Before the Age of the Donald by Dave jaffe - Part Eleven

    Before the age of the Donald - Part 11.

     As Vladimir Putin tightened his hold on the Russian Federation, the Cold War was restarted. Violence broke out in the former U.S.S.R. republic of Georgia, that was now a new country. In Georgia there were many Abkhazians, an ethnic group that now wanted to secede from Georgia.
      The Georgian army crushed this rebellion. Yet in 2008 Russians supported the Abkhazians. And then Russia moved to help South Ossetia, a region of Georgia that also wanted to leave Georgia. As tensions mounted in Georgia, trouble also broke out in the Ukraine, another former republic of the U.S.S.R. that now like Georgia was an independent country. Both Russia and the United States tried to bring the Ukraine into their orbit.
     The U.S. through the National Endowment for Democracy funded pro-western groups in the Ukraine. With the establishment of this fund U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in 1986,"We in the U.S. can now do legally what we used to do illegally through the C.I.A."
     In 2013 the then pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych suspended completing an agreement with the European Union. A group called Euromaidan took to the streets and drove Yanukovych from power. He fled to Russia. A new pro-western leader Peter Poroshenko who made himself rich in making chocolate, took power.
    The Ukraine nearly split apart. Pro-Russian and Russian speaking groups in the eastern and southern Ukraine clashed with pro-western and Ukrainian speaking forces in the western Ukraine. Over 8,000 people died in the battles.Then Vladimir Putin launched a counter stroke. He sent Russian troops into the Crimean area of the Ukraine and later annexed it after a referendum approved of the Crimea joining Russia. Russia had ruled the Crimea up to 1954 when then-U.S.S.R. leader Nikita Khruschev had handed it over to the Ukrainian republic. In the Crimea was the port of Odessa where many ships that were now part of the Russian navy were stationed.
    "Putin wanted a warm water port for his navy," one western observer said. "And now he's got it."
      The Cold War was definitely back. Eastern European nations that had once been part of the U.S.S.R. dominated Warsaw Pact were now scared of a Russian invasion. So were former Soviet republics. Meanwhile tensions between the U.S. and Russia were also on the boil in the Middle East. The U.S. and some other U.S. allies and their troops tried to overthrow Syrian leader Bashir Assad. But Russia backed Assad and sent troops to Syria to support him. Meanwhile conflict simmered in the Ukraine.
    Putin wasn't Stalin. He didn't kill millions of people like Stalin had. His troops probably killed 50,000 people in Chechnya. He is a tyrant like most of Russia's past rulers whether they were czars or communists. In any case Russia's brief flirtation with democracy under Mikhail Gorbachev was long over. Russian politics were just back to normal.