ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

but maybe there iwll be some sort of miracle transformation.

VS.

http://alumni.imsa.edu/~data/images/autographs/yankovic.jpg

Powell warned "there will be consequences" for the United States' relationship with Ukraine as a result of the developments in the former Soviet bloc nation.

Powell spoke shortly after election officials in Ukraine declared that Kremlin-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych won the election over opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko. The announcement raised fears of violence in Kiev, where tens of thousands of demonstrators have been demanding that the results be overturned.

orange is a wicked colour

argh i was reafing baout the ddrug they think was used on him, it is something with "chlor" in the name, and accelerates acne to a massive extent or something.

I mean, until they turn 30 and immediately turn super-dumpy

i really wanna go to kiev

2006?

There are no reports the death is linked to Mr Yanukovych's defeat by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko in Sunday's presidential poll re-run.

Yeah, right.

http://www.eyecandyforthebrokenhearted.com/ukraine.jpg

nice pics of timoshenko. whats with the c.17th thing? is this some ukrainian nationalism schtick? national dress a gogo?

A Stratfor note today:

---

Ukraine made a radical policy adjustment on Thursday by essentially ending its bid for NATO membership. The move, which would have been unthinkable as recently as a month ago, probably resulted from external forces, namely Russia. Ukraine’s abrupt departure from its long-standing bid indicates the ominous involvement of Moscow. In its effort to maintain its security buffer, Russia probably employed its FSB security services.

Economic tools can include fostering closer integration, raising or lowering barriers to trade, embargoing another country, threatening to undermine a country’s financial stability by mass sales of its currency, or by simply shelling out cash. In the case of Ukraine –- and by extension, Western Europe –- Russia frequently has employed natural gas cutoffs.

Political tools are varied, and focus on finding political weak spots for later manipulation. The options include promoting closer integration among citizens with a common heritage found in both of the countries in question. These ties can then be manipulated later. For example, one country can threaten to intervene in the other to protect an allied ethnic group from alleged discrimination. Russia could employ this tactic in relation to ethnic Russians living in Ukraine.

Military tools to influence another state’s behavior include the threat of invasion, conspicuously aiming weapons — anything from artillery to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)— at the other country, or providing military assistance to the government or the opposition groups in the other country. Russia’s Feb. 12 threat to aim ICBMs at foreign forces that might deploy in Ukraine falls in this category.

The 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s subsequent loss of influence in its near abroad and in the West laid the foundation for Russia’s current geopolitical trajectory. Russia’s resurgence under President Vladimir Putin has involved a strong effort to regain the influence, respect and national security it believes it is due. Moscow’s desire is especially keen given previous Russian humiliations — particularly those suffered by the government of the late Boris Yeltsin, when the West encroached on what Russia perceives as its prerogatives. Russia, however, lacks many of the tools the Soviet Union had at its disposal for compelling other countries’ behavior. This complicates Putin’s effort to satisfy the Russian geopolitical imperative of establishing hegemony in its near abroad.

The Russian resurgence took a potentially fatal hit over Kosovo’s Feb. 18 secession from Serbia. This was an issue of minor importance to the United States and most Western European countries, but a major threat to Russia’s effort to demonstrate its return to major power status. For Russia and Putin to survive the Kosovo insult, retribution elsewhere in the Russian near abroad was expected — namely in the Caucasus, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states.

Ukraine’s dramatic about-face on NATO comes in the context of Kosovar independence. Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko — who came to power in his country’s 2004 Orange Revolution — was clamoring as recently as a month ago for NATO membership, despite a lukewarm reception from the alliance. Rumor has it that Yushchenko’s sudden change at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels occurred after the Russian president literally ordered him to withdraw Ukraine’s NATO bid, probably reminding him of the aforementioned Russian economic leverage over Ukraine.

Putin likely did not rely on economic coercion alone, however, and we can assume the FSB helped change Ukraine’s mind on NATO. The FSB is quite good at pressuring individuals using threats, intimidation, enticements and even sophisticated assassinations. Yushchenko knows the capabilities of the secret service underworld well, having barely survived a poisoning while seeking office in 2004.

Russia and the FSB probably decided that bringing the existing Ukrainian leadership in line would be easier than introducing a new leadership, allowing Moscow to avoid the pitfalls of Ukrainian politics. Given the lukewarm reception to Ukraine’s membership bid, Kiev could simply have let its application fall by the wayside. Instead, it made an active policy reversal. Compelling Yushenko’s U-turn on Ukraine’s NATO bid thus represents a significant Russian achievement, one that others — particularly Georgia — will observe closely.

The willingness of right-wing analysts to suggest that personal threats by the FSB against the Ukrainian government were probably behind the policy change, while completely omitting to mention the saleient fact that Gazprom did in fact cut gas supplies to Ukraine beginning on Monday and only restored full flows on Thursday... well, you're smart guys I'm sure Stratfor, but don't pretend you have less of a policy agenda than Putin does.

I imagine anybody writing about Russia who doesn't themselves work for the Kremlin is likely to have on about fifteen tinfoil hats as regards the FSB/GRU apparatus, and with perfectly understandable reason

it has come to...trebuchets

http://rt.com/news/ukraine-clashes-kiev-molotov-907/

can someone with more geopolitical smarts explain what's happening to me?

the american MSM seems to painting this as a peaceful-freedom-fighters vs. entrenched-corrupt-government thing, but I get the feeling it's more complicated. for one thing reading the foreign press tells me that some ultra- right-wing groups (whose nationalist distaste for Russia apparently trumps reservations they might have about the EU) with a distinctly anti-Semitic bent (and some soft-right groups who have connections to the ultra-rightists) are taking an increasingly visible (and increasingly violent) role in the Kiev protests.

but you know, I don't really know anything about all this. so 'splain me.

some discussion here - Rolling European Politics Thread

maybe this will help: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anne-applebaum-ukrainian-smears-and-stereotypes/2014/02/20/450b8d62-9a72-11e3-b88d-f36c07223d88_story.html

the protesters are fascists trying to impose the EU on a country that doesn't want it

xpost

i think that washington post thing is a little pollyanna-ish (pollyanish?) about the nature of the protest movement(s), it's true.

but i honestly don't know what to read/who to believe.

I'll break it down as i see it.

Yanukovich indicated that he wanted to sign a provisional agreement with the EU to liberalise trade relations. He's not on good terms with Putin and Russia's decision to keep charging Ukraine high fees for gas (which is partly Ukraine's fault for reasons i won't go into) has wrecked the Ukrainian economy. He took the view that opening up Ukraine to the EU would have some short term difficulties (cheap EU products competing with domestic Ukrainian goods, etc) but it was worth it for the potential long term gains. The EU prevaricated over exactly what was on offer, didn't give a clear indication that full membership could be on the cards in the future and wasn't willing to provide financial assistance to help compensate for short-term hardship.

At the same time, Russia did what Russia always does. They said that if you don't want to have a special relationship (in this case preferring the EU over a post-Soviet trade agreement) then you can't expect special favours. Russia started imposing the kind of border checks on Ukrainian traffic into Russia that Poland always has on the other border and stopped giving Ukrainian companies preference on government contracts over Indian, Chinese, etc firms. Ukraine's eastern side is economically reliant on Russia and trade income went down by about 30% over the course of two or three months.

Ukraine also owes Russia a stack of cash for gas it hasn't paid for. The Ukrainian government was very close to defaulting until Russia offered to defer billions of dollars worth of loans in return for signing their trade agreement. Yanukovich didn't really have much of a choice other than accepting.

This went down very badly with a wide range of people, from EU-minded liberals to hardline neo-Fascists and ended up highlighting deep political, regional and ethnic splits in the country that go back decades. Bear in mind that Stalin was responsible for starving millions of Ukrainian peasants and Ukrainian nationalists later collaborated with the Nazis to murder hundreds of thousands of Russians and Jewish people. Western Ukraine remains strongly nationalist - both in the soft sense of wanting to make sure that the country is free of Russian control and in the less soft 'Mein Kampf displayed in bookshop windows' sense. The nationalists are not all violent right-wing extremists, as the Russian press would like to have it, but some of them certainly are. On the other hand, lots of the East of the country, and Crimea, retain a strong Russian identity.

There is no unified protest movement. Some are hardline nationalists, some are liberals, some want to be part of the EU, some want to be free of Russian control, some want to split the country in two, some want to unite it. There are a million positions in between each. The protests are also equally about the economy. Ukraine has been in a massive slump for several years, partly as a result of the oil situation, and people are sick of it.

They're also sick of corrupt, criminal politicians. Pretty much everyone who has held a political post in Ukraine since independence is a corrupt criminal, though, so Yanukovich is not unique in that regard. There's a chance that Klitchko might be different though which is why a lot of people are uniting behind him.

that's the sanest, most even thing i've read about the situation since i stopped listening to the BBC pretending to be impartial

I think that's about right, although the geographic split being talked about doesn't seem to be working out so much in reality -- my Ukrainian pals are all Russian-speaking Easterners, and are supporters of the protests. Yanukovich is also widely considered to be the worst of a bunch of idiots -- this is an "enough is enough" moment in many ways. There are neo-fascists in the protest movement, but I have seen no sources that are not Russian-friendly that suggest that they are the majority or growing, and there sure as hell are neo-fascists in Yanukovich's troops as well. There are agents provocateurs at work as well. For the people on the ground this is primarily and simply anti-government protest, but of course there is far more going on than just the people on the ground.

in the context you folks describe the way the west (esp. US) is dealing w/ this is kind of embarrassing.

we all know john mccain is an idiot, but appearing with some of the right-wing protest groups and calling for "freedom" was one of his more embarrassingly credulous photo ops.

what about those folks that briefly came into power after the "orange revolution"? my understanding was that they were both crooks _and_ victims of political show trials.

The elite political class in Ukraine is a disaster -- the lack of a central strong figure leading the protests is both a result of and a reaction to that.

Yes, Yushchenko (who was president) is a minor crook, his son is a fairly major one. Tymoshenko (who was Prime Minister) stole several billion dollars worth of gas from Russia while people on both sides of the border were dying in poverty. Her reinvention as a St Joan figure is laughable.

Yushchenko and Yanukovich were both PM under Leonid Kuchma, the journalist-murdering crim who was Ukraine's first independent President, so the idea of a major political difference between the two is somewhat overstated.

Ukraine is generally though of as more corrupt than Nigeria. All politicians are required to state their income on electoral forms. There was one election in the mid-2000s where every single candidate but one claimed that their only source of income was their government salary of £5,000 - £13,000. All had BMWs, plush Kyiv apartments and massive country dachas. The one candidate who didn't claim to be living off his stipend ran with the campaign tagline "i'm too rich to need to be corrupt!". He didn't win.

Much of Ukraine's economy is carved up between a small number of oligarch factions and they bankroll everything. Some are pro-Tymoshenko, some are pro-Yanukovich. Quite a few are in favour of EU membership as they think it'll stop future governments from trying to reclaim the money they've stolen, some are against it as they think it'll prevent them from stealing more.

The oligarchs tend to be worse than the politicians. Ukraine' richest man, Rinat Akhmetov (who's more famous as Chairman of Shakhtar Donetsk), for example, was a prominent member of the Donbass Mafia and acquired most of his wealth when his boss (and former Chairman of Shakhtar) died in a bomb attack at a football match.

Great posts ShariVari.

As with most protest movements there are elements you wouldn't want to embrace - during Greece's Syntagma Square occupation in 2011 the left occupied one end and the far right (much smaller) the other because they were both opposed to the ruling elite and the EU austerity package - but the neo-fascists don't seem to be the driving force here by any stretch.

I'm still shocked it's come to this. I reported a story in Kiev after the 2004 Maidan protests and was told "Psychologically speaking, the orange revolution was unique. The Ukrainian nation is very peaceful and calm. We don't like ups and downs. A lot of Ukrainians still don't believe that they all went out into the street." So much for that theory.

With Bangkok and Caracas kicking off as well, for different reasons, it's a scary time. Since the Arab Spring turned sour it's really hard to be optimistic.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/21/ukraine-president-says-deal-has-been-reached-opposition-bloodshed

Positive news, though it'll be a tough sell on the streets. Expect Yulia to be freed any day now.

posting w/o comment since I am still just learning here, but I saw this today:

http://boingboing.net/2014/02/21/i-am-a-ukrainian-powerful-vi.html

The Ukraine

to avoid getting depressed, maybe just embed parliamentary brawl clips

one of the more balanced pieces i've read on this: http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2014/02/ukraine-war-were-just-not-admitting-it-yet

Yes, that is much better than most.

There are unconfirmed rumours that Yanukovich has resigned.

Pro-Russia Kharkiv and Crimea have effectively said that they are implementing self-governance until constitutional order is restored and are highly unlikely to come back under Kyiv's control if they aren't satisfied with the make-up of the new government. Lviv is doing the same but from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Yanukovich hasn't resigned and has apparently claimed that a coup has taken place in Kyiv. The main square of Sevastopol is full of people demanding the Crimean Autonomous Republic breaks with Ukraine and rejoins the Russian Federation.

Y has fled the palace acc to the NYT

The parliament has apparantly fired Yanukovich, and elections will be held May 25th

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ukraines-president-open-to-early-vote-polish-leader-says-scores-reported-killed-in-clashes/2014/02/21/05d3de46-9a82-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html?hpid=z1

Thousands poured onto the grounds of presidential residence, 12 miles from downtown Kiev, to gawk at the manicured lawns, the golf course and the botanical gardens, while other government offices were shuttered amid reports that workers at the public prosecutor’s office were destroying documents.

