1. The Russian naval base was not under any kind of serious, immediate armed threat. If by “protect their naval base”, you mean “to ensure that it is permanently in their possession and will never have its lease ended”, Russia has no fundamental right to that.

Putin has made up and exaggerated claimed threats against sub-populations including Jews.

President of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee Eduard Dolinsky said that the community did “not feel any specific threat at this moment. And we can solve any issues inside our country in dialogue with all political forces peacefully.”

“We are very skeptical of Mr. Putin’s assertion that he is coming to fight fascism and anti-Semitism” in Ukraine, he added.

“It’s ridiculous. We don’t need protection from fascists,” said Dolinsky. “We were shocked when he used this as an excuse for the invasion. This is absolutely unacceptable.”

The insistence on trying to claim that the threat from the right within Ukraine is fundamentally worse than the threat from Putin is suspect in both its origins and consequences. It seems to originate from a desire to latch onto any perspective that lessens the menace of a US adversary in order to lessen justification for any US action — if the US government is the enemy that has someone’s primary focus, the enemy of your enemy keeps looking like it’s a friend.

The consequence of this is a set of crazy contortions, including trying to effectively accuse the Israeli far right of anti-Semitism.

Especially given the neo-fascist environment that Putin cultivates in Russia, it again seems laughable to view Russian annexation of any territory anywhere as some kind of civil libertarian act. But the other uncomfortable truth here is that Russia did not exactly wait for any feared reprecussions of the acting Ukrainian government’s policies to materialize before occupying and annexing. Hell, there’s an election scheduled for May that could well have severely weakened the standing of the far right, which one could argue is artificially inflated due to its role in the protests.

To the contrary, anonymized Russian solders and Russian-supported groups have been at the forefront of instigating tensions and street clashes in order to hype the danger to Russian interests, not trying to calm them down in preparation for an orderly election that would determine where the political winds are really blowing.

At the end of your reply there, your point seems to have shifted from the idea of a threat to Russian-speaking civilians or Jews or gays or other fascist targets to the “threatened alignment with NATO” of the Ukrainian government, whatever its ideological tendencies. Certainly, it would not be a fabrication to say that there was a renewed ascendancy of forces in Ukraine that favor integration with EU/NATO structures and not Russian ones. But, provided that this alignment is only truly solidified after elections by a government with a proper mandate, and provided that any revocation of the naval base lease is in in orderly keeping with existing agreements, Putin has no right to use force to stop it. Whether the US cheers or condemns the interim government or this or that minister has no bearing on that lack of right.

2. Is your argument here that instead of swallowing the interim government whole, even with the inclusion of forces it finds dangerous and distasteful, the US government instead should have dictated terms in which the recognition of the parliament’s governing legitimacy is predicated on a certain list of people being included or not included in certain positions? Yanukovich was/is gone from the scene, and there was and is nothing practical that the US could do about that. Given the players in Kiev that are left and the choices they made in the Rada to organize, i feel like there is no US action that you would not have condemned. If the US dictates who is in or out, then it is the puppeteer, responsible for everything that happens, and any vaguely right-wing person involved in the interim government is a “US-backed neofascist.” If the US recognizes the interim government’s de-facto legitimacy leading up to the election but takes a hands-off approach, then somehow it is *also* responsible for the (even higher numbers of) right-wing figures involved in it.

It seems to me that a much more realistic perspective is to understand the extent of right-wing participation in the interim government as an expression the US’ limited ability to impose its preferences, particularly when doing so would only have an impact for a period of weeks before the May elections and would be sure to invite a backlash from the likes of Putin and ess emm.

3. My use of the phrase “seat of power” was clearly paired with my identification of the electoral base in that part of the country. As I noted above and in my original reply, the inclusion of right-wing officials is problematic. And my strong take on it was that it enhances even more the urgency of holding proper elections. If it is the case that right-wing forces are taking a disproportionate share of power in the interim government not because the electorate shares their ideology but becuase they were instrumental in the overthrow of the Yanukovich government, then real elections will diminish their power substantially.

This is an extension of what I think is the core problem of your position here: you are endorsing Putin’s right to take drastic, concrete, and permanent measures in response to what — at least in terms of “neo-fascist” social ideology — looks like a vague and probebly temporary problem (the disproportionate influence of Rigth Sector-related individuals in the pre-May interim government).

4-5. It is true that the protests and the occupatin of the Maidan initially took place in response to what was a decision on a trade deal that was apparently the prerogative of the government at the time. And demands for the government to reverse that decision or step down called into question the democratic bona fides of the protesters, an issue I raised at the time. When the Rada reconvened and started passing measures, I also raised the question of how problematic it would be for the interim government to go too far in cracking down on separatism.

However, the actual departure of Yanukovich took place after that dispute over the EU deal had morphed into a much more serious dispute over his use of violence. And I think it is sily to mention “revisionist propaganda” in the same paragraph that you brush away this violence with a vague suggestion about reports that the snipers were some sort of false flag. Further, the looting of the country and the human rights violations uncovered *after* the ouster of Yanukovich are relevant insofar as they made it impossible to support his return as a legitimate leaders — he is rightly liable to arrest if he sets foot back in the country. This sets the background against which US decisions have to be made about whom to support and how much influence to exert.

And that is why I placed so much emphasis on the need for a real campaign toward real free and fair elections as soon as possible. Questioning the legitimacy of the interim government is not enough when the old regime is so discredited, since the old regime can’t come back. You totally miss the mark when you try to answer this by making a point about how the facts that discredit it were either not in the light or were not important when the forces that led to the overthrow were initially instigated. The point — a point I made clearly — is that Ukraine *then* found itself in a circumstance where the only path to legitimacy was a new election. And so anyone trying to take drastic measures in the interim would be doing so without a proper mandate of legitimacy.

No political leader inside or outside of Ukraine had a mandate to go changing the country’s borders during this interim period, particularly when the fears about “neo-fascist” elements in the new government were just that, fears, and ones whose basis would be up for serious revision upon a new government being elected properly.

6. “A few claims of irregularities”? Have you been under a rock? For starters, I’ll just repeat what I already said:

There was no time for a real popular debate. Kiev-based Ukrainian media was blocked during the supposed campaign period. Anonymized Russian soldiers, along with pro-Russian militias and biker gangs, intimidaded both the population and journalists without recourse. Serious international monitors were not allowed. Significant reports of voting irregularities, involving the integrity of voter lists, multiple and ineligible voting, and counting processes, were not acknowledged or investigated. The turnout reported was impossibly high. The 97 percent in favor figure is very obviously not reflective of the divide on the peninsula, even if there truly is a pro-Russian majority. And the immediate move by the authorities against Tatars regarding land rights should put to rest any notion that this is some kind of emergency process to ensure minority protection.

And as a side note, I don’t understand how you simultaneously hold two points of view: (a) that the government in Kiev was illegitimate due to its holding parliamentary votes in a climate of intimidation, and (b) that the provincial government of Crimea was legitimate in spite of the fact that it held its emergency session while occupied by 50 gunmen who installed machine guns at the entrances and while selectively admitting entry and hoisting a Russian flag.