They did win ! (sort of ??)

Can't we just end this war in Ukraine ?
 what's left to do ? Formalizing the deals set forth in Minsk, giving Ukraine control of it's Border, and of course,  some sort of Quid pro quo deal , at least for some interim period,  about Crimea : I tend to agree with the Tatars, I do agree with their stance on the issue (s) , they have been there  so very long, they carry the blood of the very most early people in that region in their hearts.

 Is the left hand of darkness amusing itself somehow ?  I can not envision the mood of the Metro riders, the people crammed into trams clunking along from Lviv to Dnepropetrovsk , I guess those arduously slow trams that roll out from Simferopol to the Yalta Pass (or wherever they go to get you to the beaches) are all still rolling along: As news of continued cease fire violations permeates the edges of media consciousness, and front/ center for the daily news cycle in Ukraine, I'd guess the Metro mood is "we are getting tired of this " Our sons, daughters are going off to this wasted zone, risking death, heinous injury, capture, and yes... torture (or at least in the past, many incidents have been documented, and some I know personally, who were intentionally maimed and tortured by the separatist  (many of them foreigners ) elements operating in the Eastern Ukraine conflict zone.

Is that dark Shaman, Mister Vladimir Putin going to cut the folks in Ukraine some slack ?

From the Premier Palace Hotel (the last place Putin stayed at in Kyiv, early 2013 when he told Yanukovych face to face in the Presidential offices,  the EU association agreement was not acceptable to the Kremlin ) to the Cathedral of Vladimir in Kiev, it's a short walk, even an average guy or Gal could do it in ten minutes, maximum time. I have studied this Cathedral, the stone is gorgeous, it's been rebuilt, reworked somehow. There is something about the alignment from the center door and the center of the Cathedral, the stone pieces, as majestic cuts as they are, they are all a little off, something about like 13 across (13 pieces) or whatever it is, the door does not align with the stones in the floor and the center of the altar.

as I quote from this epic Der Spiegel article : which continues in my mind as the best breakdown of the crisis out there, from November 24th, 2014:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/war-in-ukraine-a-result-of-misunderstandings-between-europe-and-russia-a-1004706.html

Kiev, Premier Palace Hotel
July 27, 2013
His name wasn't anywhere on the official program and no one appeared to know that he was coming. The Russian Embassy in Kiev hadn't even been informed that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be making an appearance at a conference of his Ukrainian supporters at the Premier Palace Hotel.
"We will respect whatever choice the Ukrainian government and people make...," he said. "But there are facts that speak for themselves." The statements are far from friendly. Whereas they may have sounded like a promise to those listening in the hall, Putin's comments were both a slap in the face and a threat to the Ukrainian government.
Prior to his speech, Putin had spoken for nearly an hour with Yanukovych in the presidential palace, leaving the Ukrainian president vexed. The talk would fundamentally change Russia's position towards Kiev. Previously, officials in Moscow hadn't believed that the association agreement with Brussels could actually come to pass. The general consensus in the Russian capital had been that the EU would insist on Tymoshenko's release and that Yanukovych would never push through all the uncomfortable reforms that Brussels had demanded.
But now, Putin realized that Yanukoych actually was considering signing the agreement.
Moscow, the Interfax News Agency
July 29, 2013, 9:24 a.m.
Two days later, the Kremlin-aligned news agency Interfax issued a news alert warning Russian consumers against consuming Ukrainian candies and chocolates. The article quoted Gennadiy Onishchenko, Russia's chief sanitary inspector at the time, who had just imposed a sales ban on candy by Variete, Montblanc pralines and Ukrainian milk chocolate because of alleged quality and safety problems. The sweets are made in factories that belonged to Petro Poroshenko (the oligarch and current Ukrainian president) and a television station he owned had been promoting Ukraine's pro-European policies. Shortly thereafter, Moscow imposed other measures in an escalation between Moscow and Kiev dubbed by the international media as the "chocolate war". Although the term may sound sweet, the realities were anything but nice.
By then, at the very latest, officials in Berlin should have realized that Putin was going to take off the kid gloves in the battle over Ukraine.

