Even more Ruskis!

Well, that didn't take long:

Three Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and six injured by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, a top Kiev official said on Thursday.
Speaking at a press briefing the Ukrainian president’s spokesman on security, Alexander Motuzyaniyk, said rebels launched more than 500 mortar and over 300 artillery shells at government-held checkpoints on Thursday, local news agency Ukrainsky Novini reports.
"The last time we witnessed a similar intensity of fire using heavy armaments was a year ago," he added, referring to the flare up in the region last summer, which threatened to collapse the fragile ceasefire agreement in place since February 2015.

One supposes that Putin is trying to crave out a land bridge to Crimea. He's got a few months to do it. Who knows how President Trump would react. Readers will recall that we already discussed the measures President Bush took against Putin's invasion of Georgia in 2008, flying back a Georgian infantry brigade from Iraq, sending the U.S. navy to the Black Sea in a show of support, etc.

So Putin is securing the western flank.

He better, because Russia has long term problems. First, its demographics are alarming. In the last 25 years Russia has seen a steep population decline, a falling birthrate, and an aging population.  Your typical Russian is a chain smoking, vidka swilling 50-60 year old pining for the days of Brezhnev.

While the first decade of this century saw the dominance of Russia's Gazprom, that dominance is coming to an end thanks to Brazilian, American, and Israeli natural gas production. The Israelis are building a pipeline to Greece, opening up the European market to their massive Leviathan field.

Then there's China.

While Russia has been consolidating their western, China has been consolidating its eastern flank, most recently in the Spartleys in the South China Sea.  This effort  is aimed at the Pacific Rim and America, of course.

The author has always felt that China, once securing its Pacific bases, will stop short of war. Does it really want a conflict pitting it against Taiwan, South Korea and Japan backed by the United States. Is Taiwan worth all that? Why not just get rich selling stuff to the Americans instead.

Yes I know, similar arguments were made before 1914.

Now this is interesting:

Siberia – the Asian part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains – is immense. It takes up three-quarters of Russia’s land mass, the equivalent of the entire U.S. and India put together. It’s hard to imagine such a vast area changing hands. But like love, a border is real only if both sides believe in it. And on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, that belief is wavering.
The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the legacy of the Convention of Peking of 1860 and other unequal pacts between a strong, expanding Russia and a weakened China after the Second Opium War. (Other European powers similarly encroached upon China, but from the south. Hence the former British foothold in Hong Kong, for example.)
The 1.35 billion Chinese people south of the border outnumber Russia’s 144 million almost 10 to 1. The discrepancy is even starker for Siberia on its own, home to barely 38 million people, and especially the border area, where only 6 million Russians face over 90 million Chinese. With intermarriage, trade and investment across that border, Siberians have realized that, for better or for worse, Beijing is a lot closer than Moscow.

Read and quiver, Russians, because the Chinese are coming.