ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

the junta who took over Kyiv in February are literal Nazis, organizational heirs to mass murderer Stepan Bandera (they carry his portrait at rallies there)

true that nazi-friendly bandera is widely liked & popular among nationalists who sometimes try to play down the whole 'he was a fascist + nazi collaborator' thing

Poland trained those guys to take over

reportedly true

yet they are openly hostile to Poland

i mean poland is giving NATO plenty of room to do training exercises in case kiev needs defending, so if there's hostility to poland from kiev it doesn't seem to be doing much damage

NATO supporting nazis against Russia is some weird through-the-looking glass shit, was my reaction

ha

We can't pretend that the presence of the Far Right (and their enablers) is not problematic. But to pretend that their presence is Russia's motivation is naive. Like most of you, I just don't want more people to die.

There are actual Nazis in government but they form a relatively small element. Yarosh is unlikely to get more than a few percent of the vote in the Presidential election.

The main nationalist group has a more complex background but they are happy to work with deeply unpleasant groups when it suits them. The apparent deployment of Pravy Sektor thugs in hot zones and partnering with Svoboda in the transition government being examples.

The rehabilitation of Bandera has been going on for a while. There are statues of him all over West Ukraine. Russians see him as a Nazi stooge, some Ukrainians see him as a pragmatist who allied himself with whoever could free Ukraine of the Soviets. Poland is definitely not cool with this and has made a number of official protests over the years. Their general hostility to Russia, and a certain amount of Catholic solidarity, acts as a counterbalance.

Most Jewish oligarchs in Eastern Ukraine did have closer ties to the Party of the Regions but some have been willing to work with Kyiv to keep the country together.

oh I'm under no such pretenses. it's just one brand of fascist vs. another, with a lot of duplicitous noise covering actual motivations.

kinda cool with them all killing each other tbh, but yeah don't want to be involved.

xp

Russia is motivated by the existential crisis of a shrinking population and clinging on to regional power status, and hasn't been a good actor in the crisis.

But the Ukrainians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine had every reason to be concerned by Svoboda getting 5 cabinet seats + secretary of the National Security council for Svoboda cofounder/Fatherland go-between Parubiy, and the Svoboda/Fatherland government hasn't done much to alieviate their concerns.

A Lviv torchlight parade from 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2Il2LeEQYk

And from November 2013 (prior to the Maidan protests), schoolchildren near Lviv chanting "One language. One nation. One Fatherland. It's Ukraine. Hang the Russians! Whoever not jumping - Russian!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8YqjAcaLYc

Chilling for those familiar with the slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." Svoboda has fallen in polls from 6% to around 2% since the beginning of the protests, so clearly this sort of ultra-nationalist sentiment isn't common. My concern is that the ultras recognize their time is limited, and have reasons to provoke more polarization, a Russian response, or with Fatherland, contest the likely victory by Poroshenko in the Presidential election.

In the meantime Putin appears to be backing down, (at least) publically calling on the separatists to delay their independence referendum. Perhaps he concluded Poroshenko (who supports EU ties, but opposes NATO expansion) is someone Russia can deal with.

Is the Atlantic reading ILX?? http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/05/what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-ukraine/100730/

haha that was my first thought tbh

http://i.imgur.com/FUB6D0c.jpg

(that's actually Pakistan)

lol

so here's what the WSJ was running on its front page today under headline RUSSIA CONTINUES TO ADVANCE IN UKRAINE

http://www.viendongdaily.com/res/fckfolder/Image/NewEditor/2014/5/09-May-2014/UKRAINE.jpg

so here's what the WSJ was running on its front page today under headline RUSSIA CONTINUES TO ADVANCE IN UKRAINE


--purposely lend impetus to my HOOS (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver)

This reminds me - Friday I was listening to the Diane Rehm show and the substitute host referred to the thousands of "Soviet" troops amassed at the Ukrainian border and nobody on the show corrected him. An understandable Freudian slip.

http://i.imgur.com/F3ign.gif

i imagine after the results of these votes things are going to get particularly intractable

clock is running out tho.. the russian army has been mobilized since what, march? you cant keep troops mobilized forever.

Russia admits 10,000 near the Ukrainian border, Ukraine claims 80,000. At the Ukrainian estimate, that's 20% of the 400,000 Russian ground forces total. All active-duty units, as Russia hasn't mobilized, per se. Many of those troops were originally stationed nearby around Voronezh and Rostov, and frankly it doesn't cost that much more to keep troops in tents on the steppe in your own country than in barracks.

They can leave the heavy equipment in place and rotate other troops through, just as the U.S. has done for 60+ years in places like Germany, Okinawa, Kosovo, and Kuwait. The Russian budget can cover this, and the Central asia/Siberian troops may welcome the change from monotony.

A Ukrainian Rada commission just cleared Burkut snipers of firing during the Maidan protests (at least with their service weapons).

There were allegation about provocateurs acting immediately following the
21 February deal brokered with Yanukovich.

As in all things Ukraine, cui bono?

Oh, and Joe Biden's son just signed onto the board of the largest Ukrainian gas producer.

well, that's a good look.

Peskov has said Russia sees no problem in Biden's son working in the Ukrainian gas industry as "everyone knows Ukraine has no gas. The only gas in Ukraine is Russian".

Apparently Aleksander Kwaśniewski, former President of Poland, joined the board on the quiet earlier this year too.

There's a bit of legacy conventional gas. Ukraine was the center of the Soviet gas industry, peaking at 69 billion cubic meters in the 70s, mostly from the eastern Dnipro-Donetsk Basin, but that's fallen to 20 bcm in recent years. For comparison, Russia produces around 650 bcm. Most of the prospective gas in Ukraine is either offshort (and lost with Crimea), or in shale beds, only available through fracking. Poland is already exploring the Lublin basin which continues right through West Ukraine.