Police had abandoned the center of Kiev to protesters who had commandeered water cannon trucks and claimed full control of the city.

that wapo article helps, but i'm still confused. has the country splintered into two soon-to-be-independent states, one in kiev (west)and kharkov (east), and if it's true, what factions would control each such territory?

so much happening so fast. this reporter is a good read on the subject.

Eric Margolis ‏@ericmargolis -- Yulia Tymoshenko jailed Ukraine leader freed. Will make triumphant entry into Kiev, maybe challenge protest leaders.

sorry; meant to say one in kiev (west) and one in kharkov (east).

The big nationalist power bases are Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. The nationalists now dominate the West and North, including defacto control of the capital. The pro Russian groups dominate the East (the economic heart of the country) and the south, including the whole of the Crimean peninsula.

so those controlling western ukraine are, largely, nationalists who are comfortable seeing "Mein Kampf displayed in bookshop windows." normally i'd think pro-russian groups would be especially anti-semetic.

scary times. your posts have been outstanding, sv.

The newly-installed interior minister declared that the police now stood with demonstrators they had fought for days, when central Kiev became a war zone with 77 people killed.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ukraine-protest-20140221,0,1284200.story

x-post to Sharivari-- so if one is not pro-Russian then one is a "nationalist"... ok I guess.

"Nationalist" doesn't mean far-right automatically, though there is some of that and the continued affection for Stepan Bandera even from some of the mainstream is troubling. It's more about prioritising a sense of Ukrainian national identity over a pan-Slavic one and a fairly strong hostility to Russian influence. Most people don't fit neatly into either category (I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Ukrainian independence in Maidan Nezhaleznosti with Ukrainian and Russian speakers) but to the extent that there is a clear split, that's how it breaks down.

i mean, yeah, party is "troubling" to use the word of the times

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_%28political_party%29

*this party

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Yanukovich estate pics are nuts.

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

― goole, Saturday, February 22, 2014 12:08 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

explained by hatred of russia

http://www.thenation.com/article/177421/letter-new-york-times

bears repeating that yulia tymoshenko is a total babe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsZIZKBqSaE

she is!

I have a Russian fb friend who has been going nuts about this for a while now & he calls the opposition Nazis and I'd been thinking he's off his rocker but the more I read about what's going on, the more I can see where he's coming from. friend claims that the opposition tried to assassinate Yanukovich but that the Western press has been suppressing this.

Between this and Venezuela (where I have a good friend in Caracas), I'm getting an impression throughout of 'no black/white sides here, total mess, watch and wait.'

this is a very vague thought, but in discussions of ukraine + venezuela (+ thailand, etc) i keep seeing writers making reference to the arab spring and i wonder if these things do exist in a continuum - that maybe they're all reverberations of the global economic downturn? it does seem like a pretty tumultuous time for a variety of seemingly unlinked governments + nationhoods.

I think that's probably right. From Iran and Egypt to Bosnia and Ukraine to Thailand, whatever ill feeling existed towards the government has almost certainly been intensified by increased economic hardship. People have more to complain about and less to lose.

http://libya360.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/syria-ukraine-and-venezuela-the-politics-of-protest/

We saw it in Syria and now we are witnessing it again in Ukraine and Venezuela; namely, using the politics of protest to engineer anti-democractic movements which seek to overthrow popular and/or elected governments in the name of democratic freedoms. And we aren’t merely talking about undemocratic groups here, but anti-democractic movements which are opposed in principle to democracy (takfiris and jihadis in Syria; right-wing fascists in Ukraine; reactionary neo-liberals in Venezuela). In all these cases, governments are being rebuked, pressured and sanctioned for exercising their constitutionally prescribed and universally recognized duty to maintain law and order and to protect national security, public safety and national unity. And as we witnessed in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring”, democracy and revolution are now redefined in the public imagination as any popular outpouring of anger irrespective of the nature of its demands, the medium through which it is expressed, or its intersection with the interests of global capital.

If Ukraine actually splits, will Georgia also?

Georgia has already split!

Oh ffs, I'm so out of touch

I mean I dunno, it looks as if whole chunks of post-Soviet states just don't want to be independent, want to be Russian still

(Abkhazia is now not part of georgia? Or was the pro-Russian part of Georgia called Ossettia?)

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.575732

there is a weird postponed momentum in the way that "nationalism", which was one of the key driving forces toward liberal, democratic Europe in the 19th century, is now continuing along its logical trajectory after a pause for the "bad" nationalisms of Nazism and Soviet expansionism, and yet is viewed thru the prism of those regimes whilst the original impetus towards free democratic nation states is being forgotten by western journos

incidentally fuck nationalism in its liberal forms too but the collective amnesia or ignorance of Euro history is piss-poor

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

― goole, Saturday, February 22, 2014 1:08 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

its pretty exclusively an eastern european thing

there is a weird postponed momentum in the way that "nationalism", which was one of the key driving forces toward liberal, democratic Europe in the 19th century

Examples?

Germany, Italy, France were formed as nation states in large part due to pressure from nationalist movements - these movements on the whole were progressive and liberal in 19th century terms

France is somewhat different to the other two in terms of geographic borders and pre-existing central government but still pretty much counts in terms of the country as it exists today

basically nationalism = good when it's liberating the great Platonic nation-state from its mean old oppressor but then it's bad when it turns out the Platonic nation-state is full of smaller thwarted nation-states full of people antagonistic to the country they end up in

well i guess theres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_a_Nation too

the end logic of nationalism is something a wee bit smaller than the city state basically

Was gonna say

yeah H4A there are always counter movements which are often explicitly totalitarian: Moseley, the Nazis that were actually effectual, Napoleon, Soviet expansionism etc

I find it p difficult to work out what to think about the nationalism of people with less money than me and who have a more traumatic political history

But now with all this mention of nationalism, how many of the protesters in Ukraine are actually full nationalists, as opposed to 'opponents of Russian influence'

who knows? i'm not thinking about why people react to oppression, i'm thinking about how that reaction gets represented within our media and how it gets subsumed into reactionary channels

history is full of ideas that serve a useful purpose right up until the point where they do the opposite

xp Oh yeah NV, wasn't meaning to contradict you there. I agree, 'nationalist' is often dropped in scare quotes by newsreaders etc as if, like you said, France, Germany and Italy were not products of nationalism themselves

ok and now i realise the question you was raising is the difference between "Ukrainianism" and "Russia gtf"

http://i.imgur.com/bdoyF5v.jpg

Gandhi was a nationalist who believed in a pluralistic, multi-cultural India free of British control. He was murdered by a completely different set of nationalists who didn't. I don't think the Scottish nationalists are seen as Scottish exceptionalists, they just want full self-determination. That's what I mean when I refer to nationalism in its broader sense in Ukraine. It's when nationalism turns to exclusionary nativism that you have the biggest problems.

Abkhazia is now not part of georgia? Or was the pro-Russian part of Georgia called Ossettia?)

The Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia are both independent of Georgia, in effect, but have very limited international recognition.

yeah i appreciate the complexities, i may have had a few cocktails yesterday evening. still i think my point broadly stands re: western hypocrisy

I think that you are probably right in a European context - in that the (generally leftist) view that the self-determining state could be more liberal than the superstructure of the EU has been on the wane for a long time.

It might be making a mild comeback in the era of austerity, though. The reaction to the EU threatening Switzerland with the exact kind of economic reprisals Russia holds over Ukraine went almost without comment in the liberal press but I get the sense that there is more sympathy towards the popular groups in Ireland, Spain, Greece, etc who reject the idea that national economic policy should be dictated from outside the country, as long as those groups don't explicitly code as right-wing.

there's the added complexity created by those who still view the EU as "Greater Germany" which the EU itself cd be doing a lot more to dispel

Good to know that Ukraine's new acting President is a guy dogged by persistent allegations, backed up by Wikileaks files, that he destroyed police records of collusion between Tymoshenko and Semiyon Mogilevich, long-term star of the FBI's Most Wanted list.

As a continuation of the debate regarding 'nationalism' then and now: I'm pretty tired of people saying The Arab Spring and other revolutions 'turned sour' as if they were thereby bad or pointless. France still celebrates Bastille-day, even though The French Revolution led to terror, massacres and then decades of repressive regimes. Europeans still think fondly of 1848 - well, if they ever think of it at all - even though it only really worked in Denmark, and led to counter-revolutions everywhere else. These things never work completely, there are always set-backs. However, they create opportunity for change, where before there was none. Sometimes the change is good, sometimes it really doesn't go anywhere. And sometimes, as in Syria, the change is quite clearly bad.

But the problem isn't 'revolution'. The problem is repressive regimes closing down every other avenue for change, until the uncertainty of a revolution seems like the only possible way forward.

Yes, I think that's true.

Back to Ukraine and the government has officially voted to de-list Russian and Crimean Tatar as national languages. It almost looks like they're trying to promote a split.

Good to know that Ukraine's new acting President is a guy dogged by persistent allegations, backed up by Wikileaks files, that he destroyed police records of collusion between Tymoshenko and Semiyon Mogilevich, long-term star of the FBI's Most Wanted list.

― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:01 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ouch. is there anyone of the political class in ukraine that isn't a criminal? i guess that explains the appeal of klitschko (sp?).

But the problem isn't 'revolution'. The problem is repressive regimes closing down every other avenue for change, until the uncertainty of a revolution seems like the only possible way forward.

i'm not sure that really matters, even in the long run. modern "revolutions" have as much or more carnage to their names as old-school monarchies/autocratic regimes. basically, i'm not much of a believer in political "progress" in a world-historical sense.

but of course it's the autocrats and despots who create the conditions that make revolution not just attractive but inevitable. so it's not like i'm blaming revolutionists per se.

http://i.imgur.com/mCdqJvr.jpg

i went to NYT.com this morning and the front page story was about Russia conducting military drills on the Ukraine border - and then all the columns switched to cyrillic and i was like wtf and then the entire screen dissolved and it turned out to be an ad for The Americans which is some bizarre synchronicity w/ reality there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25910834

Great, the acting Chief Prosecutor is from Svoboda, the neo-Fascist party. Fair trials all round.

i went to NYT.com this morning and the front page story was about Russia conducting military drills on the Ukraine border - and then all the columns switched to cyrillic and i was like wtf and then the entire screen dissolved and it turned out to be an ad for The Americans which is some bizarre synchronicity w/ reality there.

― Mordy , Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:05 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same thing happened to me.

also all of the people profiled in that last link sound like total assholes. ukraine is fucked.

Yep, the country really needs a popular, grass roots people's movement to provide left-leaning balance. At present the choice is between three unscrupulous neo-liberal parties indebted to oligarchs, a bunch of Nazis or the aging communist rump.

Like 2004, this would seem to be a perfect time for that kind of movement to develop. People are sick of corruption, sick of oligarchs, sick of the IMF, sick of inflation, sick of dodgy banks, etc, but the vested interests, as in 2004, are incredibly adept at stifling or hijacking genuine popular sentiment for change.

would the demands by the IMF/EU break up the oligarch's grip on the economy?

The IMF wouldn't - Tymoshenko and Yanukovich have both been enthusiastic adherents to IMF and World Bank programmes in the past. The IMF has never seemed to have much of an issue with oligarchs anywhere in Eastern Europe. I assume they are considered preferable to nationalised industry.

I think the EU would probably make it marginally harder for oligarchs to extend their power but it would also make it harder for Ukraine to follow Russia in reclaiming industries from the oligarchs, should it want to. For all the noble talk, the EU doesn't seem to have done much about endemic corruption in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria or Ireland. It could possibly provide a framework for small export / service oriented businesses to grow but it's tough to see that being an effective counterbalance to big business in the near future.

the recent events just seem like the legislature and other powerful figures jettisoning a liability (yanukovitch) rather than any genuine political change.

xxpost i guess

pretty interesting piece here: http://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/ukraine-1-yanukovichs-end-is-a-beginning/

What a mess.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/?insrc=hpss

Read that the other day and thought it was one of the worst pieces I've come across so far. Really disappointing from the NYRB.

Why do you think it is the "worst"? Specifics please?

ShariVari mistakes the political parties with any hope for power under non-revolutionary circumstances with the nature of the protests (revolution) itself, and that's why he hates that article. He's wrong.

A good friend of mine is reporting Tituschski stopping busses and robbing the passengers in Zaporizhia (in the South East). They have some sort of power, but not by the will of the people.

The article makes grand sweeping statements about groups with a complex set of aims and objectives. It also completely ignores the main reasons so many of the protesters are out on the streets - endemic corruption across all political parties and the economic mismanagement that has gone with it. There is no economic analysis at all.

Saying that 'the protests represent every group of Ukrainian citizens' is clearly nonsense. There may be representatives of all groups of Ukrainian citizens but that is not quite the same thing. Most Ukrainians have not taken part in the protests and many are opposed to them.

Equally, saying 'Jewish leaders have made a point of supporting the protests' is misleading. Some have, so say 'some Jewish leaders'.

The etymological description of the term 'maidan' is extremely dubious. It's the primary Ukrainian word for "square" and carries the same set of meanings as "square" and the Russian "ploschad" - a public space, a gathering point, etc. The fact that Russian speakers refer to Maidan Nezhaleznosti as such is no more surprising than the fact that French speakers don't usually call the big clock tower in London 'grande Ben'. It's a Kyiv landmark and that is its name.

