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This has been a challenging week, especially for the United States and President Obama.  First, Secretary of State John Kerry spent the end of last week trying to negotiate with his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, but to no avail.

Then, on Sunday as widely expected, Crimea with its predominantly Russian speaking majority voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian federation. 

The west in retaliation to this ill-conceived power move by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who further escalated the conflict by annexing Crimea, placed sanctions on Russia.

In a speech the president gave Monday, “In recent months, as the citizens of Ukraine have made their voices heard, we have been guided by a fundamental principle — the future of Ukraine must be decided by the people of Ukraine.  That means Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected, and international law must be upheld.”

The president continued, “As authorized by the executive order I signed two weeks ago, we are imposing sanctions on specific individuals responsible for undermining the sovereignty, territorial integrity and government of Ukraine.  We’re making it clear that there are consequences for their actions.”

U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), reacted bitterly to the “timidity” of President Obama’s response to his implementations of a weak response by the United States.

“I don’t know when the president and his advisers are going to wake up to what Putin is really all about,” he added. “We’ve got to start with a fundamental reassessment of our relationship with him.”

Today Senator McCain released a press release stating the U.S. needs to provide greater support to Ukraine and at the same time impose additional cost to Russia in it flagrant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Some of the areas Senator McCain advocated would give economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and at the same time add additional punitive sanctions against Russia. The unfortunate aspect is he was just adding additional steps that went a bit further then the president, but nothing he advocated would deter Putin.

The one action which is worth perusing is when he stated the U.S. needs to, “Take steps to permit and enhance the exportation of U.S. oil and natural gas, especially to NATO allies and other European partners, in order to decrease Europe’s reliance on Russian supplies of energy.”

It’s worth noting that Edward Chow, senior fellow at the Energy and National Security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., Sarah Ladislaw, director of the Energy and National Security Program and Michelle Melton a research associate with the Energy and National Security Program wrote an article on this very subject.

They mentioned that energy is mutually dependent on both sides, with Ukraine heavily dependent on natural gas.  40 percent of Ukrainian energy consumption is natural gas, and 60 percent of domestically consumed natural gas is supplied by Russia.

They further reported the dependency is mutual; more than 90 percent of Russian gas exports go to Europe, as does about 80 percent of Russia’s crude oil exports (revenues from oil and gas exports make up more than 50 percent of the Russian budget).

If the U.S. and the west are serious at punishing Russia it would need to look seriously at this aspect and increase the United State considerable energy surplus in natural gas and other sources to Europe to offset their dependency on Russia.

At the same time the West needs to place significant pressure on Ukraine to enact serious market-orientated reforms, which would also include a transparent and open based energy sector.

The West has failed to understand how Putin thinks as he continuously remains undeterred by actions imposed on him by the west.

We will see how the crisis continues to unfold in the coming days.

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