Epstein Secrets

vival. EFTA00662759 As the date of Ukraine's presidential election, scheduled for May 25, approaches, cities and towns in eastern Ukraine and now Odessa continue to fall victim to the secessionist hysteria, with armed balaclava-wearing men in turn vandalising and occupying office buildings and setti

e relationship with Ukraine. EFTA00662755 In an April 17 interview, Putin declared, "We have reached a point beyond which we cannot retreat." The Kremlin's determination to stop the advance of Euro-Atlantic institutions was signaled in a smaller campaign against Georgia in 2008. Now Putin also implie

nly out on the streets [in Crimea], capturing public buildings and military outposts. And it's likely all a part of a larger plan for other places: Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson. And they'll use the same technique. Some Russian-speaking citizens will appear, put up a Russian flag, and make appeals that t

in Ukraine used different, but no less ominous, historical analogies. Some compared the arrival of Russian troops in Simferopol to the way that the Kremlin, in 2008, took advantage of Georgia's reckless bid to retake South Ossetia and then muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended w

nning rampant through the country's industrial heartland. Instead the great prize may be the southwest, an area that includes the Black Sea port of Odessa and gives him a boundary not only with the pro-Russian breakaway Transnistrian statelet, but with NATO and the EU itself. To fan the forces in the

ational environment posed few effective barriers to the reassertion of Moscow's power. There should be little doubt in anyone's mind today that the Kremlin aims to repeat the process, and from President Putin's desk it must look as if many of the pieces for a second restoration are in place. Many of th