Hey, South Ossetia, how'd that hopey changey thing work out for ya?

It seems that Russian "humanitarian" assistance can be as capricious as hurricane aid under a corrupt Republican governor or postwar reconstruction under an incompetent Republican president:

[W]ithin a few months of Russia’s recognition [of South Ossetia] ... people began to wonder when the billions of rubles of aid pledged by Russia would reach them. The answer seems to have been that much of it was stolen....

Russia’s federal audit chamber found that six months after the conflict, only $1.4 million had been spent on reconstruction out of a disbursement of $55 million in priority aid. By last year, the chamber estimated that $33 million had been lost or misused.

Next up, Russia's Crimea, which a Carnegie Moscow Center analyst says will be a daunting task--"reviving its economy, distributing money and influence among its ethnic groups, and trying to control the corruption that accompanies all big Russian projects"--while economists predict "a serious drag on Russia’s budget."

Please proceed, Vladimir.

 

Comments

[japa21]

I find it interesting that Sebastopol is a frequent stop for cruise lines and tourism is a major part of the economy in that region. I wonder if and to what degree that will be impacted by all of this.

I know that there are many cruises that include places like St. Petersburg on their itenerary, but I see that as very different.

So not only may it be hard for Russia, particularly considering its current economic crisis, to provide much aid to Crimea, they may lose a major source of income from the tourist trade.

[Peter G]

That's what I was thinking back when Putin "won" the Crimea. What did he win? Very little in natural resources, some decrepit military and naval bases that can be isolated with ease and must be supplied by sea and a restive population of Ukrainians and Tatars. Lord preserve me from such wins.

At least Hitler has a strategic goal in mind when he used the German ethnic minority as an excuse to appropriate the Sudetenland. That geography was Czechoslovakia's only line of military defense without which they were militarily helpless. This Putin victory looks more like the move of an Argentinian hunta vis-à-vis the Falkland Islands, a distraction from more serious concerns and an attempt to rally support for a shaky government.