Russian president Vladimir Putin denied that the green-fatigued, insignia-free soldiers who popped up in the Crimea were Russian; they were only “local self-defense forces,” he said. After those “little green men,” as they quickly came to be known, had cut the Crimea off from mainland Ukraine, and the Crimea had been annexed to Russia, Putin bragged that “of course” there had been “Russian servicemen” in the Crimea. “They acted very appropriately,” he said; also “decisively and professionally.”
Putin’s little green men look like the inspiration for a new Chinese operation around Japan’s Senkaku Islands. Beijing claims the Senkakus — or the “Diaoyu Islands,” as they’re called in China — as an inseparable part of Chinese territory, in the same way they’ve claimed Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet, Taiwan, and all of the South China Sea. Pursuant to that claim, Beijing has begun prodding Japan with a Chinese fishing fleet; Bloomberg’s Eli Lake has already dubbed them the “little green boats.”
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