Nowadays, there is a lot of trash talk going around :
http://www.amn.com.ua/podiyi/i-zhyruye-zh-taka-pokyd-v-ukrayini-eks-komunistka-kaletnyk-poshyryuye-v-sotsmerezhah-antyukrayinski-materialy-foto/
I don't really know how to judge these things, it's just out there.
Now the Russian people, as a whole, separated from Ukraine by circumstances, politics , variations of ethnic history : it's a continuum, no doubt about it, stretching back to Genghis Khan, Alexander the great, probably Egyptian times, these were tribes of people and a deep, deep history at the center of Europe, between the East and the West, yes those wide open plains, above the Ice Age fluctuations, rivers, seas, tectonic movements actually  happened within Human history. The vikings brought their long boats down the rivers to settle or integrate with native people in the Kyiv region.
Will Ukraine regain Crimea ? One can only guess. Often , I have talked with Ukraine folks, normal people : I sense dejection and some form of acceptance about Crimea, like a family torn apart,

something akin to our father/mother has left us , and she/ he will never return (( and I know this from reality. Guys from Krim who went to /with Ukraine, they can't risk to call their family. And the same, the other side .
https://news.vice.com/video/right-sector-blockade-russian-roulette-dispatch-111
Now I have heard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Parasyuk
heard his thinking, he is a pretty smart, balanced guy, not an extremist, and he seems capable of marginalizing the extremist people within his "Sector " and maybe he'll be the next President of Ukraine? He is a skilled , engaging story teller, inverse humor, pacing : he won't want the job, but his people may push him to go for it ?
I found it interesting, he was taken prisoner in the battle of Illiovask and they let him go in a prisoner exchange without knowing who he was, a lucky break ! So, (Tak ),  he has luck and the tact to blend in as well, be invisible to some extent.
and another telling article, well written and true sounding in every detail :
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-suffers-harsh-defeat-in-eastern-town-1409616541
 ********************
Mr. Beryoza said he reached an agreement with the Russians on Friday morning, and at 6 a.m. he and the other commanders ordered their troops to move out of Ilovaisk and formed a column of 60 vehicles. At the front of the column was a truck carrying dead and wounded, flying a white flag.
Soldiers in the column said they traveled for about an hour when surrounding Russian and rebel troops opened fire on them, first with mortars, then with machine guns. As vehicles caught fire and blew up, men in the column fled in every direction. Tracked vehicles ran over men on foot and one armored vehicle blew up, sending a head flying toward Taras Samchuk, a 28-year-old cook from the western town of Lutsk. About 100 were killed on the road, and more than that were wounded, survivors said.
Others fled in small groups towards Ukrainian lines or were captured. Mr. Beryoza said he was part of a group of 14 soldiers who crawled to safety and arrived in Dnipropetrovsk on Sunday. Mr. Samchuk said his vehicle swerved into a sunflower field and out of sight.
Residents of the small town of Kolmsomolske some dozen miles away said they saw dozens of fighters staggering through the town in small groups on Saturday morning, with bloodied bodies and dirty uniforms
*******************
it is a telling feature of the article (in my opinion) , an important historical feature omitted ,
.
Kolmsomolske, Ukraine: Dnepropetrovsk Oblast
it was the Southern most outpost of Russian , (or Orthodox Christian  churches in Ukraine)
and it has an age, roughly equal to  the mid 1600's, it has an existing wooden framed  church still standing from that time : I have visited it, and somewhere have some photos of it.


Has it all been  a "wag the Dog" ploy, just to bolster Mister Putin's political stature ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog

is it another platform for a Lord of War to emerge in this tableau of conflict in Syria, now Turkey and Russia butting heads , it's gotta be a money maker for somebody
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_War
what I like is the cross linked entry about Semion Mogilevich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semion_Mogilevich

No, it's not a "fake war" it is quite real people  (in USA ) are losing context on what is going on with it  , what the scoop is about it. I can't pinpoint the current scoop myself, what nugget of relevant information can be derived about it. There are a lot of vulnerabilities in the Clinton and also the Republican campaign camps regarding Ukraine, easy to exploit. Hillary, and even Bernie need to build a cohesive narrative regarding their positions as they relate to Ukraine, US foreign Domestic, economic and security policy, the past and more critically, the future. It seems likely that #winteronfire , it will win the Oscar, while it's perhaps not a balanced presentation : it's emotionally driven , it has enough objectivity to pass the Hollywood litmus test for best Documentary,

There are many interpretations, yes it's true : the West totally fucked up on this, People in Ukraine suffered, and folks in Russia also suffer the effects of their leadership's decisions. I agree with the precept, that there are no winners. Every day I feel sadness about the price people I know in Ukraine, they have to pay for the thieving habits of their political echelons of the past, the war, the violence, the currency devaluations. It all totally sucks.
Yet how do we emerge from this crisis ? Can we focus on Planetary defense ? Back away from regional, Ethnic, religious dogma ? get to the core of who we are today, right now.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/29/russian-biker-gang-in-ukraine-night-wolves-putin
it does not look like things will get easy to extricate the massed militaristic mechanisms emplaced.

