The clock is ticking down for Ukraine

As Ukraine spirals downward towards another possible revolution, Donald Trump appears trapped on this most critical front of the comprehensive East-West standoff between the US-led global alliance system and Vladimir Putin's Russian-led Eurasian authoritarian axis.

Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.

So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.

As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.

Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.

The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.