Amazing nobody has yet produced a tape of that call.
Amazing too that none of the hundreds of journos who covered the mob scenes in Kiev have just packed up and gone home, leaving eastern Ukraine and Transnistria like veritable trees falling in the forest.
Lack of facts doesn't get in the way of screechy articles however:
50,000 troops on the frontier!
80,000 troops on the frontier!
40,000 troops! -- No wait! 88,000 on the frontier!
You have to wonder if cute Ukrainian pols are still playing east against west there.
A shot of sanity in the Canadian press
'Putin’s willingness to negotiate also suggested some confidence that he will be dealing with the West from a position of strength, having annexed Crimea and largely dispersed the remaining Ukrainian military units that had been holed up on bases awaiting instructions from Kiev. The Ukrainian government this week formally ordered a withdrawal of those forces.'
It may well be that Putin will be willing to 'compromise' -- keep Crimea, post observers in eastern Ukraine to keep Julia 'nuke 8 million Russian speakers' Tymoshenko and Friends honest, and guarantee that Transnistria will not be subject to illegal efforts at strangulation by Ukraine.
Compromise will be more difficult for Obama, who by his bellicosity has painted himself into a corner and now has several episodes under his belt where he has said to Putin 'take away the troops or else'. Despite the 'give 'em heck' 'tude, there are mutterings in the US that he has shown himself too weak. By contrast Putin, who is enjoying huge popularity in Russia, has been quoted as saying he is happy with what the Crimean events demonstrated as far as the Russian armed forces were concerned -- good morale, showing positive results of reforms, which may mean he believes he can emerge fairly unscathed with a compromise reached.
The call to Obama was also designed to make Russia look reasonable and eager to see stability return, which will play well in Brussels. The remarks about turmoil and the Ukrainian right wing and illegal blockading of Transnistria are for the benefit of the EU, which above all else wants stability, the right and nationalist forces opposed to the EU stamped out, and to keep the gas and oil flowing. So here we have an attempt to put a wedge between the EU and the US, and it was met with lawyerly weasleyness by Obama ['put it in writing'], who must mollify the warmongers at home.
CNN Money article -- and maybe Russia won't lose out even if Ukraine stiffs her on the now-cancelled loan deal that was trumped by promises of western taxpayers' money arriving in wheelbarrows.
Ukraine faces loan repayments on $145bn of dollar debt this year including a scheduled payment next week iirc of at least $1.5bn to Russia for gas delivered in 2013 and part of 2014. If Ukraine defaults on the gas debt in particular, I wonder is it possible that Crimea could be offset against the money, and possibly some other parts of the country too, to spare Tymoshenko the effort of going nuclear. Other creditors will no doubt be mulling the pound of flesh option or holding their sticky hands out for IMF and EU and American money.
Torygrah again:
'There will be no haircuts for creditors under the deal, unlike the EU-IMF formula in Greece and Cyprus. This amounts to a bail-out for Russian state banks [how ironic] and Western funds accused of propping up the previous regime and for vulture funds that bought Ukrainian debt cheaply for quick gain.
Tim Ash, from Standard Bank, said: “Ukraine has been the ultimate moral hazard play and it’s cavalier to expect taxpayers to cover this.” [But cover it we all will it seems.]
'Mr Ash said it has been obvious since 2011 that Ukraine was heading for the rocks, yet funds continued to snap up its bonds, betting that the country was “too big and geopolitically important to fail” and would always be bailed out in the end by Russia or the West.'
The big issue, and the reason for the troops on the Russian side of the border, is the US's stubborn idea that NATO must be expanded into eastern Europe despite the successful softer approach of EU economic embrace of eastern European countries and the westernising of political culture in former Soviet Socialist Republics that are now EU members. The reasoning behind the Marshall Plan has been forgotten by Washington, mainly because defence is such a profitable industry but only if the government is paying money for missile systems, etc. A big chunk of the American economy failed to rationalise in the wake of the demise of the USSR. If the Marshall Plan was supposed to work in the face of Stalin's Soviet Union then surely the approach where economies would gradually become strong and intertwined would work when Russia, the US and Europe are all committed to prosperity? The only proper conclusion to draw from Washington's expansionist ambition for NATO is really the one that Russia has drawn -- that the US wants to destroy and loot the Russian Federation and believes it to be weak enough to accomplish this.