The description of the changes to constitutional powers, awful as they were, is completely hyperbolic, as is the suggestion that they were intended to turn Ukraine into a 'dictatorship'. If the 'dictatorship' laws were based on Russian models, they weren't dictatorship laws.

The comparison between an EU where every member is a equal partner (lol) with the Eurasian Union is ludicrous. Most Ukrainians i've spoken to are in favour of the EU but don't think it's a magic bullet that will miraculously cure the country's ills. There's no mention of the millions of Ukrainians whose jobs depend on close ties to Russia and Belarus and who actively want a closer partnership.

The line "it is the Ukrainian regime rather than its opponents that resorts to anti-semitism" is head-spinningly stupid when one of its main opponents, a party that got 10% of the vote and has been in the vanguard of the Maidan protests is as avowedly anti-Jewish as Svoboda. They were called, until relatively recently, the 'Social National' party ffs! They might only make up a small percentage of the whole national protest but they're not imaginary. It's another example of trying to shoehorn a complex set of competing movements into one homogeneous group.

The suggestion that the Eurasian Union is presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy is bunk. Dugin is a fairly marginal figure who has vacillated between the far-left and the far-right. Putin does have some very unpleasant people working alongside him (including Glazyev and Kiselyov) but the whole section is tainted with transparent cold-war paranoia.

Conflating the authoritarianism and brutality of Berkut and Yanukovich with fascism is wrong. They are murderers clinging on to their own personal influence but fascism means more than that. If you want to bring the historical perspective into it, maybe expand a little on why the Jews suffered so badly in Ukraine - it was partly thanks to a man hailed as a hero by many Ukrainian nationalists today.

This could have been written at any point in the last ten years. It makes no attempt to understand or engage with the protest, or its root causes, other than to use it as a vehicle for a questionable ideological attack on Putin - a man with a mutual loathing for Yanukovich.

SV otm, piece is total garbage. Obviously saying that all of the protesters are fascists is false, but otoh the NYRB piece (as well as other UK+US sources, until recently at least) deliberately tries to diminish the role of the far right and openly racist groups. Also, his account of WWII is filled with rather gross misrepresentations.

so is ukraine about be become another yugoslavia? it sure looks that way. hard not to despair.

i feel particularly bad for the crimean tartars right now.

a minority w/in a minority

Cue SV saying the aggressive Russian invasion of the Crimea is a defense of the genuine will of the people.

The situation wrt the 'invasion' doesn't seem particularly clear at the moment. Russia leases parts of Crimea / the Black Sea from Ukraine so will always have troops in the area but taking control of local airports would be a huge provocation. There's no confirmation of whether the the people who apparently have them are Russian Russians or Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Either way, it's not particularly positive.

Most accurate Yugoslavia comparison might be Slovenia, but it's hard to tell. Difficult to see many Western Ukrainians wanting military action to reclaim it if the referendum went in favour of separation. Losing Crimea would mean a permanent Tymoshenko-leaning political majority in the rest of the country as things stand. Their fear might be that the economically productive East might go with it.

"Referendum".

Don't most of the gas pipelines between Russia and Europe go through Ukraine? I would have thought that alone would be enough incentive for the rest of the region to prevent a Yugoslavian-style collapse.

Most accurate Yugoslavia comparison might be Slovenia, but it's hard to tell. Difficult to see many Western Ukrainians wanting military action to reclaim it if the referendum went in favour of separation. Losing Crimea would mean a permanent Tymoshenko-leaning political majority in the rest of the country as things stand. Their fear might be that the economically productive East might go with it.

― Yuri Bashment (ShariVari), Friday, February 28, 2014 4:55 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, it's likely not a fear of losing crimea as such, but once one part of the country is allowed to "go" like that, what's to keep the rest together? see also: yugoslavia.

i don't mean to be cap'n pessimist on here, i do hope things work out without force, but i just feel like we've been down this road before...

Wait, so is the airport occupied now, or are there just armed unaffiliated men hanging about?

And what is England/Europe/the EU saying about this stuff? Doesn't it affect them directly more than the US (oil and all)? Is the fact that I keep hearing US blather about this related strictly to me being in the US?

Another also: what is the current readiness of the Russian army? I know they have manpower and firepower, but are they in tip-top condition to get bogged down in a border war? Russian strategy post USSR mostly seems be killing everyone willy-nilly.

And what is England/Europe/the EU saying about this stuff?

Excuse me, England?

What they saying about it in the Confederacy?

It looks almost certain that the armed men are not Russian troops. Ukraine's interior minister has claimed that the men are "under the control of the Kremlin" but suggestions that they're actually Russian soldiers have dissipated. They do look fairly well equipped so it's possible they're Ukrainian soldiers from Crimea but nobody seems clear.

Russia could roll into Crimea with five minute's notice, the entire Black Sea fleet is anchored off-shore, and they would have no problem defending the peninsula if it came to a war with Ukrainian troops, but i honestly can't seen any circumstances in which that would happen at the moment. It would wreck relations with the EU and Russia can generally get what it wants via other means. Russia would probably intervene 'on humanitarian grounds' if Ukraine tried to recapture Crimea by force at some point in the future, but again, that doesn't seem very likely.

Irrespective of how close to the EU it gets, Ukraine still needs a cordial relationship with Russia and, when things have settled down, Tymoshenko is likely to try to rebuild one.

The EU seems to be focusing on getting Russia to calm the situation down but i haven't seen much taking a firm position on Crimea.

"...suggestions that they're actually Russian soldiers have dissipated"

Who the fuck are you, really? And beyond denials-that were-kinda-not-denials from Putin and a spokesman for the Black Sea fleet (“Given the unstable situation around the Black Sea Fleet bases in the Crimea, and the places where our service members live with their families, security has been stepped by the Black Sea Fleet’s anti-terror units.”) what are you talking about here?

How would you compare Russia's relationship to Crimea w/ its relationship to South Ossetia? xp

or 'this one time in college i read a book'

The Ukrainian government is still calling this an 'occupation' but has largely stopped claiming that they are Russian troops, as far as i can tell. The difference between troops loyal to Russia ("controlled from the Kremlin" or otherwise) and actual serving Russian soldiers is fairly important.

Russia has said that it has increased troop activity in the area - euphemistically called "anti-terrorist" security efforts, which is where the port-access blockade allegations come in, but hasn't claimed responsibility for taking the airports.

South Ossetia is what i was thinking of when i said that Russia might intervene if there was an attack but probably wouldn't make the first military move. The situation isn't quite the same yet, though. Crimea, although, an autonomous Republic, is officially recognised by Russia as part of Ukraine at the moment but South Ossetia is mostly viewed as an independent territory.

And I don't think he's misinterpreting something I said or confusing me with someone else; he's just making shit up.

x.post http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-troops-take-over-airports-in-crimea/2014/02/28/659fbec0-a082-11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html

SV OTM (not going to check this thread again for a while if 'unpleasantness' continues)

Post story indicates journalists have been threatened for approaching, has one of the uniformed men calling himself a member of the Black Sea Fleet, describes a Russian officer approaching the uniformed men, who acted as if he were in command.

xpost

Yeah, SV I always appreciate your clarity and contributions to threads like this.

Credit where credit is due: SV writes very clearly and puts a lot of thought into what he says here, but he appears to me to have an agenda and the constant "otm"s bug me.

It doesn't look like SV is parroting the Russian line here at all, wtf?

I didn't say the Kremlin line or the Putin line -- I said the moderate Russian line.

I might be reading that wrong but it looks like the Post is referring to the men at the airport as "mysterious", not as Russian troops. The Black Sea Fleet guys are part of a separate incident in Balaklava. The officer at the airport is described as "appearing Russian" so presumably not in uniform.

The Ukrainian security minister has repeatedly said that the airport guys are "controlled" or "commanded" by Moscow but not that they are Russian soldiers.

I have no great agenda. I love Ukraine, i love Russia. My sympathies are with the people of both countries and i have little time for their leaders or political structures. They're all a bunch of criminals. Bad reporting and hyperbole about the stuff they get up to makes it harder to critique their crimes with any clarity.

I'm not a huge fan of the people of Ukraine, tbph. It's hard for me to separate out the country's historical right-wing violence against minorities from the current situation.

really?

Well, my family lived in Ukraine before they immigrated to North America so you can probably draw your own conclusions there.

yes i can

That's where many of my family came from too, but like a hundred years ago. Its hard for me to hold a grudge that long.especially since a lot of the blame falls on the czars.

"the cossacks work for the czar" as they say

x-post: I think the Post is not making the judgement, but is leaning toward their being soldiers, contrasting them in appearance, behavior, and armament to pro-Russian local militias. They are in uniform, according to the article, but in a uniform without insignia.

it's my understanding that most of that violence was committed by Ukrainian civilians against their neighbors, and moreover from speaking to Jewish family I still have in Ukraine (very, very, very little, understandably - my family's historical town as far as I've been able to research has been totally obliterated) it has never gone away. cf http://www.chabad.org/blogs/blog_cdo/aid/2502442/jewish/Chabad-Center-in-Ukraine-Firebombed-Amid-Ongoing-Violence.htm and http://gawker.com/are-ukraines-jews-screwed-1532453920

I have a similarly vexed relationship with Poland because of the way my Jewish relatives were treated before, during and after the war. Not that I hold it against any of the Poles I've met.

Ha, my wife just the other day told me about a radio story she heard talking about dwindling anti-Semitism in Poland, and I was immediately pretty much, yeah, no way in hell is that happening. Indeed, there was a study just last year or so that showed a drop of, like, 2%, from 65% to 63% or something, of firmly held anti-Semitic beliefs along the lines of blood libel, using Christian blood in ceremonies, etc. And this in a country that went from 3 million Jews to less than 10,000, currently. One theory is that anti-Semitism is so ingrained that people don't even think of it as anti-Semitism. Doesn't stop them from defacing Jewish cemeteries, though.

(Definitely belongs in the anti-Semitism thread, sorry. I'll repost there)

my wife's family left the Ukraine for the US in the 1980s. They've recently stopped shopping at the Russian markets because the more recent non-Jewish Ukrainian immigrants there are always making anti-Semitic comments.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-02-28-riabchuk-en.html

huge fan of the people of Ukraine here, got all their stuff

three word userkraine

Ukraine has started to get a lot of Jewish tourists now - mostly organised tours to pilgrimage sites around Cherkassy / Uman but lots to Odessa too. Not sure about Lviv but it would be a shame if it didn't, given how strongly associated the city is with Jewish history.

I have glibly remarked in the past that I would not visit anywhere in Europe east of Italy but I'd love to go to Odessa one day y bc Babelstan.

You should! It's a great city and very chill. Possibly because it has always had such an international outlook it's one of the most laid back, friendly places I have ever been. I do not think you should have any problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TVyPiHVZ1A&feature=youtu.be

I have glibly remarked in the past that I would not visit anywhere in Europe east of Italy

this is ridiculous

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10668357/Russia-admits-that-it-has-moved-troops-in-Ukraine.html

u're right. i'd also visit finland. xp

I was in Russia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary right after the wall came down, I never ran into any anti-semitism. which is not to say it doesn't exist, and is not to say that I was advertising my Jewishness in any particular way that would have invited it, but there are plenty of great places/people in that area of the world, not visiting them because of historically shitty things that have happened seems I dunno sort of small-minded.

xxxp

not visiting them because of historically shitty things that have happened seems I dunno sort of small-minded.

really? this isn't like ancient history. it's current and very recent history.

would you find it small-minded if a black person said they would never visit the states of the confederacy?

anyway, i said glibly bc obv i didn't mean it w/ any seriousness. that said, i've never visited any of those countries (i almost went to kosavo a couple years ago for a conference but it didn't work out). if someone bought me a plane ticket to Krakow tho i wouldn't refuse it.

http://www.jta.org/2014/02/28/news-opinion/world/in-kiev-an-israeli-militia-commander-fights-in-the-streets-and-saves-lives

^ this is amazing

would you find it small-minded if a black person said they would never visit the states of the confederacy?

― Mordy , 28. februar 2014 21:24 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think this is the same, when you imply that you would go to Italy? Also, what about the countries to the north?

let's say my statement applies specifically to the following countries:
Germany, Austria, Czech, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia

Well, then that makes it more the same. And I can definitely understand that.

i heard obama is speaking at 4:45 about ukraine sitch

https://twitter.com/edwardlucas/status/439499082617597953

http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-explainer-budapest-memorandum/25280502.html

obama speaking now - "the Ukrainian people deserve the opportunity to determine their future"

obv US is not going to do shit to stop any potential annexation (assuming that's what is going on here) - just happy obama didn't make any unenforceable red lines during his speech

so is the us going to war with russia over this or what

no way

A boykot? Apparantly the Russian economy is pretty close to a shambles, and spring is here, so who needs Russian gas anyway.

Though to be honest, if someone put me on the spot, I'd be hard pressed to answer why the people of Crimea shouldn't be allowed to hold a referendum on their future status. If it was a free and fair referendum, obviously, which there's no chance it would be.

been refusing to visit spain ever since the spanish inquisition

I would assume that there would have to be some kind of international monitoring of the national general election in May for it to be taken remotely seriously. If the separatists have any sense they wouldn't impede the work of the international monitors in Crimea, but who knows if they do? The referendum could genuinely go either way.

maybe crimea will consider itself de facto part of russia and not participate in the elections. the rest of ukraine will get to join the eu.

Aiui, what is on the table would be more autonomy (which could let the Crimean parliament move for full separation afterwards) rather than a straight switch to Russia so I would be surprised if any big decisions like that were made prior to May.

