re: #15 Charles Johnson

In all situations like this, you simply have to make a gain/loss calculation, and it isn’t worth the cost to plunge that part of Eastern Europe into a bloody conflict and interrupt the natural gas supply. Some people seem to think the right way to respond is to get all puffed up and issue threats of war, but the fact is that nobody is going to go to war over this.

And that’s quite correct. The concern in my little corner of the world - living as I do in a former Warsaw Pact nation, now a NATO member state - is “What’s Putin up to? Is he going to come after the former Eastern Bloc nations? Is Crimea enough or does he want more?”

The words, “This is my last territorial demand in Europe” still ring quite clearly here, as well as such cynical phrases such as “The government of the CSSR has invited their Warsaw Pact brothers to help restore order in Prague”.

Hopefully, Putin isn’t foolhardy enough to attempt something like this in NATO or the EU proper.