On February 28, when reports started coming in that unidentified armed men in combat gear were patrolling outside Crimea’s airport and had occupied the region’s parliament building, Forbes contributor Mark Adomanis (@MarkAdomanis) took to his blog, ‘The Russia Hand’, to condemn what appeared to be a Russian incursion into Ukraine.
“I knew that the Kremlin would react negatively to [Viktor] Yanukovych’s downfall and to the anti-Russian tint of the new Ukrainian government,” he wrote in a piece called ‘Did Russia Just Invade Crimea?’
“That Russia would muck around with Ukraine’s economy, by increasing the price or halting deliveries of gas, by withholding loans, and by threatening or imposing trade sanctions, was a given. […] That’s just the way the game is played.”
“But what’s going on in Crimea is absolutely not normal, and is way outside what is normally considered acceptable behaviour. The Russians have been acting in a manner that is extremely provocative, extremely foolish, and totally unjustified, and it’s worth stating as much.”
Coming from someone who has been labelled a Kremlin stooge, a usual idiot and any other number of Cold War-era pejoratives, these were strong words. And they didn’t stop there. Adomanis went on to write blog posts arguing that Crimea would be remembered as Russia’s biggest foreign policy blunder in a generation, that it would decimate the country’s economy and that the West needed to slam the Russian government with every institutional weapon.
Matthew Clayfield
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
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