Is Ukraine now a runaway train?

It was a busy today for both Ukraines. Oh yes, there are definitely two, not including Crimea. In East Ukraine we saw three major cities, Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv, go “in play”. The timing was no coincidence, I am sure. The pro-Russian activists gave it their best shot by taking over some city buildings, asking for Russian protection, and declaring themselves to be independent states, with May referendums to confirm.

Gosh, if things were only that easy, but they aren't. Over on the other side of the country, the Right Sector crowd had besieged the Supreme Court in Kiev, after only having been run out of town last week.
 
It seems they have a new patron, because only a 100 of them were able to do this, and the ready reaction force which the Ministry of the Interior must have on standby in Kiev was nowhere to be seen. In the Intel biz we call that a “stand down.”
 
But the dead giveaway was what their beef was. It seems that they don't want ANY of the old regime people involved with the government, about 150, to have any positions at all, a total purge. I will have to give this a name... let's see...how about Neo-Ukrainian democracy? And to that we can add intimidating the Supreme Court judiciary, as an added twist.
 
I suspect Dimitry Yarosh, head of the Right Sector and currently an MP, and presidential candidate who cannot win, wanted to show that both he and his storm troopers could be useful as political enforcers. You know... the kind of folks who help others make the correct decision to avoid certain negative consequences. They needed a comeback event to stay in the political game.
 
This is another blow to the credibility of the coup-meisters, as it shows that the coup is still going on. Whatever election they are planning to have, will just be a sham, but probably one that the West with its selective eyesight will say looks just fine to them. But I am not making a joke about it, because such actions drive a wooden stake through the heart of any constitutional reforms to hold the country together.
 
Why?... because any legal challenges would eventually have to be ruled upon by their Supreme Court, the one who has actually been humiliated today by a coup against the Court from subversive groups inside the Parliament. This bunch really is the gang that can't shoot straight.
 
Interior Minister Avakov had made a comeback by running the armed Right Sector thugs out of town and by eliminating Right Sector thug, Alexander Muzychko, who went down in a hail of bullets after firing on arresting officers. He just threw that all away by not deploying his security forces to throw the RS 100 bunch out of town for disrupting the Supreme Court's work in these difficult times. That is a very strong indication that he was in with the bunch wanting to pressure the Court.
This kind of scam usually works with giving Avakov a promise to keep his job after the election if he helped run all the former regime people out of the government to join those already in Russia. But the Kiev dummies just answered the question that middle-of-the-road East Ukrainians might have had about maintaining unity.
 
A coup government who will use a thug group that has been widely disgraced to muscle the Supreme Court... well, we are talking gangsters here, folks. There is no way to sprinkle sugar on it. (Or as Sarah Palin once said, “You can't put lipstick on a pig.”)
 
Over in East Ukraine a different, but just as high stakes, political struggle was taking place. In a way, with this being Confederate Heritage month in the US, it reminded me of the Yankees versus the Confederates in our disastrous Civil War. Those in East Ukraine wisely suspect they will be targeted for an extra dose during the budget crunches that are coming to their country. In the United States, the last punitive Civil War era taxes were not removed from the defeated South until WWII.
Kiev began burning the house down with their early decree on banning Russian as the language of State business in these traditionally Russian areas. Once again, a government that will take your language away will not be shy of taking most anything else. Add onto that the early loud-mouthing by the Right Sector when they bragged that once they were officially placed into the new Revolutionary Guard, they were going to hunt opponents of the Revolution. That of course meant East Ukraine.
 
So today the three above-mentioned cities decided to cast their sister fates. What option did they really have? And they even used Putin-like tactics... no killing, no shooting, no arson, no real property destruction and no threatening to kill anybody. Missing from the photos and videos are the professional goons that were so prominent in the Maidan coup.
 
Yes, their numbers were not huge today, but they were disciplined. In fact, they were so reserved that Kiev had to do their usual inventing stuff... like Russia was orchestrating the whole thing. The part that killed me the most was the claim of “illegality.” The coup-meisters are still sitting dead in the water on any real investigation into the Maidan sniper killings. And notice the zero-pressure coming out of the West. Gosh, you would think that maybe they had something to do with the illegal coup.
 
But I must say, they are taking a long shot here. Russia is not about to come in without substantial violent aggression by Kiev. The good news is, I think Kiev is smart enough to know that. They would lose big in any kind of a military confrontation, and neither NATO nor anyone else is going to save them if they were to attempt to crush East Ukraine autonomy with military power. The smart play is to work out a reasonable autonomy arrangement.
 
The Kiev coup-meisters are already in over their heads. They think they will be heroes for avoiding a financial default, but the country is going to wake up the morning after in chains. Most of the bailout money being hyped is just debt refinancing. There is not a whiff of anything on the table to even start an economic turnaround. Half the country is about to became Soviet-style peasants again.
 
And on top of all this, Kiev defaulted on its gas bill to Russia that came due today, almost $2 billion. Not only did they not pay anything, they have no intention of paying. I would bet that there are restrictions on the IMF refinancing that none of those funds can be used to pay Russia.
 
Although Ukraine was subsidizing the reduced Russian prices, even the monies they were collecting never got paid to Gazprom. I sense Kiev people feel they can play a game of chicken over the Russians cutting off the gas flow, as they are holding the European customers hostage, over the Russian pride in being a dependable supplier.
 
This whole mess could get a lot worse than it is now, and you will be getting no predictions from me, other than my betting that those with a track record of stupidity will maintain their reputation at all costs. And there is always the chance that someone could make a big, big mistake. I don't even want to go there.