The pattern is familiar. An insurrection breaks out in an unstable State, subject to indifferent government. It starts with street protests. The West back the protesters without taking account of the underlying fault lines of ethnicity, religious group, cultural variation and racial origin. It sees the mob as heroes because they make western sounding noises, failing to notice within their ranks people with whom they want nothing whatever to do. The recognised government falls and a new government comes to power without the authority to rule. The state collapses and chaos ensues. So far none of these failed states has emerged into the good times so we cannot tell if they ever can.
Those western politicians who joined the street protestors in Kiev have achieved the opposite of their intention. A new government without any legal mandate, beyond self appointment and acclamation by the crowds outside its parliament, is peopled with some pretty unsavoury types, some of whom are from the far right, who have openly declared that Hitler’s Germany is their ideal. One of the first things it does is to pass into law a declaration that Russian, spoken by nearly half the population and the only language of many if not most ethnic Russians in the east and south of the country, shall cease to be an official language, in what had been a bi-lingual state. Not surprisingly this scared the living daylights out of every single Ukrainian of Russian origin.
The West somehow supposed that President Putin would play tidily winks and ignore the mayhem and violence threatening not only the Russians in a country which was until recently an integral part of Russia itself, but substantial Russian naval and military assets in the Crimea. Unlike Russian foreign policy which studies all the options and possibilities and then plays its hand according to the principles of protection and containment, the West still sees diplomacy through the obsolete prism of a world long gone. Until it can upgrade its diplomatic thinking to match the technological revolution, it will blunder on from one crisis to another, without knowing how it got there or where it is headed.
Meanwhile Russia has consolidated its hold over the Crimea with the support of the local population, without so far firing a shot. Kiev blusters and mobilises but it is far from clear whether it actually controls or is recognised by its armed forces. There is little doubt that a good part of them could not be relied upon to take on the Russians if the Kiev government did something rash. The difficulty is that there is no authority now in Kiev whom the Russians in Ukraine would accept as a guarantor of their rights, culture and interests. For a long time yet they will look for that to Moscow. This is the outcome of overthrowing a government from the street rather than through the ballot box.