It's worth remembering that Crimea has had more autonomy in the recent past than it does now, while still being part of Ukraine. It used to have a President, until Kuchma abolished the post, and elected mayors until they started voting in separatists and Kyiv abolished that too and imposed mayors on them. This is part of a long game that has been going on since 1992 and compromise positions have been reached in the past.

http://blogs.rj.org/blog/2014/02/28/reform-synagogue-attacked-in-simferopol-ukraine/

If the Russians go whole hog on armed intervention in the Ukraine, then the Ukrainians won't get much help from the west, apart from angry talk and a lot of tut-tutting. Putin prob knows this, too.

The "Putin is a reasonable guy"/"TWU is dumb and worse than Hitler" crew are real quiet this morning...

Upper house of Russian Parliament approves the use of troops in Ukraine. Huh.

I'm not sure anyone has claimed that Putin is particularly reasonable. He is usually rational in going about his objectives, though - whether we agree with them or not.

Russian troops are currently "guarding" some Crimean government buildings, using some unverified (and possibly spurious) claims that armed men tried to take the Interior Ministry last night as justification. The Parliament decision might be providing extra legal cover for that but it would also permit much wider action "if Russian lives are threatened", which they aren't being at the moment - similar to the Ossetia situation. It looks like unhelpful sabre rattling rather than a declaration of war but it's a pretty clear threat that Russia would respond if Ukraine tried to move in on Crimea (which, again, it probably wouldn't).

Would be very worrying if Russian troops started turning up in other parts of the country like Donetsk, though.

The more significant news is that the Crimean Parliament has apparently voted to move the referendum forward to the end of this month which leaves Kyiv with much less time to come to a negotiated agreement that would avoid it.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=287_1393605865

NY Times headline
Action Flouts U.S. Warning to Respect Ukraine’s Borders
By ALISON SMALE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN 32 minutes ago
As Russian armed forces effectively seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula on Saturday, the Russian Parliament granted President Vladimir V. Putin the authority he sought to use military force in response to the deepening instability in Ukraine

Washington Post:
Crimea’s pro-Russia leader claims control of the region’s military and police, saying soldiers from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet are guarding official buildings and that his government was coordinating directly with them.

There's so much happening so quickly, but isn't it debatable, invasion or no, that Russia's military presence may be more stabilizing than not? At least in the short term. That is, Ukraine appeared on the cusp of total chaos *before* Russia moved in, so short of massing on the border to keep refugees from spilling out, which would have caused more than its own share of problems, Russia moved in to fill the power vacuum. Curious how this all plays out now. Occupation in the name of stability is an all too common gambit.

Russia has long considered having access to an ocean port in warm waters for their navy as a paramount strategic goal. Odessa and the Crimea are about the best they're ever going to get, so if they can secure it as non-contiguous part of the Russian federation, they will go to great lengths to accomplish that.

Sevastopol is already Russia's warm water port. The questions would be whether a nationalist government might break the agreement in place to lease areas to Russia (which I think would be unlikely) and whether in the short term any outbreak of civil war would threaten their ability to operate there (which again is possible but not necessarily likely). It might not be the primary reason for intervening but having a friendly Crimean government letting them use it without question in perpetuity would be a consideration.

I'm not sure that Russia's actions have necessarily stabilised the country as a whole. Their presence is probably enough to stop Kyiv from taking Crimea back by force but that may never have happened. It has probably exacerbated tension outside of Crimea.

gosh i wonder what john mccain will say on the sunday morning shows

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2008/10/22/russia_might_invade_ukraine_if_obama_wins_palin_warns

the whole "protecting russian-speakers from abuse" line (also used in georgia war IIRC) is such bullshit. does anyone believe the russians in crimea were under any threat?

i don't even know why I'm parsing this, it's a pretty thin rationale for standard imperialist behavior.

this is all so worrisome. i now read people "hoping" for the sort of very limited conflict we saw in georgia, but georgia was much more stable—they had a sitting president whose authority (at least outside of the contested territories) wasn't much in question, etc. this could really become chaos.

I wouldn't call it standard imperialist behaviour, as such. Seen from the perspective of a lot of Crimeans the events of the last few weeks are going to be pretty worrying. The president 85% of them voted for was forced out of office with threats of violence, on their first full day in power the new government (not recognised by Crimea) downgraded the languages 90% + of the people speak to unofficial status, fascists were given significant official posts, armed men (many linked to the far right) occupied buildings, Pravy Sektor has called on Chechen terrorists to up attacks on civilians in Russia, etc. That's a very partial and arguably slanted view of what has gone on but these are concerns that are widely and genuinely held.

The idea of Ukrainian "terrorists" taking over Crimea is fanciful but some people, including the current Crimean government, are clearly in favour of the security Russian troops provide. It's more complicated than an old fashioned land grab.

I should stress that I don't think it's "a good thing". It wasn't necessary and probably divides Ukrainians and Russians in the rest of the country even more at a time when reconciliation is crucial.

wow palin otm

http://rt.com/news/ukraine-donetsk-protests-referendum-383/

Donetsk City Council has called for a referendum and has clarified that it doesn't currently recognise the government in Kyiv. It has also restored Russian as an official language alongside Ukrainian.

The Kyiv chief prosecutor (from Svoboda) has said that any groups holding referenda will be "severely punished".

wow palin otm

― Mordy , Saturday, March 1, 2014

(a) right about what?
(b) even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2008/10/22/russia_might_invade_ukraine_if_obama_wins_palin_warns

― balls, Saturday, March 1, 2014 3:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

not only was she right about russia invading ukraine, but i agree that a lot of it (tho probably not everything - russia didn't hesitate invading georgia even w/ meathead warking bush in office) is attributable to obama's foreign policies over the last few years

which of obama's foreign policy choices led to russia invading ukraine?

i think it's likely that w/out the evidence of syria's red line, reconciliation w/ iran, deferment to putin in the former and partially the latter, the lack of antagonism re russian social policies esp wrt the recent olympics, in general policies of hands-off non-intervention, may have convinced putin that obama would be very hesitant to defend the budapest memorandum. obv it's not even close to being entirely obama's fault (for one he is expressing the post-Iraq sentiments of the majority of Americans, for two, like i mentioned, having Bush in office didn't stop the Georgian invasion), but i don't think it's controversial to state that obama has squandered some believability when it comes to US deterrent. maybe all for the best in the end. russia entered georgia on august 8th and left by the 22nd. it seems unlikely at this point that russia will leave crimea in a similar timeframe.

one thing i noticed during obama's speech yesterday is that he really didn't threaten russia w/ anything. not military action (okay, bush took military action off the table for georgia) but not even trade agreements, partnerships, etc (which iirc gates threatened pretty early on in the georgia campaign). he was basically like "ukraine deserves to determine their own fate, russia it won't be great if you stay" and that was that. idk. it seems of a piece w/ his general policies imho.

I'm not sure any US President would have enough weight to shift Russia's thinking. Military action is not a credible threat and iirc Russia exports less to the US than it does to Poland. EU would have more muscle but needs gas / coal.

Yeah, Obama could do absolutely nothing. Bush wrecked the foreign policy for decades to come.

and, it seems to me from mordy's comment, that the kinds of things obama arguably could have done to scare russia away from its ukraine intervention -- e.g., a u.s. strike on syria; increasingly hostile posturing, and possibly a u.s. strike on, iran -- could have been disastrous episodes for the u.s.

at the very least re syria he shouldn't have made a red line that he wasn't prepared to back up

like it's one thing to not threaten at all and so much worse to threaten and then not follow up on the threat

that part's fair.

yeah there's nothing obama can do. i agree that he shouldn't have made threats.

The Kyiv chief prosecutor (from Svoboda) has said that any groups holding referenda will be "severely punished".

he's the neo-nazi one, right? that's charming.

yeah, you're right that russians in the east have some legitimate reasons to fear, or at least not to recognize, the new government, such as it is. i highly doubt any of the big words coming from kyiv would amount to much in the end, though, even w/o russian invasion.

The irony is that if Russia were at peak Cold War powers, the US would probably have more power to persuade, and likely be forced to intervene. But because Russia is nowhere near at peak power, and because Russia these days has little direct bearing on US policy, despite being more "powerful" the US is almost forced to take a sideline stance.

That said, I'm not even going to bother reading an opinion, any opinion, from Palin. She's an idiot who has proven her worthlessness so many times over that an opinion from her likely ratifies the opposite as the valid opinion. See also: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton ...

this seems so oversimplified and pollyannaish that it defies belief: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nyrblog+%28NYRblog%29

the author seems to think that "propaganda" is wholly the product of one "side" of this conflict.

we've seen similar articles about the arab spring - it's inevitable that revolutions, esp in infancy, will always seem more romantic and charming than they later turn out.

he does get at some of the complications in the latter half of the article, but i think he is naive in thinking that the character of the "transitional government" is fundamentally liberal and multicultural—some of the actions taken by kyiv in the preceding days suggest otherwise. none of this of course justifies Putin's invasion of opportunity.

Sunday, March 2, 2014 in WASHINGTON, DC, MEETING AT NOON WITH FRIENDS TO DEMAND "RUSSIA - GO HOME" AND #stoprussianoccupation of #Ukraine. Dupont Circle
PLEASE JOIN US!!!!

Facebook message I received

rubio: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/8-things-obama-must-do-about-ukraine-104128.html#.UxLAHtxRhO5

"Fifth, the U.S. and our allies should put forward a condemnatory resolution in the United Nations Security Council. A Russian or Chinese veto would make clear to the world the hypocrisy of these governments, since they say they oppose foreign intervention into the affairs of sovereign countries—unless of course they are the ones intervening."

THAT'LL SHOW EM

rubio's 8 things obama must do about ukraine are lame.

rush's 8 things obama must do about ukraine are bold.

• resign;
• resign;
• resign;
• resign;
• resign;
• resign;
• apologize and resign;
• resign in disgrace;

http://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukraine-revolution-groups-with-us-government-documents-show/

i think i just got my brain into a knot

greenwald's response to the above: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/01/journalistic-independence/

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/

this seems like a good roundup for people who are behind

Yanukovych built for himself a series of extravagant homes, perhaps the ugliest in architectural history.

I kinda like it?

http://www.nybooks.com/media/img/blogimages/yanukovych-house_jpg_600x654_q85.jpg

rubio/cruz 2016 -- ukraine, you saw, you conquered

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhvIcQ2CQAAttsr.jpg:large

http://i.imgur.com/85nDLvk.jpg

I lol'd

The Admiral Kyiv made head of the Ukrainian navy yesterday has just sworn allegiance to the Republic of Crimea and told all the troops under his command to ignore any orders coming from the capital. Not sure how many will follow him.

russia didn't hesitate invading georgia even w/ meathead warking bush in office

worth noting that this was a response to georgia's invasion of south ossetia.

https://24.media.tumblr.com/90c89980510c84634ef509adf5de3a0e/tumblr_n1sjpnqwic1r6s5zro1_250.gifhttps://24.media.tumblr.com/ea0deff2a634c1f5503d88d4af298ba1/tumblr_n1sjpnqwic1r6s5zro2_250.gif

This is a bold move:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-turns-to-its-oligarchs-for-political-help.html?referrer=

Kyiv has put billionaire oligarchs in charge of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, presumably because they have enough influence behind the scenes in the East to theoretically keep some of the institutions onside.

Appointing oligarchs could go down very badly with pro-revolution, anti-corruption groups though.

Yes, they should be freely elected in totally transparent and totally fair elections.

Lots of interesting perspectives on this thread. Perhaps surprising, but when I was thinking of where to go online for well-rounded analysis I thought of ILE first, and you guys didn't let me down. The major media outlets (NY Times, WaPo, etc) have an annoying tendency to frame things in terms of US domestic politics - like everything that happens is portrayed as either a rebuff to Obama or a victory for him - as though the number of one thing on people's minds in Russia and Ukraine is what does the US president think. Personally I'm 100% A-OK with Obama's handling of this so far. I certainly don't think US needs to be out in front of EU in taking a hard line - it's their backyard.

is there gas and oil ukraine ? is taht what theyre really after

Well, no. But important gas-lines from Russia runs through Ukraine.

er yes there are: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26418664

Yes, that article is about the gas-lines. Ukraine doesn't even have enough gas for themselves.

This is bleak

http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/russian-invasion-ukraine-push-west-economic-war/441

xp q was whether there are gas fields in the Ukraine, which there most definitely are

q was on whether or not Russia was after the gas in Ukraine, so the relevant information must be that Ukraine doesn't even have gas enough for themselves. Whether or not they have some gas is not really important, they obviously don't have enough to cause the invasion.

couple days old now, but:

http://world.time.com/2014/02/28/crimea-russia-putin-night-wolves/

Because their uniforms and vehicles had no identifying markers of any kind, the troops patrolling the streets, highways and airports of the Crimea could at least plausibly have been part of irregular militia forces, which locals have been forming to defend against the revolution. Moscow was therefore able to deny any knowledge as to which troops were part of the regular movements of the Black Sea Fleet and which ones weren’t. This meant that on Friday, the only identifiably Russian force descending on the Crimea were the Night Wolves.

Since 2009, they have been one of the defining elements of Russian soft power in Eastern Europe. Their biker rallies and mass rides through countries like Ukraine, Estonia, Serbia, Romania and Bosnia serve to promote Slavic pride and Russian patriotism in Moscow’s former Soviet dominions. President Putin has often joined them on these rides, although he usually plays it safe by choosing a three-wheeler.

obv the "unidentified" troops have been now

Ukraine's position as a gas transit route is hugely important to Russia and the EU but I don't think it's directly relevant here.

