Ukraine fiasco .... Update 1 ..... March 3

Ukraine defense ministry: Russian fleet issues ultimatum to Ukraine forces in Crimea to surrender by 10pm ET or face 'storm' - Interfax
— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) March 3, 2014

Mike Blanchfield writing at Star:
...The Harper government’s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis smacks of empty gestures from a country that has become increasingly marginalized on the world stage, said two retired Canadian ambassadors Sunday.
Those scathing reviews came from two of the county’s most distinguished ex-diplomats: Jeremy Kinsman, who has served as Canada’s senior envoy to Russia, Britain, Italy and the European Union, and Paul Heinbecker, the former ambassador to the United Nations and an adviser to past Conservative and Liberal prime ministers.
They were highly critical of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision Saturday to temporarily withdraw Canada’s ambassador to Russia, and of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird for not ruling out the expulsion of Russia’s ambassador to Canada, Georgiy Mamedov, in a later televised interview.
Both dismissed the Canadian response as “gestures” that underscored Canada’s lack of clout on the world stage, especially since its historic failure to win a temporary seat on the UN Security Council in 2010.........

#Ukraine: 'no shots have been fired, it is not an armed confrontation', says @dougf24, in #Simferopol for @FRANCE24 ►http://t.co/JIbVPQwh9T
— FRANCE 24 (@FRANCE24) March 3, 2014

From LarouchePac:
Disgusted with the neo-Nazi fascists of Stepan Bandera and his associates' role in creating a tinderbox situation in Ukraine, members of Anonymous Ukraine (AU) hacked into the fascists' e-mails and found widespread meddling by the United States, NATO, the European Union, the NSA, and the CIA into the internal sovereign affairs of Ukraine. The latest e-mails released by AU prove that the Bandera Nazis are allied with the Islamic extremists, the Voice of Russia noted.
AU says it has breached the communication of Laurynas Jonavicius, advisor to the President of Lithuania, to Vitali Klitschko, the leader of the opposition party Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR).....



From TorontoStar:
....Ukraine appeals for international help on ‘brink of disaster’
Ukraine’s interim government fears further internal violence would provide Moscow with rationale to invade eastern provinces.
Warning that it is “on the brink of disaster,” Ukraine’s interim government put its military on high alert Sunday and appealed for international help to avoid what it feared was a possible Russian invasion of its eastern provinces.
Elsewhere, international leaders, worried that Europe’s borders were suddenly being rewritten by force, rushed to find a diplomatic solution to the dispute.
But there was no denying what had already happened on the ground: Moscow had overrun the Black Sea peninsula without firing a shot — and the mostly ethnic-Russian eastern regions could be next to fall......

Russian TV Rossiya24 + some fake YouTubers running re-edits of our film on far right in #ukraine. Only true version = http://t.co/PzSVBMUVLP
— Jack Garland (@jackwgarland) March 3, 2014

From WashingtonExaminer:
Aleksandr Dugin's Eurasianism is the volatile theory behind Vladimir Putin's drive into Ukraine. A swelling chorus of worried voices on the Right is warning of the dangerous decisions being taken by President Obama in slashing American military might.

The most recent cuts announced by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will reduce the country's defenses to their weakest point since the fall of 1940.
But the Hagel cuts were preceded by five years worth of Obama reductions in military preparedness and weapons acquisition that were preceded by inconsistent funding throughout the Bush years.
The end result is, as Washington Examiner columnist James Jay Carafano puts it this morning, "after a decade of war and two decades of lackluster attention to modernizing the military, America has now pretty much exhausted the Reagan investment."....