guys and ignores the land "reforms" that wiped out millions of Ukrainians, faults shoe-banging Kruschev (ignoring possibly the reason for giving Crimea to Ukraine - guilt over WWII & 30's Beria-led atrocities). He then laughingly riffs on what Ukraine got out of the war, ignoring that 1) the Soviet Union bargained an extra vote in the UN for Ukraine, making it its proxy, perhaps using the Novorossiya transfer to justify this stature, and 2) the Soviet Union did a major land grab against Germany after WWII by moving Poland 100 miles west and giving that eastern 100 miles to Ukraine - at that time presumed to by Stalin to be its eternal bosom buddy. He does proclaim the transfer to have been illegal, but doesn't say why Russia can't try normal diplomatic procedures for its return (and why it didn't negotiate this when he had a compliant pro-Moscow President to work with). Pure Putin.

He does hint at the real intrigue with "The communists had a simple logic: their goal was to increase the share of proletariat in Ukraine so as to ensure they had more support in various political processes, because in the communists’ view, the peasantry was a petty bourgeois group that was hostile to their aims, and so they needed to create a bigger proletariat." - much as China has settled millions of Han Chinese into Turkic Xinjiang plus Tibet to control by population transfer.

I can't definitively respond to the claim that "after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Crimea pressed for and proclaimed autonomy with wide-ranging powers. Unfortunately, the authorities in Kiev then started abolishing these autonomous powers and essentially reduced them to zero, centralising all the political, economic and financial processes" but I'd guess that 1) Crimean autonomy was greater after 1992 than under the USSR, and 2) much of this period was under pro-Russian leaders in Kiev - until this year - so it's hard to see how Russia's complaining about Kiev now.

Anyway, so much self-serving bullshit in 1 long speech, and there are certainly more topics worth discussing. No, it's not a great speech, but it does give an idea of what a weasel Putin is if you didn't know it already, and I suppose mainstream media should have acknowledged the bullshitter is back on the loose.

Note - none of this has to do with Obama's crap "diplomacy" in the Mideast. As noted before, I'm less interested in either promoting the archaic Novorossyan aspirations of Putin, nor the control/fear-laden anti-Muslim security state expansion of Obama including indifference to/violation of human rights as long as they're brown (not that Putin doesn't explicitly share this anti-Muslim attitude). Here I sit in the middle of Europe, wondering why none of these parties make any real sense. 15 years ago, politics across America & Eurasia seemed much more logical and sane.

The ruble is tied to an oil budget of $96 a barrel. Oil is now around $85-82 dollars a barrel.  It 's value is falling with the price of oil.  They are facing inflation and higher interest rates. I think interest rates right now are around 8% or 9%. The free fall may stabilize because OPEC is cutting back on production to keep oil from falling too far. Russian business is under pressure because they have to buy dollars and euros to pay debt. Sanctions are making it hard to borrow in euros and dollars. The ruble has been falling since the beginning of the year. Russia now faces inflation. The demand for oil is down.  

Western Russia is in a drought because of global warming and that has stopped the exporting of food and wheat. They have been importing wheat to keep up with the demand. They have had several years of extensive wild fires in Siberia. Siberia has been very warm and this has also effected winter wheat and other cool weather cash crop production. They are a major producer of hard winter wheat that is used in bread.