'Frozen conflicts': Democracies decline to uphold their own values
The front lines in eastern Ukraine have moved very little in recent weeks as Russia-backed separatists and government forces hunker down for winter and a World War I-style impasse sets in.
Ukraine appears on its way to becoming the latest "frozen conflict," a case of territorial aggression loudly condemned by an outside world unwilling to intervene and change it.
A possession-is-nine-tenths-of-the-law mentality has often prevailed in the Kremlin since the breakup of the Soviet Union 23 years ago, with Russian troops controlling Moldova's Transnistria region since 1992 and propping up puppet governments established by pro-Russia separatists in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia for the last six years.
But resorting to conquest to achieve geopolitical objectives is hardly limited to the former Soviet sphere. Frozen conflicts abound worldwide, with some of the most intractable standoffs going back more than 60 years. The quest for sovereignty over Kashmir has been the catalyst for deadly conflict since the 1947 partition of British colonial India, and Koreans' failure to settle their 1950-53 superpower proxy war with a peace treaty keeps the books open on that dispute into its seventh decade.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-frozen-conflict-20150112-story.html#navtype=outfit
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