Buh bye G8.
The group formed in 1975 for the leaders of eight key industrialized countries is for now dead, and it doesn’t look as if it’ll be back very soon:
The European Union is set to impose further sanctions on Russia following its decision to annex Crimea as German Chancellor Angela Merkel today declared the G8 ‘is dead’.
EU leaders are set to meet in Brussels today to discuss how to deal with the developments in Crimea after Russian troops seized majority control of the peninsula.
In an address to the German Parliament in Berlin this morning, Merkel said the EU was readying further sanctions and that the G8 forum of leading economies has been suspended indefinitely.
Russia holds the presidency of the G8 and President Vladimir Putin was due to host his counterparts, including President Barack Obama, at a summit in Sochi in June.
But Merkel today declared the G8 will not meet again until the situation in Ukraine has been resolved.
Don’t hold your breath.
‘So long as there aren’t the political circumstances, like now, for an important format like the G8, then there is no G8,’ Merkel said. ‘Neither the summit, nor the format.’
Earlier this week, the EU and the United States slapped sanctions on certain individuals that were involved in what they say was the unlawful referendum in Crimea over joining Russia.
Moscow formally annexed Crimea earlier this week in the wake of the poll. The Black Sea peninsula had been part of Russia for centuries until 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine.
Russian forces effectively took control of Crimea some two weeks ago in the wake of the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, after months of protests and sporadic violence.
The crisis erupted late last year after Yanukovych backed out of an association deal with the EU in favor of a promised $15 billion bailout from Russia. That angered Ukrainians from pro-European central and western regions.
So several issue are atplay here. It’s a game of chicken in which Europe and the United States seem destined to get plucked.
And Putin is unlikely to back off due to THIS.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.