This should be in the WTF thread! Doesn't Ukraine owe most of the debt to Russia? I'm leaning towards Russia in this, but the West must be totally crazy to throw money Russia's way, or am I missing something? What is the end game? Bring the Ukraine over to the West, EU, and NATO, stick missiles in aimed at Russia, start a land and/or nuke war, energy war, economic war? I'm goung to start stacking Uranium!
In the old days, when trouble happened in the Crimea, the West sent the navy and marines. Now, when there's trouble: * The IMF gives a "bailout" * The UN condemns the action as "illegal" (not a bad thing, but without anything to back it up...) * The US government tells a press conference that "I wouldn't invest in Russian stocks unless you're planning to go short" It's fracking surreal. The same verbal sophistry the Fed Reserve uses to try and jack the stock market higher has now bled into the world of realpolitik as though a few worthless words would send the Russian stock market tumbling and put Russia on its knees. Oh, how powerful the US President is in that he can get his spokesperson to defeat Russia where 685,000 French (and allies) and later 4 million Germans, had failed! So this is what it has come to. The Russians made the calculations before the annexation and someone must have pointed out to Putin, "but comrade President, they have no balls!". And then the order was made to move in.
It's money owed to the future. I don't think it will ever get paid off. It will just go up and up and up. But it reminds me of the saying "The piper must be paid."