Peskov has said Russia sees no problem in Biden's son working in the Ukrainian gas industry as "everyone knows Ukraine has no gas. The only gas in Ukraine is Russian".

he's pretty hateful but i must admit this guy trolls like no other

Decent Mark Ames piece on the culture war that's driving some of Russian policy here:

http://pando.com/2014/05/14/sorry-america-the-ukraine-isnt-all-about-you/

this seems like good news, maybe?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/world/europe/ukraine-workers-take-to-streets-to-calm-Mariupol.html?hp&_r=0

it certainly puts the lie to the "referendum" results

The polling is pretty consistent that (unlike Crimea), only a small minority (around 15%) in the Donbas want independence, though the sentiment for more autonomy, less corruption, limits to oligarch power etc. are much higher. I get the sense that not only does Russia have little control over Eastern Ukrainian militants, but the self-appointed councils have little control either. Imagine arming all the football hooligans in your town and withdrawing the police, and this is the result.

pretty much the whole country (outside of many oligarchs and most of the political class) want less corruption, i imagine.

this is probably the most OTM thing said about the separatists in recent days:

“There are a lot of idiots with guns in my city,” Aleksey Rybinsev, 38, a computer programmer who said he welcomed the new patrols

His decision to throw his weight fully behind the interim government in Kiev could inflict a body blow to the separatists, already reeling from Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s withdrawal of full-throated support last week

This is a very strange take on his position. It's hard to square throwing his weight fully behind the interim government with what he actually said - that the idea of governing from Kyiv, as happened pre-crisis, had "run out of steam". He rejected full separatism but called for a federal Ukraine with power devolved to the regions - which is what a lot of people in the east have been after all along. Not sure thousands of metal workers have " routed" militants either. Most accounts have hundreds of Akhmetov employees working with local NGOs to clear barricades and tidy Mariupol up but without any notable animosity.

yeah it seems less of a "rout" than a generally welcome sign that cooler heads may prevail.

and yeah, it doesn't seem he's "throwing his weight behind the interim gov't" so much as acknowledging them as partners toward some negotiation of regional autonomy.

A federal Ukraine with oligarchs acting as local power brokers, rather than competing with each other as national power brokers, looks increasingly likely. Poroshenko and Tymoshenko will take Kyiv and the West, Akhmetov and various Yanukovich associates will get the East. You'll probably get a situation where corrupt businessmen have even more power than they did when people started taking to the streets to complain about them bit it'll look preferable to civil war to most.

feels a little wrong giving this another look but wtf

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117848/peoples-republic-luhansk-appoints-minister-culture

not like i know better but julia ioffe's coverage has been pretty good? what's the point of this, even?

lol that legs spread bench pic is actually her fb VK profile pic!

i haven't read this yet but i love snyder - i just started reading "the reconstruction" last night

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/22/ukraine-edge-democracy/

Snyder has been consistently awful throughout this.

his pieces on ukraine have been among the most hysterical responses i've seen.

i just finished reading this piece and i thought it was very level-headed and reasonable?

tbh, i started to do a point-by-point response but got fed up three paragraphs through. There's barely a assertion in the piece that isn't unsupported or highly slanted. This is just one example:

People in the southeast of Ukraine certainly have legitimate political complaints, above all corruption, but language is simply not an issue. People in the southeast speak Russian all the time in all settings without hindrance, and the current government in Kiev, like the leading presidential candidates, has made it a point to assure people that they will continue to allow the use of Russian where people so desire.

Literally the first thing the government did was to pass a law preventing any language other than Ukrainian from being used for state business. The only reason they can be said to have "made a point to assure people" Russian can still be used is because they were forced to backtrack almost immediately.

He presents a nice picture - in which there aren't massive concerns about the politics and integrity of the leading presidential candidates, in which there aren't elected politicians posting on Facebook about how much they enjoyed seeing Russians burned to death in Odessa, in which the far-right is marginal rather than being a key part of the transitional government and actively involved in government-sanctioned military operations, etc, but it's just not true and the real situation, both in Ukraine and in Russia, is far more complicated.

Reminder that Julia Ioffe posted a picture of two black men at a demonstration in Moscow and said that because of their skin colour they cannot be Muskovites https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/441971424669216768 Also, the above piece about the minister of culture isn't anything new for her. Won't even go into her cheerleading of Navalny and the kid gloves treatment that she gave his nationalism and racism while working at the New Yorker.

She's a talented writer but both she and Snyder are malicious hacks, as bad as most you'd find at Russia Today.

Poroshenko appears to have won outright in the first round.

Turnout in Donetsk was about five per cent, though, so expect questions about legitimacy to remain.

Crucial few days. The outright Willy Wonka victory, despite low turnout in Donetsk, may deter Iron Lady T. and her Svoboda pals from contesting this referendum on NATO membership. I'm not so sure, given past comments, that either Tymoshenko or the former Maidan Self-Defence are fans of democracy.

It seems to be becoming gradually clearer that Putin has little appetite for direct military intervention in Eastern Ukraine.

Thomas Friedman is ready to declare victory:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/opinion/friedman-putin-blinked.html?hp&rref=opinion

http://springtimeofnations.blogspot.be/2014/04/donetsk-rebels-novorossiya-fits-russian.html

"Ukraine accuses Russia of letting rebels bring in tanks"

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/12/us-ukraine-crisis-tanks-idUSKBN0EN1KS20140612

What's the deal with this squinty Russia Today guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JFY6Xug6X8

Did they go out and try to find a guy who looks like Putin or what

http://i.imgur.com/NoKhJf6.jpg

Maybe they should just get the Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Orthodox priests in a room, lock the door and tell them to fight it out between themselves.

That's a great photo, though.