Little is expected from the European Union (EU) leaders' meet on Thursday to discuss a response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's unilateral invasion of Crimea in Ukraine beyond the suspension of visa talks, a possible arms embargo against Russia and a push for mediation. If these measures fall short of the expectations of pro-democracy, West-leaning Ukrainians, it only reflects the general impotence of the world's major powers since the Cold War. The tepid response from the United States and the United Nations, the post-war world's two policemen, underlines the point. The US has threatened trade and economic sanctions, but it is unclear how these will impact an amoral president who runs his country as a self-contained oligarchy built on a rich supply of natural resources. Barack Obama's pullback from the Syrian crisis last year, providing Mr Putin an opportunity to assume the unlikely role of a regional peacemaker, was one indication of this.
Certainly, that Russian troops have entered Crimea suggests that Mr Putin doesn't worry about global opinion. As he did in Chechnya and Georgia, Mr Putin has used the artless explanation that he is protecting Russians. Some 58 per cent of the Crimean population is ethnically Russian. Ethnic Ukrainians make up about 24 per cent and Crimean Tatars, the original inhabitants, account for just 12 per cent - a result of Stalin's mass deportations. This provides an argument against accusers who say he may be violating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which the US, Russia, Ukraine and the UK agreed not to threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine. Mr Putin can also count on the fact that the lease to allow Russia's Black Sea Fleet to remain in Crimea's Sevastopol was recently extended to 2042. However, it is transparent that his sole concern is not Crimea but the need to keep Ukraine firmly within Russia's cordon sanitaire against the West. That explains his hasty $15-billion loan to Ukraine when his protege, ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, looked like clinching a trade deal with the EU that came with critical political and economic reforms for Ukraine's corrupt and dysfunctional economy.
Ukraine's tragedy is that its economy is inextricably bound with Russia's, since the latter supplies all of Ukraine's natural gas, and about a fifth of the gas Russia supplies to Europe flows through the former Soviet republic. Gas supplies and price were the proximate causes for unrest in 2004 and 2006 and they are expected to play a major part in the current crisis (Gazprom raised prices by five times after Mr Yanukovych was ousted). But if Mr Putin gets away with impunity in Ukraine, will China, with its similar disregard for world opinion, not feel encouraged to unilaterally extend its sphere of influence, as it has shown in the Senkaku Islands and the Philippines? Will this not encourage Japan to come out from under the US protective umbrella and re-arm? Like the crisis in tiny Serbia in 1914 - "some damned fool thing in the Balkans," as Otto Von Bismarck once described it - the global implications of Ukraine's 2014 domestic crisis are enormous.