The bigger issue for Russia and the US is NATO membership, which is one of the few things that Yanukovich and Tymoshenko disagreed on. The US, since Clinton, has been trying to encircle Russia with sympathetic allies with mixed success.

The suggestions that this was a US coup are daft but there has been a lot of meddling and it's not all in the services of advancing democracy.

Xps

what about the euro? I thought that was the unreast

Ties to Europe are a big factor in domestic politics, and from the Russian side, but the EU doesn't really have a stake in destabilising Ukraine to achieve them and the US, although it supports pro-EU parties, does so for other reasons I think.

walt weighs in: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/03/no_contest_ukraine_obama_putin

There's plenty of room for finger-pointing and blame casting here, but the taproot of the debacle in Ukraine was a failure to distinguish between power and interests. Power is a useful thing to have in international politics, but any serious student of foreign policy knows that the stronger side does not always win. If it did, the United States would have won in Vietnam, would have persuaded India, Pakistan, and North Korea not to test nuclear weapons, and would have Afghan President Hamid Karzai dancing to our tune. In the real world, however, weaker states often care more about the outcome than stronger states do and are therefore willing to run more risks and incur larger costs to get what they want.

Unfortunately, U.S. leaders have repeatedly lost sight of this fact since the end of the Cold War. Because the United States is so powerful and so secure, it can meddle in lots of places without putting its own security at risk. United States officials tend to think they have the answer to every problem, and they reflexively assume that helping other societies become more like us is always the "right thing to do." Because we've become accustomed to our self-appointed role as Leader of the Free World, Washington is quick to proclaim redlines and issue high-minded demands, convinced that others will do its bidding -- if it barks loudly enough.

Unfortunately, America's remarkably favorable geopolitical position also means that the outcome of many global disputes don't matter all that much to Washington, and still less to the American people. The result is a paradox: primacy allows the United States to interfere in lots of global disputes, but many of the issues it gets involved in are of secondary importance and not worth much risk, blood, or treasure. Why? Because the United States will be fine no matter how things turn out. It has the power to act almost anywhere, but its vital interests are rarely fully engaged.

That is certainly the case in Ukraine, a country whose entire economy is about the size of Kentucky's. Last year, total U.S. trade with Ukraine was a measly $3 billion, less than the city budget of Philadelphia and about .00018 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP). Ukraine's political system has been a mess ever since independence in 1991 and its economy is nearly bankrupt and needs massive outside assistance. It would be nice if Ukraine developed effective political institutions, but neither the security nor prosperity of the United States depend on that happening, either now or in the foreseeable future. Put simply: Ukraine is not an arena on which America's future depends in the slightest.

Since 1992, the U.S. approach to Russia and Eastern Europe has been guided by the assumption that Western-style democracy was the wave of the future and that the United States could extend its reach eastward and offer security guarantees to almost anyone who wanted them, but without ever facing a serious backlash.

Tbrr, I would say that US policy both within Russia and wrt its neighbors hasn't been about extending democracy, it has been about limiting the ability of Russia to pose a threat to the US again. Perhaps understandably given the context most of them grew up in, a lot of politicians and security officials are convinced Russia could somehow regain its Soviet might and challenge the US head to head again.

It's not going to happen but the focus / obsession with Eastern Europe central asia throughout the Clinton years has been convincingly argued to have led to not enough attention was paid to threats from the middle East, the rise of Chinese power in Africa, the estrangement of Latin America, etc.

Weird grammar going on there.

in addition to the institutionalised framework of Cold War understanding, I'm wondering how much this sort of annexation triggers basic responses derived from understanding of late 19thC/WW1 balance of power and WW2 causes.

feels like the interpretation of the strategic value of the Crimea is still likely to based on that period of history.

idk whether Russia controlling the Crimea and the Black Sea is still that big a deal - it probably is, right? also if the response is beset by military teaching of that period of history, it's understandable: the manner of the trigger - the fabrication of incidents requiring a defence force and the deniability of the initial occupying forces has a childish duplicity that's characteristic of that period, esp with Hitler's annexations.

it's going to make any military strategists jumpy as hell even if S Walt's modern interpretation of the value of Ukraine to the US is correct.

President Barack Obama said on Monday that Russia violated international law with its military intervention in Ukraine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLNqTbBu-zo

A couple of links:

Fascinating (and prescient) Charles King piece on Sevastopol from 2009:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2009/05/01/city-on-the-edge/

Interesting analysis of current situation by Anatol Lievin:

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/03/02/why-obama-shouldnt-fall-for-putins-ukrainian-folly/ideas/nexus/

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/03/if-you-want-to-be-truly-pessimistic-about-the-ukraine-crisiss-geopolitical-consequences/

Environmentalists vs American conservatives aspect---Among other arguments, Ukraine situation will also encourage some that the US should be doing more fracking and selling of energy abroad, so Europe can get energy from US and not Russia

More re seeing this through US eyes... seems a bit simplistic-

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116840/mitt-romney-and-russia-putin-and-ukraine

I strongly recommend these older articles on Ukrainian gas infrastructure by Jérôme Guillet at the OilDrum, for those curious about this facet of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict. He wrote a PhD dissertation on the subject and is a Paris based energy trader.

Ukraine vs Russia: Tales of pipelines and dependence (December 2, 2006)
Russian gas and European energy security (April 30, 2007)
Russian gas and European energy security - a reprise (August 24, 2008)
Ukraine-Russia gas spat: some background and context (January 3, 2009)
Some predictions on the forthcoming Russian-Ukrainian gas 'crisis' (November 17, 2009)

sanpaku, i've thought this at times over the years, and not really about ukraine, could you show off your blogroll/reading list? you always have the shit.

goole otm, i'd like to see it too!

Gazprom took the opportunity to casually mention they're finalising a 30-year energy supply deal with China.

http://m.government.ru/en/news/10886

That Walt piece seems like a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking to me. "The real question, however, is why Obama and his advisors thought the United States and the European Union could help engineer the ouster of a democratically elected and pro-Russian leader in Ukraine and expect Vladimir Putin to go along with it?" What evidence does Walt attest that Obama "engineered" the ouster of Yanukovych? Seems highly unlikely to me. Walt will need to point to something more substantive than distributing cookies to protesters. The fact is that Obama did take a fairly hands-off approach to the protests, and his number one goal was to reduce the tensions and promote a peaceful resolution. This is in contrast to the pro-democracy cheerleading that characterized the administration of his predecessor:

While George W. Bush was inspired by the Orange Revolution of 2004 and weeks later vowed in his second inaugural address to promote democracy, Barack Obama has approached the revolution of 2014 with a more clinical detachment aimed at avoiding instability. Rather than an opportunity to spread freedom in a part of the world long plagued by corruption and oppression, Mr. Obama sees Ukraine’s crisis as a problem to be managed, ideally with a minimum of violence or geopolitical upheaval...

After winning re-election in 2004, Mr. Bush decided to broaden his ambition by setting a "freedom agenda" for his second term. Even as he and his aides were working on his inaugural address, images of Ukrainian protesters wearing orange scarves and resisting a corrupt election exhilarated the West Wing. In January 2005, Mr. Bush declared it his policy to support democracy "in every nation" with "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." ... As the latest Ukraine protests got underway, Mr. Obama personally evinced little of the enthusiasm of Mr. Bush, but his administration has been heavily involved in seeking a settlement. Taking the lead has been Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who called Mr. Yanukovych nine times since November, and Secretary of State John Kerry, who has reached out to Russia repeatedly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/world/europe/wary-stance-from-obama.html

The 'smoking gun' for theorists who want to believe it was a US coup tends to be the leaked conversation between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26079957

Although things turned out more or less as they planned they would, there isn't much evidence that it wasn't a case of two people wildly overestimating their importance in the situation. Obama has been OK here. There is a case for saying he should have been banging heads together in the opposition to ensure a less contentious transition government but the EU tried that and nobody paid any attention.

I haven't read the whole transcript but my understanding is that call pertained to working out the details of a proposed power-sharing agreement with the opposition - not the "coup" that ended up taking place.

That's probably true - it was deliberately leaked without context. I don't think anyone really expected the negotiated agreements to collapse as quickly as they did.

To get conspiracy-minded about things, it seems much more likely to me that if anyone engineered Yanukovych's decision to flee it was Putin. He probably figured he had more to gain from a disorderly breakdown to talks that could give him a pretext for his Crimea move than to allow any kind of negotiated settlement that might lead to a stronger central government in Kiev.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26442381 Come on! :(

The fact is that Obama did take a fairly hands-off approach to the protests, and his number one goal was to reduce the tensions and promote a peaceful resolution. This is in contrast to the pro-democracy cheerleading that characterized the administration of his predecessor.

yes, I think this is very much true--just witness the different responses to the protests by Obama and John McCain (who admittedly has much less to lose as he is not deciding American foreign policy). McCain took the "freedom fighters! yaaaay!" approach. Obama's was more: "don't kill your own people, guy."

although politically he's dead weight now, Yanukovitch's role in all this is interesting to me. we still don't have a clear picture of why he fled Kyiv. was he under immediate physical threat? did all but the inner ring of security refuse to protect him? did he just figure, more broadly, that he could better rally his base from a position in eastern Ukraine? did Putin offer him immunity and/or support if he left Kyiv? (as o. nate suggests below).

and what is his position now? even if he is ethnically (and linguistically) Russian, he is still a Ukranian citizen and current/former/? head of state of Ukraine. what does it mean that he's openly colluding with another government, that he seems to be supporting a de facto invasion of Ukrainian territory by this other government? by any standard, I think, that's treason, no?

see - that's what is weird to me. why would the pro-democracy cheerleader support the ppl deposing the ostensibly democratically elected government? this destroy a democratically elected government to save democracy paradigm is so bizarre. pro-democratic opponents of government need to establish reforms + not precedence for coup d'etat

agreed that yanukovitch seems like the most interesting player in the conflict xp (well putin obv super fascinating but maybe not especially here)

i think the simple answer unfortunately is that the people who replaced yanukovitch are thought to be more "pro-western" (=neoliberal). which a lot of western (and other) minds have taken to be one and the same thing as more "democratic," in the formulation whose hypocrisy you point out.

on the other hand it's true that Yanukovitch (and most of his predecessors) betrayed the public trust to a truly egregious extent.

it's pretty clear to me that obama did not and could not have engineered yanukovitch's overthrow or even the protest movement. that's rather condescending to the ukrainians, for one thing. money from wealthy americans with an interest in the ukraine is not (always!) the same thing as state dept./oval office policy.

He would presumably argue that as elected head of state he had the right to call on external assistance to resist an antidemocratic coup but that's almost academic now. He will probably remain in Russia. Putin said today that he had told him his career in politics is over (and probably enjoyed that greatly).

He claims he was shot at and had to leave for his safety and the safety of his family. The way the security apparatus and high-ranking politicians melted away overnight is still extraordinary though. A charitable reading might be that they left to avoid civil war breaking out the next day but I suspect they knew there wasn't a sufficient appetite in Kyiv to defend them from a full armed insurrection. Once he was gone he was gone. The Party Of The Regions threw him under the bus almost immediately. There was no real prospect of regrouping. Xps

i can't really shake the desire to watch both parts of Ivan the Terrible this week. the "scene" you describe (of Putin telling Yanukovitch that his days in politics are over) sounds like something Eisenstein could have put in those films. of course in the film Yanukovitch's head would roll a few scenes later.

see - that's what is weird to me. why would the pro-democracy cheerleader support the ppl deposing the ostensibly democratically elected government? this destroy a democratically elected government to save democracy paradigm is so bizarre. pro-democratic opponents of government need to establish reforms + not precedence for coup d'etat

― Mordy , 4. marts 2014 22:44 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Once Yanukovitch shot and killed scores of his own people, he sort of lost the status of 'democratically elected', don't you think?

money from wealthy americans with an interest in the ukraine is not (always!) the same thing as state dept./oval office policy.

seeing as how this is a country whose wealthy citizens do dictate policy you can see how they might suspect the same is true of the US (and not be entirely wrong, at least in a broad sense)

xp to Frederik:

J0rdan S. wrote this on thread pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.) on board I Love Music on Oct 24, 2013

one of the rites of passage of 2013 ilx is learning to never argue with mordy

Once Yanukovitch shot and killed scores of his own people, he sort of lost the status of 'democratically elected', don't you think?

― Frederik B, Tuesday, March 4, 2014 5:14 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, he didn't. he may have lost legitimacy in the eyes of many if not most ukrainians, but he was still democratically elected. you can't change that retrospectively, whether you believe he should have gone or not.

of course, he was democratically elected in an election in which one crook was running against another crook, but if that invalidated elections the US would be missing a few presidents.

i imagine there are at least a few democratically elected leaders who've gunned down their own people over the years.

http://iaspace.pbworks.com/f/richard%20nixon.jpg

you rang?

Who was removed as president...

hey those weren't really *his* people anyway

Who was removed as president...

