What kind of 'uplift' can happen in Crimean economy when almost all the money they got was from tourism? Russia can sink some money there but they'll cut it down when something other will happen. They even get like 80% of dirinking water from 'mainland' Ukraine iirc...
A massive inflow of Russian tourists can uplift the Crimea. You need hotels with swimming pools, golf and wellness areas, lots of booze, discos and sex workers. Oligarchs can be ordered for patriotic reasons to build a massive number of well endorsed hotels. The economy can cater to the Russian demands of tourism events that often lead to conflicts with Western European tourists in more established areas such as Egypt. Tourism in Crimea could be much higher, using a patriotic marketing of this ancient tourist area and Russian tourists spend a lot more money per capita than Western tourists. Russia is only a poor country in official statistics. They still have about 50% black market economy of tax evasive payments to employees. After tax deduction, their official and black pay are on par with German employees after their tax payment (that is much higher) as Russians tell me. The Russian state uses tarifs on natural resources exploited by state enterprises instead of unpopular tax collections from the population. During the Yeltsin era tax evasion and black market economy was even more extreme. Economic growth of Russia shows the legal and legalized market and economic transactions, not the real state of affairs. In some regions of Russia, such as the Caucasus, official figures and real figures merge, because of rampant poverty, but this is on the fringes of the empire.
Ukraine similarly suffers from a black market and is not as poor as the official statistics tell you, but neither on the same netto income per capita level as Russia or Germany. They have about 25-33% real per capita income (on par with Czechs and Poles that also send sex workers abroad).
The whole idea is to have trainers and advisors go in and help them. The Ukrain military actually performed well in its deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. They were never large (I believe at the peak they had 1,600 in Iraq) but they performed well just the same.
Dysfunctional not in the sense of not knowing which end of a gun to point at an enemy, but dysfunctional as an organization that needs secure information transmission lines to plan operations and organize effective resistance against armed incursions. The Ukraine-Russia conflict is not exactly a conflict between two nations, but has lots of traits of a civil war. Such a conflict is very information intense and Russia simply proved to totally own Ukraine in this regard.
Number 3 is about economic sanctions against Russia. That is simply asking Germany to cut off from one of their most important economic partners while the NSA stays in the country and performs espionage on the German government and economic espionage on the German companies. You can have Bush, Reagan or whatever Republican in the White House. Number 3 is immediate political suicide for any German head of state and Germany is the only country that counts for enacting number 3. Making Germany do number 3 has a very high price and the US proved unwilling to pay it in recent negotiations. For Germans this was a very clear message on how little perceived value their alliance has for the USA. What the current German government currently agrees on with the Obama administration in measures against Russia is the utmost the US can expect and enact under any president. Jeff, you have simply no idea how pissed off people in Germany were after the Snowden revelations.
Imagine Germany sets up eavesdropping centers in every major American city, claims to be your ally and uses this eavesdropping to gain economic advantages over US companies. How long would it take for the US to rally against these "allies" and kick them out of the country?
The German leadership steered through this crisis with utmost skill and preserved the US alliance, but enacting number 3 at US instigation is unthinkable. Every ilk of US president must realize that the price for NSA eavesdropping on Germany is impotence in capability to impose real sanctions on Russia due to German unwillingness for economic self-mutilation in an alliance that does not mean that much to the USA.
