Thank you Victoria Nuland. You got your coup color revolution you wanted, and now the Russians are making noises about deploying nuclear weapons to the Crimea:

Russia has the right to deploy nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year, a Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday, adding he knew of no plans to do so.

“I don’t know if there are nuclear weapons there now. I don’t know about any plans, but in principle Russia can do it,” said Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of the ministry’s department on arms control, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Note that it’s about 1500 miles from Sevastopol to Birmingham is around 1500 miles, so if the Russians just stationed an SSBN there with its 6000+ mile range missiles, a launch could be made covering all of Europe on a depressed trajectory giving something around 5 minutes warning.

Of course, they could also just drive the mobile version of their Topol missile there as well.

Poking the bear with a stick is not a smart foreign policy move.

It really does not feel me with confidence that the US Government’s foreign and military policy establishment is filled with people who take hubris to this level.

This is nuclear weapons, not tiddly winks.