Just about the only good news out of Ukraine over the weekend was that a team of international observers sent there has been freed. They had been held hostage by the “green men” who’ve taken control of a strip of eastern Ukraine. They’re called green men because of their standard-issue Russian camo. They’re largely indistinguishable from regular Russian troops but, naturally, have no insignia. Although the whole world knows whose bidding they’re doing, just as they did before in occupied Georgia and Crimea. They even showed up in storied Odessa, the Ukrainians’ last major port on the Black Sea, where they caused all kinds of homicidal unrest.

It’s not yet clear who started a blazing inferno in the middle of Odessa, these thugs or the local ones who resisted them. And so this undeclared war continues to flame and sputter,spread by Vladimir Putin’s proxies in Ukraine-and who could be relieved any day now by Russian regulars. On the pretext that they’re needed to restore law and order in Ukraine. That’s the same law and order the Kremlin has subverted by instigating this de facto occupation of Ukrainian territory by Russian troops sans insignia.

But at least the green men have released the team of international observers they held for a week and put on display. Call the kidnappers the bad thugs. The role of good thug is being played by the Kremlin, which issued a statement on the observers’ release praising the hostage-takers for their “courage and humanism.”

Russian foreign policy continues to be an exercise in cynicism, whether in the old Cold War or the new one this new tsar has begun.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 05/06/2014