More Than Enough

"No one should be fooled -- and believe me, no one is fooled -- by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea. These efforts are as ham-handed as they are transparent, and quite simply what we see from Russia is [an] illegal and illegitimate effort to destabilize a sovereign state and create a contrived crisis. Russia's clear and unmistakable involvement in destabilizing and engaging in separatist activities in Ukraine is deeply disturbing."
"[The U.S.] will not hesitate to use 21st Century tools to hold Russia accountable for 19th Century behaviour."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

Kharkiv Police stand guard in front of the Kharkiv regional state administration building. AFP

"I call this a theatre of the absurd. It is just artists performing, but the main thing is that there is an ever-dwindling audience."
Donetsk Governor Sergiy Taruta

"During the Cold War, U.S. secretaries of state and Soviet foreign ministers routinely negotiated the outcome of crises and the fate of countries. It has been a long time since such talks have occurred, but last week a feeling of deja vu overcame me."
"Americans and Russians negotiated over everyone's head to find a way to defuse the crisis in Ukraine and, in the course of that, shape its fate."
George Freedman, Stratfor, U.S. global intelligence think-tank

"I think Mr. Lavrov would like to make this a U.S.-Russian negotiation on Ukraine's fate ... I don't think secretary Kerry plans to go there."
"You have to have this conversation with Ukraine."
Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, analyst, Brookings Institution

"We don't live in the 19th Century and Ukraine must decide on its own what its foreign and internal policy should be."
"Let Putin negotiate with the West on the Ukrainian matter rather than go to war with Ukraine."
Volodymyr Fesenko, political scientist, Kyiv

Well, Moscow's foreign ministry claims that 150 'specialists' from an American private security company, Greystone, were involved in aiding the provincial officials cope with the protests in east Ukraine. Ukraine denies this accusation, claiming that most of those behind the unrest in Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv were Russian. No American advisers were involved with Ukrainian officials.

"We call for the immediate halt of all military preparations, which risk sparking a civil war", said the Moscow foreign ministry's website. Wot? Can we have that again? Moscow has stationed its troops on the border with Ukraine, but deplores Ukrainian attempts to use whatever is left of its limping military resources to protect its provinces from the predations of a scant thousand or so Russians in an area of over four million people?

Unknown "separatist" provocateurs with arms and explosives threaten 60 people they have taken hostage within a security service branch in Luhansk, according to the Ukrainian Security Service. The hostages' identities were not known; perhaps they represent security service employees in a building seized on Sunday by armed pro-Russian 'protesters'.

Pro-Russian protesters strengthen a barricade in front of the occupied regional administration building in Donetsk, Ukraine, on Wednesday. European Pressphoto Agency

Ukrainian authorities have regained control of a government building in the country's second-largest city, Kharkiv. The protesters were evicted and dozens of people were detained. The measure taken on this occasion was described by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov as an "anti-terrorist operation". Which is rather odd, since Moscow insists that the terrorists are those who are causing problems for east Ukraine Russians, and they represent hard-line, right-wing Ukrainians.

Perspective can certainly be confusing, since bias is such a human trait. Protesters in Donetsk have been ensconced for a third day at the 11-story regional administration headquarters where they have declared their parallel-world-version government. Protected behind lines of tires wrapped in razor wire, obviously inspired by the Maidan in reverse. That barricade seen as an effective deterrent against police plans to storm the premises.

And while all this is proceeding, lawmakers in the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv, are having at one another, in a disagreement that turned from vocally high-pitched to physically high stakes. One might imagine that by now Ukraine would have become accustomed to being a geographic football kicked around by the east and the west, both cuddled and clubbed by Russia at various intervals in their close relationship.

Communist lawmakers scuffle with right-wing Svoboda ( Freedom) Party lawmakers during a parliament session of Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, in Kiev, Ukraine Tuesday, April 8, 2014. (AP Photo/Vladimir Strumkovsky)

Still, Ukrainians are resistant, resilient and sufficiently obdurate to insist that they would very much appreciate being included in all negotiations relating to their future as a country. The Kremlin may see this insistence as unreasonable, since they will not, it appears, entertain the thought of meeting with the illegitimate representatives of government now residing in Kyiv, making such matters unnecessarily complex.

What all sides in this geopolitical imbroglio can come to an agreement on, however, is that none of the 'sides' relish the most unpleasant and stridently unuseful threat of belligerent military action, from any source, for any reason. Crimea is gone. Vladimir Putin should retreat in satisfaction at his handiwork, and leave east Ukraine for Ukraine. Enough really is enough and more than enough.