Ukraine could be in more trouble than people realize, the goals set by Russia of it becoming a failed state, while it won't happen, it'll be a long way up a hard hill to reach to economic normality on a par with Western Europe.
https://news.vice.com/article/people-are-walking-with-a-noose-around-their-necks-inside-ukraines-huge-shadow-economy

It is such a compelling narrative that Ukraine gave up its massive Nuclear arsenal in exchange for the guarantees of security outlined in Budapest Memorandum, they could have held some portion of the weapons back, got their own command codes for the operation of the weapons, done a bypass , in effect : they had the Know how to build and use them, but they chose a non-nuclear pathway in their statehood, and gave up those trump cards in their security
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine
and Now this :
https://euobserver.com/foreign/128001

they are certainly rethinking their defense strategy:
http://www.unian.info/economics/1248234-ukraine-renews-its-sapsan-missile-program.html


For the first thing, I Love Kyiv, and all the subset of cities that became the consolidated core of modern Ukraine. I feel more alive, more connected to reality in Ukraine , than here in bustling San Francisco,  on the Kyiv Metro, it functions so beautifully, has such interesting dynamics, for all the _____  __ stuff the Soviet planners did, doing the metro, building centralized cities, it  was a sweet and intensely perfect thing , yet even the clinckety clank Trams in the South, Center , West and elsewhere, they have a nice character, the modern ships they are bringing online can't replace such pragmatic and serviceable designs as they have in operations. A good friend of mine from Donetsk, who has gone to Kyiv, recently posted some lament about all the inequities of train travel in Ukraine, I get it, yeah , all advertised features and aspects are still totally skewed in weird ways.Yet thanks to God, he has the freedom to complain about such things, he is not  (as I Know it) subject to immediate conscription to enter his home city with (inadequate ? ) body armor, and essentially go into battle with guys he went to High School with, or Junior college.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault

Now I don't have the energy to pick apart, or build up/ tear down what this guy is saying, there seems to be a fair chunk of relevance to it.

In essence, like there was a logistical  ____ __ in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs, ultimately leading to the JFK Kennedy killing, and as there was a screw up in the Libya situation (with different outcomes)\ The "Rebel " general in charge of the Libyan opposition that wound up killing Khadaffi as he hid in the culvert under the road,   come one folks, he lived for 6 years within a stone's throw of CIA's Virginia  Headquarters(it is documented in fact checked news stories )
 Nobody,  (I can think of)  needs to be an idiot savant to figure it out , the Libyan "revolution " was a Culinary Institute of America orchestrated event planned and arranged during Mister Bush's Administration and gone ahead with during President Obama's administration. WHat the outcome will result, I can't say, don't want to go there, wouldn't be prudent. But will the Bush dynasty, give way, once again to the Clinton/ Rodham group, who is to say ?