― Frederik B, Tuesday, March 4, 2014 6:10 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for covering up the tapping of the opposing party's campaign headquarters!

why would the pro-democracy cheerleader support the ppl deposing the ostensibly democratically elected government?

pro-democracy cheerleaders are only pro-democracy if the result is pro-them(/western), cf hamas etc

tbf there haven't been elections in gaza since 2006. but yanukovych wasn't threatening to cancel elections was he? if anything he pushed the elections up in the deal signed before he had to flee.

see - that's what is weird to me. why would the pro-democracy cheerleader support the ppl deposing the ostensibly democratically elected government? this destroy a democratically elected government to save democracy paradigm is so bizarre. pro-democratic opponents of government need to establish reforms + not precedence for coup d'etat

― Mordy , Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:44 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not saying it applies here - and I'm really swayed by the arguments that the 'pro-democracy' cheerleading is really just 'pro-free-flowing-capital' - but surely there would be some circumstances where someone who was once 'democratically elected' then uses their term of office to dismantle legitimate means of opposition, stifles the free press, allows only pro-them advertising, finds ways to stifle all protestors on weird technicalities, whatever. I mean, this situation is definitely NOT Germany in 1933 or even France under Napoleon III for that matter, but those kinds of cases do exist and I'm not sure I'd object if brute-force mass movements forced out these democratically elected governments to save democracy.

hmmmm, putin comes to mind, but most russians seem not to mind him

oy, hillary

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/hillary-clinton-compares-russia-moves-to-nazi-aggression

that's a terrific way of helping to defuse the situation and prepare for her foreign policy as president

https://twitter.com/grahamblog/status/440920315292811264

This situation ceased to be defuseable many weeks ago. I do wonder if some of the Western cynical "hey, calm down, dudes, we all made mistakes" pseudo-liberal punditry has elements of wishful racist "white people shouldn't act this way" feeling to it.

Lindsey Graham is an unconscionable sack of feces

This situation ceased to be defuseable many weeks ago

so what is it that you think is inevitable at this point? whatever putin wants?

Lindsey Graham is an unconscionable sack of feces

― you are clinically deaf and should sell you iPod (stevie), Wednesday, March 5, 2014 2:21 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if only! then we could be rid of him with one swift roundhouse.

as it is, it will take a significant portion of the people of south carolina to come to their senses, which is a very remote possibility at best.

Bloodshed is inevitable, as is Putin trying to do whatever he wants. I think the choice is between Putin doing whatever the hell he wants or significant military conflict, and neither of those choices are any good.

Do you see war as being in Putin's interests? He's getting a boost from 'defending the rights of Crimea' at home but full on war with a historical ally is unlikely to go down well. Ukraine is also a major economic partner and Russia will still need to have some kind of relationship with it, and most likely Tymoshenko, when the dust settles.

Russia's recent actions have made concessions from Kyiv more difficult as they'll be seen as backing down in the face of aggression, but putting some kind of deal on the table that would guarantee elected mayors and no Ukrainian military intervention in Crimea in return for Russian troops backing off and the referendum being delayed until next year should be something the EU is floating.

He's getting a boost from 'defending the rights of Crimea' at home

Time piece I read this morning - which might be full of US-friendly shinola, I don't know - suggested he's not even getting that, and that 70$ disapprove of his movements in the Ukraine.

70%, not 70$

$70 is the current budget of the ukrainian gov't

Putin is betting that the only army he'll have to fight against is that of Ukraine, and I think that's a fairly safe bet.

I think it's not wise to try to figure out Putin's next move without constantly considering him to be, in many ways, a bully who feels he has nearly invincible backup. I am not saying he is in any way correct, but I do think that that's where he's coming from most of the time.

Ukraine's army is pretty decent, tbh. It's not like rolling over a couple of thousand Georgian soldiers moving into South Ossetia. A full war (not skirmishes around Crimea) would probably be a long, drawn-out affair (bad for the economy). There doesn't really seem for him to need to make that move unless Ukrainian soldiers attempt to take Crimea back or things turn nasty in Donetsk. At the moment, things in Crimea seem tense but mostly cordial.

Among professional military, yes -- but the pro-Russian paramilitary types (startlingly well-built and well-armed protestors, Cossacks, etc.) are, from what I have heard, becoming increasingly provocative and ready to throw down at any moment. I do not believe that they are outside of the control of the Kremlin, and doubt that most of them are full-time long-term residents of the Crimea, if you get my insinuation.

I would assume most are Crimean but some probably won't be. One of the side effects of Russia being there is that the pro military is fairly unambiguously in charge. They should be able to keep them in check. Bad as the current situation is, government troops or nationalist militias clashing with separatist militias might be even more dangerous.

thanks, both of you, good posts

now I think at least for this morning I have half a clue about how this might go down

USA/UKR soccer friendly getting ready to kick off... in Cyprus.

roundhousing a sack of feces sounds like a terrible idea. just take that sack of feces carefully to the nearest dumpster imo.

The Crimean Parliament has voted to extend the scope of the referendum to include the option of union with Russia, with remaining part of Ukraine under greater autonomy the other option. This is supposedly happening on the 16th.

Pre-crisis surveys had about 40% of people in favour of going back to being part of Russia but it could be close. Clock ticking on efforts to negotiate a delay now.

The legitimacy of this referendum is extremely questionable.

isn't it

It's tough to argue that the current Crimean Parliament is valid but the current Kyiv government isn't (and vice versa).

The challenge to the international community is how to monitor the referendum to make sure it's fair without implicitly endorsing it. They might take the view that sending observers validates the outcome and choose not to.

If the referendum was free and fair, and the people wanted to be part of Russia, then is that so bad?

Putin has made up a bunch of shit about western Ukrainian terrorists, but ... are there Ukrainian terrorists, like some of the more rabid nationalists? Because if Russian annexes Crimea or otherwise permanently invades Ukraine, I bet we'll find out.

If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.

If in some bizarre twist of events Russia invaded Kyiv or Lviv, then sure. Crimea, by virtue of being mostly Russian, a relatively recent addition to Ukraine and semi-autonomous already hasn't really featured in the Ukrainian nationalist narrative in the same way as the west / centre of the country though. Or at least not yet.

There have been some speculative articles about Tatar terrorism being a possibility but they don't extend much beyond 'oh hey, they're Muslims they've gotta be into blowing stuff up, eh?'.

Eh, some just go on stabbing rampages.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/03/who-s-really-behind-ukraine-s-synagogue-attacks.html

Putin has made up a bunch of shit about western Ukrainian terrorists, but ... are there Ukrainian terrorists, like some of the more rabid nationalists? Because if Russian annexes Crimea or otherwise permanently invades Ukraine, I bet we'll find out.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, March 6, 2014 1:01 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We can all thank George W Bush for such great statesmen like Bashar al Asad and Putin invoking terrorism any time they want to run off and do some flagrant violent shit.

Worth a read.

putin and assad's dad were using that language well before dubya

not everything happens cuz 'murrica

“The only lawful armed force on the territory of the Crimea is the Russian armed forces,” said Crimea’s deputy premier, Rustam Temirgaliev, according to Reuters news agency. “Armed forces of any third country are occupiers. The Ukrainian armed forces have to choose. Lay down their weapons, quit their posts, accept Russian citizenship and join the Russian military. If they do not agree, we are prepared to offer them safe passage from the territory of Crimea to their Ukrainian homeland.”

things not lookin good

that's just... nuts.

it's one thing to say that the current ukrainian government isn't legitimate it's another to say "oh btw we're part of russia now. referendum? why wait for a referendum?"

the "offer safe passage" thing is such an ugly veiled threat

oh good, Seumas Milne has some thoughts

question

so putin was able to effectively seize crimea by taking advantage of a nation gripped by something like chaos, or at best political confusion--not to mention a struggling economy, only tentative formal links to the EU.

a lot of people are suggesting versions of a domino theory, where a russia victorious in the crimea would elect to invade/stir trouble in other countries w/ significant russian populations using the same "protect the people" pretext. but those other states--i'm thinking chiefly of the baltic ones--are doing well economically, have strong democratic governments, and if i'm not mistaken are members of NATO. putin would have no ambiguities to make hash of there.

as for belarus, they are so firmly in the russian orbit that it might as well be a sattelite, so there's not really any need for russia to assert their dominance there.

so does this sort of "domino theory" have any credence?

nah

uh

Simon Shuster ‏@shustry 15m
CONFIRMED: Russian forces storming Ukraine base near Sevastopol, home of anti-aircraft commander center #Crimea http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/03/7/7018108/

Simon Shuster ‏@shustry 9m
20 Russian troops inside, moving toward command post of Crimea base, guarded by 100 Ukrainian troops, reports @ukrpravda_news

yikes

fuck

Putin really loves doing this shit on Friday.

surprise attack when everyone's in the pub

normally american politicians use fridays to dump scandal-related news hoping to bury it over the weekend. putin is a bit more ambitious w/ how he uses fridays clearly tho.

i assume this is what rebecca black was singing about

we underestimated her

seems crazy to me that this is worth fighting a civil war over (does either side really have the resources?) but yeah, not good

the gas pipelines from russia to europe run through ukraine

xp I've come to despise Milne. There's literally no tyrant or bully that he won't defend as long as they're not backed by the west, no Russian propaganda talking point that he won't repeat wholesale, no scenario anywhere in the world in which anyone but the US/UK is to blame. He's an intellectual sham, a stuck record, an embarrassment.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2012/10/24/1351078844553/seumas-milne-010.jpg

Re domino theory, annexation of territory isn't the major issue but this sends out a huge message to countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, etc with big Russian populations that nationalist governments should not fuck with the interests of citizens aligned with Russia. France kind of takes a similar, albeit more focused and arguably justifiable, position on military action when non-resident French are threatened. Estonia is psychologically a big deal for Russia. It wasn't in a position at the time to stop, idk, 250,000 or so, Russians from being marginalised, often to the point of disenfranchisement, by a nationalist government. That boat had sailed but they don't want it to happen elsewhere.

Milne is a clown and one of the factors that has made the Guardian coverage so shambolic. Rather than striving for actual balance in its news coverage, 'balance' is achieved by getting him to write stupid contrarian articles taking the opposite position to everyone else.

his continued employment is kinda baffling, kinda disgraceful

my partner checks in with naked capitalism sometimes. they have always been a mix of the good and the terrible, but she pointed me to some recent pieces that were rather astonishing putin apologetics.

Milne also writes a lot of the unsigned editorials (or at least he used to).

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wfkEBybHV5s/Uxem5m5dDoI/AAAAAAAAARs/dVCx8jNKei0/s1600/001.png

Yeah, been kind of disappointed by how quickly some people have returned to the position of reactionary Russian nationalism. I suppose that stuff has always just been under the surface, though.

A lot of people will automatically take the position that anything and everything the US government thinks is wrong and anyone defying its will must be on to a good thing. Milne is one and should be ignored.

On the other hand, I have seen a lot of liberals and leftists who wouldn't have known Simferopol from Calpol two weeks ago acting like armchair generals and accusing anyone who doesn't think military action against Russia should be on the table of appeasing fascism.

With any dispute, if a lot of people feel they aren't getting the full story (heavily slanted news articles, little scrutiny of actors on 'side' of Western powers, little engagement with complexities of situation, etc) there is a tendency to create a theory that it's all a sham and the real truth must run counter to the official position.

This is why I have had such a problem with so much of the reporting on Russia in the Putin era. If you constantly print rumours, half-truths and slanted narratives you damage by association the credibility of the critics who are more accurate, more focused and more honest about the government's many failings and problems. Luke Harding does more harm to the British left's support of Russian / Ukrainian opposition groups than Milne could ever hope to.

Excellent points.

We can all thank George W Bush for such great statesmen like Bashar al Asad and Putin invoking terrorism any time they want to run off and do some flagrant violent shit.

Gavrilo Princip to thread.

http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-and-love-gavrilo-princip.png

GMiL is invaluable in times of international crisis

“The Finance Ministry has prepared a plan for optimizing budget expenditures, which implies budget sequestration is to be in force before the end of March. For this purpose, in particular, it has been proposed to reduce capital costs, eliminate tax schemes and preferences and to cut social benefits, for example, 50 percent of pensions to working pensioners,” Kommersant-Ukraine reported.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy reported on December 1, 2013, that an average pension in Ukraine is $160.

If true, this won't go down well. The IMF austerity measures are also likely to include jacking up gas and electricity bills. A deeply unpopular government and a discredited opposition might open things up for new parties over the next few years.

yurp

If Putin Is New Hitler, Then Monkey Became Of The Man?

lol

for an old guard left view of what's happening, i'm producing my egyptian marxist buddy's live chat rn: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/occupydclive/2014/03/12/bulletpoints-wnavid-nasr-3-12-14

Looks like the US/EU are getting serious about sanctions if the referendum vote goes through:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-12/russia-said-to-get-ready-for-iran-style-sanctions-in-worst-case.html

Might get some targeted visa bans but I can not see full-scale sanctions happening. Russia is much more integrated into the global economy than Iran and I doubt there is much appetite to push it towards isolationism. Also gas / coal issue.

I found it interesting that the Bloomberg article mentions the Russian government asking billionaires and large companies to see who was vulnerable to margin calls.

Some sanctions seem unavoidable, whether or not they escalate from there would depend on the Russian response. Who so far has been overreacting. So I can clearly see a series of escalating sanctions being imposed. Which would be far more damaging to Russia. And then Ukraine afterwards, probably, and sadly.

so crimea voted for secession, unsurprisingly.

i couldn't figure out where else to post this article but since we were discussing obama, russia + o's foreign policy in this thread i figure this is a good place for it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/obamas-policy-is-put-to-the-test-as-crises-challenge-caution.html

Apparantly 123% of the voters in Sevastopol voted for secession. I mean, faced with such an overwhelming desire to be part of Russia, who would not allow that?

