Vladimir Putin and Chris Hayes are wrong

Isidora Kranjcevic of the Belgrade daily Blic asked me this morning to comment on Russian President Putin’s remark:

Generally, I believe that only residents of a given country who have the freedom of will and are in complete safety can and should determine their future. If this right was granted to the Albanians in Kosovo, if this was made possible in many different parts of the world, then nobody has ruled out the right of nations to self-determination, which, as far as I know, is fixed by several UN documents. 

What is Putin trying to do here?

He is trying to justify the holding of a referendum in Crimea on whether to join Russia, which its parliament has now been scheduled for March 16. His support for self-determination in Crimea contradicts Russia’s position on Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo, and on sovereignty in general. But Moscow is not known for consistency. I don’t really anticipate that it will support self-determination for Kosovo, or accept that it has occurred.

The cases of Kosovo and Crimea are of course distinct. No one has ethnically cleansed Russians from Crimea or even mistreated them en masse. To the contrary, Russians in Crimea at the moment are mistreating Ukrainians, including Ukrainian soldiers, and Tatars, who mostly support Kiev. Crimea is an autonomous province. Kosovo’s autonomy was revoked. Serbia lost a war over Kosovo, after which the UN administered it for almost a decade, during which time it set up provisional institutions of self-governance in accordance with Security Council resolution 1244. During that time, Belgrade did nothing to repair the problems the Milosevic regime had caused. Nothing comparable to this has occurred in Crimea.

In short: Kiev’s relationship to Crimea is not even remotely analogous to Belgrade’s relationship with Kosovo. Putin is wrong.  He is living in a world his own propaganda machine creates to justify the takeover of Crimea and its re-incorporation into Russia.

Chris Hayes on MSNBC last night trashed the idea that energy has anything to do with Putin’s behavior:

I beg to differ.  Energy revenue has a great deal to do with Putin’s sense of invulnerability and his boldness in challenging the West in Crimea and Ukraine generally.  Half of the Russian Federation’s revenues come from oil and gas.  Oil for several years has hovered around $100/barrel.  This is far above production costs in most of the world and has provided Moscow with the means to spend $51 billion on the Sochi Olympics as well as the refitting of the Russian army that now controls Ukraine.

The question is whether anything the US does can affect oil and gas supplies and prices enough to affect Putin’s thinking.  The answer for natural gas is “yes,” as detailed in the New York Times this morning.  It is an even louder “yes” for oil, which has a global price with only minor source and quality variations because it is readily traded internationally.  Oil prices often anticipate events, so even something like the Keystone pipeline that won’t come online for years may affect prices.  And US production is already climbing sharply because of fracking.

I share the concerns of those who worry about the environmental impacts of fracking and about global warming.  But those concerns do not justify Chris Hayes denigrating the argument that US energy policy and diplomacy can help counter Russian aggression against Crimea.  Chris seems more anxious to get a laugh out of the notion that Republicans always come up with the same answers no matter what the problem rather than searching for appropriate responses to Putin’s land-grab in Crimea, wherever they may be found.  Energy is one of the responses, perhaps the most effective one.

Vladimir Putin and Chris Hayes are both wrong.  Putin about Crimea’s self-determination, Hayes about the role of energy in resolving the Ukraine crisis.