But in essence, I can swear it's true : FORMER EMPLOYEES, elements of the ( Clinton ) organization did work on behalf of the Yanukovych to elect him, maybe not intentionally , yet effectively to undermine the Tymoshenko clan . Ultimately,  leading to her imprisonment which was a pseudo-galvanizing factor in the Euro-Maidan movement. There was money behind Madam Tymoshenko, and let's not forget that she worked the corruption index. Yet, I have to confess I feel affiliation with her strident intensity, call me biased but I like the Dnipropetrovsk scene, with all it's blemishes and imperfections. They tore a statue down last weekend, what's on the scoreboard for next weekend ? More Mafia cleansing ? What about Genna Korban ? I have not even dug through the news to update on his corruption prosecution scoop, isn't he a nice man ? I hope his heart condition is not difficult , and that he receives due process according to the rule of law....\
Dnieper people are often rambunctious : I won't repeat what they say about Russians. yet this pissing match, Kolomoisky versus Putin. Well, it is difficult, a difficult thing. Mister Kolomoisky calling Putin a "man of small stature"  ( A.K. A,   as known as "Napoleanic complex " Yet Mister Putin  basically looted Mister Kolomoisky's stuff, there  is no question of it.
During a public talk show, Mister Putin basically told the people of Krim, Crimea who had outstanding loans to Mister Kolomoisky's bank (and Ukraine Banks was the generic reference ) ,  "Don't worry, if you bought a car with a loan from a Ukraine bank , just do not pay the loan : I got you covered...
Just how does Mister Putin intend to cover the outstanding loans ? If it's a Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, can't Privat bank notify those entities that the loan is unpaid and ask the dealerships to hold the outstanding vehicle to certify payment/ non payment of outstanding loans "
Can Privat Bank assert it's right to collect  on bad loans issued to people in Crimea, for buying cars, Condo's etc ? Regardless of some semblance of a Democratic election in Krim, who wants to invest there anymore, aside from hard line Russian Nationalists and gangsters ?
Some people in USA didn't get the memo : Russian annexation of Crimea, they got the bank buildings, the vaults with what money was inside it, the land the buildings sat on, the ability to hold those bank assets in permanent limbo, all their records, even the furniture, everything...
while the Russians propaganda made hay about the Nazi's in Kyiv, is not taking Mister Kolomoisky's assets akin to the taking of property the Nazi's engaged in with Europe's Jewish population ? Hybrid war represents a sort of soft blitzkrieg effect, so as few people as possible are aware of what did just happen. I have native Russian speaking friends, who are white Russian, not some ethnic Tatar or something who had enormous doubts about what going to Russia would bring them (other than the more elevated format of corruption the Putin clan is so skilled at leveraging) They knew full well it was trading one variant of another, and it was not a democratic decision process.
It is distasteful to see a march of 15 guys in a ragtag set of uniforms using the Nazi symbolism, essentially Zieg Heiling down the main street of Kyiv, but does somebody pay them to engage in this extreme behavior, and if so, who ? It is very distasteful for the Kyiv local people, the middle class regulars, I have seen it on their faces, reactions, yet it unfortunately,  does exist . It will change, we had extreme right wing motorcycle gangs beating up on lefty hippies and student democracy demonstrations in the 1970's here in California and elsewhere in USA back then. We still have Neo Nazi elements freely doing their fringe element things here today.

the latest scoop I got from an inside source at the Sean Penn camp, was that there was a deleted portion of the El Chapo Guzman interview, where Sean Penn, when asked by El CHapo what movie roles he was thinking of doing next , mentioned that he was thinking of doing a role in a movie under green light consideration about the Cyborgs defending the Donetsk airport : a tale of 2 cousins , somewhat akin to his Mystic River role. The other cousin drafted into the covert Russian forces operating in Ukraine, they were fishing, drinking buddies, best of friends, when each learns of the other, various plot elements unfold, including a possible role for Sean's ex- squeeze Madonna as the Russian doyenne of the separatist forces who had partied and slept with both of the cousins, and she has to use them both to advance her scheme of ascending to permanent power...
when Sean Penn mentioned all this El Chapo confessed that he was moving a sizable portion of his operations to Europe , his group has recently bought a luxury car dealership in Tirana, and also a interest in a modeling agency based in Bucharest (you can't sell cocaine without beautiful girls around) That he was considering growing weed in Ukraine and possibly opium in Albania... all this deals was sett up shortly before his capture, and his family is already there in  East Europe buying up  real estate and various business portfolios (some formerly or currently owned by elements of the Khadaffi clan ) of course, the entire deal was personally reviewed and approved by none other than the Lord of the Pies (former head of the World Bank, DSK himself....)

I am only kidding of course, but the truth can be stranger than the fiction !

I think Ukraine did win, they engaged and held back an adversary who outspends them 85 to 1 (in military expenditure $'s ) and they held them back , through their bravery, determination and belief that they were doing what they had to to keep their country together. Maybe some day Crimea will return, it was an epic bank heist for the Russians , but what cost ? who got the cash in those vaults (Ukraine cash, Euros, dollars...
and all that gorgeous real estate, Yalta, Sudak, even SAKI, WHILE A LITTLE FLAT AND BORING, IT'S FLAT LEVEL LAND , TIME TO BUILD LUXURY APARTMENT TIMESHARES

this is classic narrative
http://joinfo.com/business/1012772_russia-seized-ukrainian-oil-rigs-in-the-black-sea.html
the Russians took massive oil storage facilities in Crimea, owned by Ukraine
along with the untapped portions of the portfolio :
http://www.platts.com/news-feature/2014/naturalgas/ukraine-crisis-energy-implications/map-crimea-oil-gas-assets

these are the stories the man on the street in Topeka or down town Los Angeles isn't aware if, but it all could lead to a testy military exchange that could result in thermonuclear war. It's something to be mindful of, no one wins in that outcome, however it ends.