I was kinda thinking this all might be for the best. Let the majority Russian Crimea join Russia and the rest of Ukraine will probably have an easier time bonding with the EU?

Well, that would be good, but how many people expect Putin to stop now?

Most of Eastern Ukraine is majority Russian and they could be next to push for secession. With them would go almost all the country's industry.

That said, there have been theories floated that the Kyiv government wouldn't be too fussed about Crimea going because it means hundreds of thousands of opposition voters becoming ineligible.

Crimea's resource-poor, dry and windswept, dependent on mainland Ukraine. Russia's going to have to provide a lot, so why not take more territory? They've already seized a power plant just over the line
[Removed Illegal Link]

Jeez, formatting. Okay, so they've taken this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/world/europe/russian-troops-seize-gas-plant-beyond-crimean-border-ukraine-says.html

Witn plenty more where that came from, massing in different regions along the border:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/europe/crimea-ukraine-secession-vote-referendum.html

Jesus, SV is still talking as if this was a real choice by the people of Crimea. Wow. Have you ever actually spoken to a Russian-speaking Ukrainian about this stuff?

yeah framing this as 'self-determination' in any real sense is very flawed imo.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-signs-pointed-to-crimea-independence-vote-but-polls-didnt/

Jesus, SV is still talking as if this was a real choice by the people of Crimea. Wow. Have you ever actually spoken to a Russian-speaking Ukrainian about this stuff?

Is there some sort of reason your weirdly personal attacks on his posts have been so overlooked by the mods? I mean, I could always fp, but I'm ~genuinely curious~.

nothing wrong with the 'both of the above' approach imo

Speaking of weirdly personal, "gyac", that's a pretty nice first ILX post.

welcome to ILX, gyac

gyac wrote this on thread The Smiths - Meat Is Murder poll on board I Love Music on Mar 16, 2011

I'd rank it:

Strangeways
Queen is Dead
Meat is Murder
The Smiths

myself.

The debut suffers from poor production but a lot of the stuff on there sounds better in the live recordings. Reel Around the Fountain and I Don't Owe You Anything are the only real duds and even so, they were still Smiths songs.

welcome aboard, gyac. always good to see new faces around here.

TWU i kinda admire yr own personal style of maximum abrasion to all available peronsages but doesn;t it get somewhat tiring at all at all

It's more tiring to read a million OTMs to SV's oddly Chamberlainesque posts (in which he has consistently predicted reasonable behavior from Putin that has consistently failed to happen) then to post "WTF?" about it.

well if you've worked out the difference in joules i'm not gonna question it, carry on by all means

But yes, saying that someone who is talking about that phony referendum as if it were not phony is "talking as if there was a real choice by the people of Crimea" and questioning whether this opinion was based on any input from ethnic Russians with Ukrainian passports is clearly outside the bounds of civilized conversation and I should be ashamed of myself. I am worse than Hitler.

Jesus, SV is still talking as if this was a real choice by the people of Crimea. Wow. Have you ever actually spoken to a Russian-speaking Ukrainian about this stuff?

Curious as to whether you have actually spent any time in Ukraine. Pretending the poll wasn't flawed is stupid. Pretending that a substantial number of Crimeans haven't always wanted to unite with Russia, even before the government 85% of them voted for was removed from office, is stupid. I am doing neither.

The poll was more than merely flawed, and a "substantial number" doesn't mean an overwhelming majority. You know that, right?

"any time in Ukraine" -- a couple of days, fairly recently, but no more than that. Cancelled a business trip set for two weeks ago.

don't engage honestly and rationally w/ evil lunatics sv, you come off like neville chamberlain

interesting 538 piece on polling in crimea - http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-signs-pointed-to-crimea-independence-vote-but-polls-didnt/

Interesting article, balls, where did you find it?

Why does it matter if the majority is 'overwhelming'?

The propaganda was certainly a factor. TV channels spent a huge amount of time playing up the far right links of the government and reminding people of the atrocities committed under Bandera. 40% of Crimeans thinking Ukraine and Russia should merge sounds feasible. You would expect more to think that Crimea alone should join Russia and more still now that an almost universally hated political leadership has taken power from a broadly popular one. That almost certainly wouldn't add up to 90+% but it forms a body of opinion that can't be handwaved away.

Obviously this is only anecdotal but of the Crimean interviews I've heard (mostly on BBC + Al-J) since the referendum, supporter interviews (who, for i guess obvious reasons*, outnumber referendum detractors in interviews like 3:1) are super outspoken + enthusiastic. One particularly memorable interviewee said that he identifies as Russian - not because of any affinity to the political entity, but because he identifies so strongly with Russian literature. I could def relate. Of non-supporters, they almost to a man explained that they refrained from voting because they thought it wouldn't matter. Some insinuated this was because the vote was stacked, but others said plainly that they could just tell which way the population was trending and it wasn't worth getting involved.

(*sorry, obvious reasons being that ppl who didn't support the referendum obv have plenty of good safety reasons to keep their mouths shut and not do interviews atm imo)

Good timeline, for events Nov. 21--March 8, anyway. Good framework/points of departure for further studies too: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/08/us-ukraine-crisis-timeline-idUSBREA270PO20140308

SV, can the difference between 40% and 90% be handwaved away? Because that it what it appears to me that you are doing.

You do get that it isn't the same polling-question, and that some pretty dramatic things happened between those two numbers? Also, fraud and supression, obviously, nobody is doubting that?

i haven't crunched the numbers, but if turnout was 83% as claimed then that would have to include a healthy chunk of crimea's ethnolinguistic minorities—mostly ukrainian speakers and tatars—who collectively make up something like 40+% of those living in Crimea. and a 97% "yes" vote would imply that even a majority of voters from those groups voted "yes." that seems, to put it mildly, highly unlikely. especially since international news groups report that most tatars sat out the vote because they think it's illegitimate. that would mean a very sizable chunk of ukrainian-speaking folks voted "yes."

anyway there are good reasons to discount the result as a fabrication even if you don't buy the most obvious reason, which is that the vote was carried out under implicit military threat with few international observers etc.

putin and his cronies are so profoundly cynical that they make my jaw drop sometimes*. esp. their references to kosovo as analogical to and thus legitimating the crimea secession. i have a bad memory, but not so bad as to have forgotten how bitterly the russian government was opposed to kosovo breaking away from serbia.

(*yeah, i guess it's not really any more cynical than arguing without good evidence that a poor, militarily decimated state was stockpiling chemical weapons that were an immediate threat to US security. but, you know.)

So it looks like annexation is going through. With the first round of sanctions looking like a joke, I guess the question is whether there's any appetite in Washington/Berlin/etc for a more serious second round.

Bizarre in an asynchronous way to hear the world community seriously discuss whether we should just let Putin have Crimea or if it might lead to further Russian annexations.

Here’s the dirty little secret of the foreign-policy pundit/expert orgy on what to do about Crimea: the US has at its disposal very few levers with which to change Russia’s behavior, at least in the near-term. We can cancel multilateral summits and military training (already done); we can deny visas to Russian officials (just beginning); we can even ramp up bilateral economic sanctions and try to build support among key European allies for a larger, more invasive sanctions regime (under discussion).
But as our long effort to bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear ambition reminds us, such steps will take time and diplomatic effort to bring results. They won’t offer the guarantee of a satisfactory result, and they could produce significant economic backlash for US companies - and, more directly, US allies.
In the end, we’re stuck arguing over policy responses that largely dance around the margins, and a situation in which Europe’s actions likely matter more than America’s.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/14/us-foreign-policy-crimea-obama-response

Interesting that financial markets are rising on this news. There seems to be relief that Putin said in his speech that he doesn't want any more of Ukraine, which assurance the markets are apparently taking at face value.

I don't see why the US can't annex Ontario

i bet some of the western oil country would be happy to leave ottawa's hold (tho maybe not to come under obama's). i doubt a referendum of canadians anywhere of "would you like to become american?" would get out of single digits. among quebecois i doubt it would get over a rounding error.

No, short term nothing can be done about Russia. But long term, it will have consequences. By taking Crimea he has secured 100% that Ukraine will be oriented towards the west, and the quest for dropping the dependency on Russian gas will intensify.

But then Russia can sell it to China, so...

just knew putin would bring up kosovo sooner or later and the precedent it set is one reason alot of ppl argued against kosovo sovereignty at the time. there's a huge difference in causus belli but putin regards that as a joke, as does the rest of the world after the last ten years (if not two hundred). could someone (ie sv obv) who's more familiar w/ ukraine's demographics tell us what crimea's removal means for the future? total 'i haven't thought about the ukraine since they gave up their nukes' here but my very shallow understanding is there was a somewhat tenuous balance between eu-sympathetic west and ru-sympathetic east - does this kind of extreme gerrymandering of crimea shift that balance toward the west? if putin really does stop w/ crimea is this arguably a win-win situation? putin gets his show of power, western ukraine is shed a nuisance region, eastern ukraine has concrete demonstration of what happens if their interests are run over and threat of secession, america gets to see putin and russia continue to self-marginalize themselves (i mean does anyone think there are any real advantages to be gained from this long term? it's a pretty empty victory. i'm reminded of dan snyder.), europe keeps pipelining oil and dirty money, everyone knows where everyone stands. i'm almost definitely wrong but tell me where and why. i just keep thinking that this kind of reminds me of the construction of the berlin wall, something that was a 'crisis' in the moment but secretly was welcomed by both sides cuz it resolved continuing nuisances for both sides. i know nti had that op-ed saying 'this must not be a new berlin wall' but really would that be so bad?

anyhow, fun story on one of the bond villain clowns notionally targeted by us sanctions - http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117053/vladislav-surkov-responds-sanctions-will-miss-tupac-shakur

I think you are broadly correct in that there will be people in Kyiv if not welcoming the course of events then definitely seeing an upside. In terms of population Crimea isn't huge (not more than 5% of total) but is so heavily weighted towards the Party Of The Regions (85 - 90 per cent support) that it gives a kicking to their chances of winning future elections. It doesn't mean Tymoshenko is unassailable but it gives her a real head start when the margins are so close.

She will need to keep East more or less on board, will have to deal with Russia (EU isn't going to supply gas or make up list trade) but I reckon she's going to be pretty confident of doing that.

*Lost trade*

Apparantly, fracking-gas from the US will be able to be delivered to Europe from 2015. Perhaps Ukraine can get some of that?

Meanwhile, Ukraine commander reports some of the self-designated self-defense groups gave a deadline for getting out of Crimea or joining the Russian military:

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-crimea-ukraine-troops-20140318,0,1415462.story#axzz2wGyC1mlz

And now the exchange of deadly fire begins (with some beating and robbery of Ukraine soldiers as well) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26637296

i do wonder for how long ukraine will have to maintain the rhetoric of crimea as illegally wrested from their country (which it was, but now it's a fait accompli rather than an act in progress). i guess it'll be like those other long-contested zones in asia where one country has had effective power for decades but the uncertain status remains a "diplomatic hurdle" or whatever that contributes to a general freeze (see e.g. india/china). i wonder if kyiv will appoint "shadow governments," etc. in the crimea and if so for how long.

2 interesting things i heard on the radio today:

1. a pro-Ukrainian activist using a Russian idiom I've never heard before to refer to pro-Crimean (non-military) "defenders": "like monkeys holding hand grenades" - quick google turned up an official last August using the same expression to refer to American interventions in Islamic countries.

2. no-godwin, http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/165408,Polish-FM-Anschluss-in-Crimea-needs-EU-response

"Unfortunately instead of de-escalation we have anschluss of Crimea, which cannot be left without a response," the 'Poland in Europe' group tweeted Radoslaw Sikorski as saying before a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday morning, referring to the German word for the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938.

Sikorski clarified that he doesn't think this is going to erupt into a WW3 but i had thought of the anchluss comparison a couple days ago so i thought it was interesting to see other ppl noticing at least some (superficial?) similarities.

Yeah, I think the anschluss-thing is underlying a lot of this discussion (notice TWU calling SV 'chamberlainesque' upthread). The key difference to me is that Russia would lose WW3 in a heartbeat, though also nukes, I guess...

This article on Putin's speeches was interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html?emc=edit_th_20140319&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=62580219

Anschluss isn't a special word, btw; it's a good cognate for the English word "annexation". The key difference to me between the two annexations is that I think Hitler's was less controversial among Austrians at the time.

Also, the annexation of Austria led to a World War. That really seems like 'the key difference' to me...

thus far ya

We're not headed towards WW3.

War is war.

But a World War is not just a War.

right, i don't mean anything special about the word itself but more the historical evocation -- the annexation of a historically national (German/Russian) territory filled w/ ethnic citizens whose majority are enthusiastic about the merger. and i think the really unspoken element of the comparison is - does this augur further territorial ambitions. obv if putin takes czech peeps are going freak (joekz, there are more obv targets like latvia/estonia/etc).

Radek Sikorski (and his wife Anne Applebaum) have had a longstanding fear / paranoia about Russia becoming a major global power again. The key driver for opposition to Anschluss at the time wasn't concern for the rights of Austrians, I think, it was the fear that Germany would regain and misuse its former might. That is probably the key driver for lots of fairly hawkish critics with Crimea as well - although obviously not the only one.

on that note, i've been meaning to finish reading applebaum's iron curtain book. now seems as good a time as any tbh.

