Putin’s big speech today was (very, very) light on honesty, and time is too short for now to list all the omissions and distortions, but, as a recital of the Kremlin’s public case (and as a hint of the real thinking behind it) it is nonetheless worth reading in full.

A few passages in particular caught my eye:

I understand why Ukrainian people wanted change. They have had enough of the authorities in power during the years of Ukraine’s independence. Presidents, prime ministers and parliamentarians changed, but their attitude to the country and its people remained the same. They milked the country, fought among themselves for power, assets and cash flows and did not care much about the ordinary people.

Yanukovych thrown under the troika?

There is, of course, the traditional deployment of the big lie:

Those who opposed the coup [the overthrow of the Yanukovych presidency] were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities. Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.

And then there’s Kosovo:

As it declared independence and decided to hold a referendum, the Supreme Council of Crimea referred to the United Nations Charter, which speaks of the right of nations to self-determination. Incidentally, I would like to remind you that when Ukraine seceded from the USSR it did exactly the same thing, almost word for word. Ukraine used this right, yet the residents of Crimea are denied it. Why is that? Moreover, the Crimean authorities referred to the well-known Kosovo precedent – a precedent our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities.

The decision to recognize the unilateral independence of Kosovo was a disaster waiting to happen. I’ll shamelessly quote myself quoting Lech Walesa in a Corner post on August 11, 2008. Walesa, I noted, had said this:

“Recognizing Kosovo will bring nothing but trouble. No one can be denied the right to self-determination, but only within the bounds of common sense. . . . With its irresponsible behaviour, [Kosovo is] causing new divisions in Europe and globally and undermining international relations.”

As I wrote the next day, the timing and the manner of the recognition of Kosovo gave Russia useful cover for what it was doing in Georgia/South Ossetia. We can argue about how good the comparison between Kosovo and South Ossetia then and Kosovo and Crimea now really are, but it is impossible to deny the extent to which the decision to extend that recognition gave Russia something to work with. And for what?

And, finally, crucially, Eurasia:

We understand what is happening; we understand that [the Orange Revolution and now Euromaidan] were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration.

“Against” Ukraine? Hardly, but what is true is that the Eurasian project continues to be central to what Putin is trying to do.

In an earlier post back in January, I posted a link to this article in the Globalist by Andreas Umland. This was the key section:

[The Moscow-led Customs Union] is one of the Kremlin’s various instruments to secure Putin’s authoritarian regime via the re-building of a new empire that covers a specifically “Eurasian” civilization – a unique pan-national culture between Asia and Europe. The Customs Union is to be followed, in 2015, by the even more integrated Eurasian Union.
The Customs Union effort is now the core of the Kremlin-promoted national dream about rebirthing Greater Russia as a self-sustaining pole in international politics. That project is designed to function as an effectual distraction of the Russian population from the many domestic failings of Putin’s regime. There have been few sustainable successes in the reform of Russia’s corrupt public administration, imbalanced social system and stagnating economy. The implementation of an ambitious geopolitical project is to provide the legitimacy for a continuation of Putin’s otherwise unremarkable rule.

As I am not the first to point out, the English-language transcript of Putin’s speech concludes with these words:

To be continued.