Honestly don't think that most Russians are fussed about Baltic states, other than with Estonia as a pointer of what can happen when Russian-speakers don't have a strong defence of their rights. Crimea is special to them. There was a poll last year asking people whether they thought various places 'were part of Russia' and eight times as many people said yes to Crimea than Chechnya.

really interesting to see who actors/speakers in this thing try to cast as the "right wing" or the imperialist. seems slightly different from a more standard rhetoric of claiming the other to be merely the "aggresssor"

maybe they're *all* right, heh

i don't think anyone considers putin a leftist, but i wonder if Russian conflicts w/ the west (EU) have a historically built-in bias for leftists who have a lot of practice swinging for the entity to the north over the capitalist colonialists in europe proper. ymmv etc.

Don't think we're anywhere near WW3, but if we did hit WW3, the annexation of Crimea seems like a perfect textbook catalyst, a la assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Just in the generic we all look back, in retrospect, and say "duh" sense, after WW3 happens, which is not happening.

Un-thought-through thoughts on the global perspectives:

What really seems interesting to me today, caused by reading about Putin's responses, is that this might be the first time since 89 where the global system is becoming fundamentally less integrated. It will probably be seen as the greatest setback for globalism in 25 years. China will have to choose sides, and they could very well choose to turn away from the west and more towards Russia as well.

And this next thought is caused by reading another article in todays Times on the effect of Globalization: For the vast majority of people in the west, a less global economy is a good thing. It's really only the elite who has benifited from the global restructuring. This can be seen most clearly in Britain, where London City is very much opposed to sanctions, as Russian money is very important. The benifiters of the last 25 years has, to a large extent, been the newly created middle class in the developing countries. However, the leaders of these countries might very well want to stop this development now. After all, the urban middle class were the people who opposed Putin in 2012, more educated middle class would mean more trouble.

i don't think anyone considers putin a leftist, but i wonder if Russian conflicts w/ the west (EU) have a historically built-in bias for leftists who have a lot of practice swinging for the entity to the north over the capitalist colonialists in europe proper. ymmv etc.

Couple of different things going on I think:

Assumption that anyone defying the US is probably right. Residual affection for Putin for going against Iraq /Syria invasion.

Belief that this was a crisis engineered by US /EU.

Belief that this is a neo-con power grab to asset strip Ukraine (which is kind of true but ignores fact that Yanukovich was also an asset-stripping neo-con).

Perception of 'mainstream media bias'.

Unease at Fascist-packed Ukrainian government.

Lots more besides. Putin is an odd figure because, while clearly a jackal, he's almost certainly the *best* leader Russia has ever had. I mean, he has no real competition in that regard. The position often taken by the left is that Russia was completely destroyed, deliberately and ideologically, by the World Bank / US / IMF with a view to putting state assets in the hands of literally anyone who wasn't the state - irrespective of whether they were mafia dons - and with no regard for how many would die in poverty as a result. Putin has not fully reversed that but he has capped the power of the oligarchs and raised living standards for pretty much everyone. Balancing that against his authoritarian streak is a major challenge though. He is not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination but he's a different kind of rightist than Yeltsin and wildly popular in most of Russia as a result.

Obviously best is relative here. Russia had never had any remotely decent leaders. And many Chechens would disagree, etc.

China will have to choose sides, and they could very well choose to turn away from the west and more towards Russia as well.

i wonder why they would do this, when there are so many more people/potential trading partners among the countries now lined up in opposition to russian expansionism. the USA alone has more people and a stronger economy, add to that the EU, much of Asia e.g. Japan, Brazil (who I also can't imagine siding w/ Russia over US/Europe)...

also all these theories about long-term geopolitics might be moot when half of world's capitals are underwater and most countries can only feed a portion of their citizens.

no one really speculating more than 5 years old i don't think and i doubt half world's capitals will be underwater by then.

5 years out* i mean

like sanctions are starting to happen now, space between annexation of austria + invasion of poland was only like 1 year apart iirc,etc

Wouldn't the annexation of the Sudetenland be a closer parallel than the Anschluss, if we're looking to apply Godwin's Law?

China will have to choose sides, and they could very well choose to turn away from the west and more towards Russia as well.

i wonder why they would do this, when there are so many more people/potential trading partners among the countries now lined up in opposition to russian expansionism. the USA alone has more people and a stronger economy, add to that the EU, much of Asia e.g. Japan, Brazil (who I also can't imagine siding w/ Russia over US/Europe)...

― espring (amateurist), 20. marts 2014 02:12 (14 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, first of all, China will apparantly by Russia's gas-leverances which would have gone to the West. Also, China and Russia walk hand in hand on most international questions, on Libya, Syria, etc. So if sanctions escalate, they would prob rather have a political partner than economical? Also, China, like Russia, will have to deal with rising, demanding middle class, if they integrate further with the west.

good morning moldova!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26662721

can anyone here recommend a good book on the fall of the Soviet Union, and the formation of the independent nations?

like, I was in hs when it happened but didn't really understand what was going on. And now I read about say Moldova and its conflicts at the time, and I don't remember anything about that

I think this is supposed to be good but I haven't read it -

http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347735474l/295847.jpg

9780804722476

what is that number is that a code

da da plan is go roll the tanks

isbn?

Transdniestr is a really weird place. In theory it's a separatist region hostile to Moldovan rule but it's home of Moldova's biggest football team and the national side plays lots of its matches there. It's effectively a corporate state run by the Sheriff Company.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_(company)

Slightly surprised that they want to be part of a country that might actually scrutinise them.

Tbh, I've always thought that Transdnistr joining Russia and Moldova joining Romania might be a win-win for everyone. I have a lot of affection for the place but it's the least functional country in Europe by a million miles and probably needs the EU to sort it out. Not sure who would get Gagauzia, probably Russia.

wonder what the kurds think about all this, or the baloch. or the ghosts of garibaldi and the '48ers... Ethnic Nationalism, Pretty Weird When You Think About It.

he has capped the power of the oligarchs

Sharivari, just asking---If Putin has done this, then how come the U.S. slapped asset friezes on four businessmen linked closely to Putin as well as a Russian bank that provides them support

Isn't he now seeking more money from the wealthy, only because of the impending sanctions?

russia handed out targeted sanctions on 'harry reed' and 'john beyner'

http://www.nndb.com/people/020/000043888/john-byner.jpg

Sharivari, just asking---If Putin has done this, then how come the U.S. slapped asset friezes on four businessmen linked closely to Putin as well as a Russian bank that provides them support

The oligarchs are still hugely powerful and, in many cases, very closely tied to Putin but it's not the same situation you had back when Berezovsky was pretty much able to decide who would lead Russia and government policy was largely decided on what worked best for a small cabal of gangsters. Putin used the oligarchs to get into office but the Yukos affair was the turning point when political power reasserted its dominance over capital.

Bear in mind under Yeltsin the oligarchs were able to engineer a situation in which the state effectively paid them for taking away assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

I think it's difficult to judge Putin's performance as a leader until we have some historical perspective. One big risk is that by centralizing power and weakening democratic institutions with no clear successor he may be setting the country up for someone much less talented and/or more corrupt following him and undoing whatever good the stability of his rule has provided.

I'm not even sure he has actually weakened democratic institutions - they were in pieces when he took over - but yes it's never good when that kind of authoritarianism becomes the long term norm (or when it becomes this popular).

obama threatens putin that if he invades more of southern or eastern ukraine there will be more sanctions. honestly, i was a huge fan of obama when i voted for him, partially bc i thought he made a lot of sense on foreign affairs, but this is some weak-chin bullshit. i understand it's probably not a good idea to do more but why not just keep his mouth shut instead of making these empty threats that i can't imagine impress putin? like maybe he could be like "we're letting our allies in europe take the lead on this one." instead of OH HORRORS sanctions???

also lol:

European leaders will meet on Thursday in Brussels at an emergency summit to wrestle with the dilemma of what to do about Vladimir Putin. The EU described the Russian seizure of Crimea this week as "an act of aggression" – but it does not know how to respond.

A crisis that started with an EU summit fiasco three months ago may reach its climax on Thursday with an EU summit failure as Putin's short-term hard power collides with European longer-term soft power and leaves the EU looking weak and feckless.

The Italians and the French do not want to punish Putin. The Swedes and the east Europeans take a hard line. The British government is worried about the impact on the City of London and losing the capital's big-spending oligarchs. German industry is lobbying strongly against imposing sanctions on Russia.

And while Washington talks of isolating Russia because of Ukraine, Berlin is saying the opposite, stressing engagement and keeping channels open to the Kremlin.

we don't even have fucking support for our policy towards putin from the EU ffs

what the fuck do you expect? the eu has to live with russia nextdoor and can't afford to alienate it, russia knows this and europe knows it

i expect that if you can't even get EU to agree to sanctions then just keep your fucking mouth shut mr. leader of the free world + stop these empty threats

Yeah, let Europe deal with this. Or not.

america and its european fellow travellers are culpable in some measure for encouraging ukraine's aspirations towards the eu and especially nato, which was never happening but encouraged russian revanchist planning as soon as it saw its military interests in crimea threatened

and yeah for the cheap seats, this isn't to exculpate russian aggression, whatever

EU has imposed almost as many sanctions as US so far. And also, the countries are making an effort to find their gas elsewhere, which would be a more damaging blow to Russia's economy than anything sanctions could do, I think.

europe just doesn't care enough about ukraine's sovereignty or its westernizing aspirations and is beholden to russia, america is less beholden but absent a few subnormal malcontents like mccain cares even less about ukraine, none of them are prepared to risk anything substantial in defending its integrity, so russia will always get what it wants when it cares exceedingly about ukraine in its paranoid, anachronistic great-power way and is prepared to use crude and illicit tactics

the crimean annexation might have been avoided if two decades of western policy towards the ukraine more reflected the degree to which its autonomy was valued, if a more transparent approach had been taken instead of bien pensant warm words and empty solicitations that accelerated internal conflict and now territorial dissolution

more /accurately/ reflected

i expect that if you can't even get EU to agree to sanctions then just keep your fucking mouth shut mr. leader of the free world + stop these empty threats

― Mordy , Thursday, 20 March 2014 21:57 (27 minutes ago)

america can try, it shouldn't be lamented for that, but ultimately it resolves to a sort of phatic shunning gesture -- russia as a deplorable, atavistic, violent drunkard unbecoming of the liberal order of nations, it's a sort of diplomatic fiction in defiance of the reality that russia isn't weakened at all, any more than china is when its colonial policy in tibet or turkestan is criticized by western leaders

something i was thinking about today (tho in an unrelated fp topic!) was that this discursive "concern trolling" is super prevalent in geopolitical conflict/diplomacy. it's not enough that we disapprove that russia is annexing Crimea, but that we let them know that we think this is a really poor idea for them, and they're overextending, and this will have repercussions (which of course it surely will, but everything has repercussions including the choice not to act at all in any given scenario). thank god for contemporary trolling studies for helping me understand this prolific geopolitical trope.

Transdniestr is a really weird place. In theory it's a separatist region hostile to Moldovan rule but it's home of Moldova's biggest football team and the national side plays lots of its matches there. It's effectively a corporate state run by the Sheriff Company.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_(company)

Slightly surprised that they want to be part of a country that might actually scrutinise them.

― Yuri Bashment (ShariVari), Thursday, March 20, 2014 1:14 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's also non-contiguous with russia, although by sea it is not far from crimean naval base. but russian annexing a non-contiguous territory that shares most of its border with western ukraine would definitely give people bigger heebie-jeebies.

i mean hell take finland why don't they

just imagine if there were a noncontiguous russian territory adjoining poland

oh yeah, there is that.

Kaliningrad is non-contiguous too, but it does make things more complicated. Transdniestr has been outside of Moldovan control for so long it's arguably a slightly different situation though. On the other hand, Moldova is broadly aligned with Russia on a lot of stuff, by necessity if not inclination. It wouldn't surprise me if Russia turned down the offer as a reward for Moldova joining the customs union.

Xps, obvs, as point has been made.

this is fucked up, but the macro at the end is both OTM and pretty funny

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/ukrainian-nationalists-hand-russians-propaganda-coup-with-video-of-assault/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

also the journalist who tweeted that is kind of foxy

http://impmagination.com/i/people/dt/dt_12.jpg

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-26663168

http://i.imgur.com/qcSrox7.png

Lol, so the Danish newspapers are checking how a trade-war with Russia would impact Danish export, consisting mainly of pork. And the truth is, not much at the moment, since Russia is already boycutting Danish pork, as they claim to have found infected pork from Latvia... Basically, they were already shitting on international agreements when they feel like it.

Bad news for Lego. I think they do about $400m of business there!

A drop in the ocean, honestly... Carlsberg is probably more in trouble, they were apparantly focusing especially on the territory. But really, it's only the pork-export which would harm the Danish economy as a whole.

so some of my family from ukraine is apparently over at my parent's house right now. i hadn't heard they were coming before today but i don't think it's like a refugee sitch - maybe an impromptu visit? idk. i'll report back w/ deets when i get them.

Hey Mordy, you do recognize that if Obama says nothing he will be criticized as weak; and if he imposes sanctions (with the US having less influence there than Europe) he will also be criticized.

So news is that anti-semitism, despite public protestations from Yaakov Dov Bleich, is common. A friend who built an orphanage for Jewish kids and a Jewish museum in Kryvyi Rih, had some windows broken and he's now thinking of immigrating to Germany (always lol when former Soviet-bloc Jews decide the safest place to go is Germany). Otherwise they are very concerned - upset about the government shooting protestors, uncertain about the future. Lots of foreboding talk. No plans to becomes emigrate yet from my family...