ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

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.

A piece in the Telegraph about the guys leading the assault on Donetsk:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11025137/Ukraine-crisis-the-neo-Nazi-brigade-fighting-pro-Russian-separatists.html

Russians Open Fire in Ukraine, NATO Reports

Bad couple of days - 15 refugees killed by rocked fire with both sides blaming each other, Lithuanian envoy apparently killed by separatists and a Russian journalist captured by a government-aligned militia may have just turned up dead. With any luck, the aid convoy will be able to get in and get out without incident.

*rocket*

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/world/europe/ukraine-russia-novoazovsk-crimea.html

This seems quite unclear at the moment. Andriy Lysenko, the spokesman for the Ukrainian military, was quoted yesterday as saying 'this is full-scale war' with Russia and today saying that there hadn't been any military invasion and the situation is stable. A couple of Ukrainian journalists are claiming that the border has been lost, the Ukrainian army is saying it's not true.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28966679

Poroshenko is now saying that Russia has invaded. still seems kind of gray but it does seem like a very Putin move - face to face meeting with Poroshenko in Georgia earlier in the week while quietly sneaking troops through the back door - given how much he seems to favor having cover during his incursions.

looks like it's getting less gray:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/world/europe/ukraine-russia-nato-photos.html

Heard a Russian dude on the radio today claiming photos of tanks have been faked. When asked about the Russian paramilitaries troops captured, he claimed they were on leave and, you know, just decided to go into Ukraine.

reading RT.com right now has been an education in propaganda. i get why so many russian citizens think their government is the victim in all of this

All the dead civilians help too, tbh.

Lots of Russian public opinion centres on the government not having done enough to intervene. That's certainly partly the result of propaganda but there are other factors.

Not to worry, Putin's starting to make up for lost time.
Good points by Samantha Power, for inst certain trends in funerals for Russian soldiers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/full-transcript-remarks-by-ambassador-samantha-power-us-permanent-representative-to-the-united-nations-at-a-security-council-session-on-ukraine/2014/08/28/b3f579b2-2ee8-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html

New UN OHCHR report is justifiably damning on all sides:

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14975&LangID=E

http://i.imgur.com/PDQ7vEO.png

The Russian press hits back: "Barack Obama Ridiculed Over Old-Fashioned Suit, Americans say he dresses like a pensioner".

is that really what that says?

Yes, pretty much. It's Komsomolskaya Prava which is the Russian equivalent of The Sun, though.

i thought we had a new ukraine thread

Seemed slightly disrespectful to the victims of the air crash to use that one to catalogue the ongoing farce.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday hailed pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine as “insurgents” battling an army that he likened to Nazi invaders during World War II, and the Ukrainian government raised the prospect of joining NATO as it seeks help in repelling what it calls an outright Russian military invasion of its territory.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/putin-calls-on-pro-russian-separatists-to-release-trapped-ukrainian-soldiers/2014/08/29/a580cb28-e6a7-4ea0-b6f4-e6ffea0162b5_story.html?hpid=z1

certainly seems like NATO is clamoring for ukraine to join ><

what a great idea.

If nothing else, it gives Ukraine another bargaining chip to offer up as part of a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Donetsk and Lugansk leaders are now setting out what they would see as acceptable concessions from Kyiv, rather than talking about independence (a certain amount of autonomy, protection of the Russian language, etc). It seems likely that the Donetsk leader will also take part in the next round of peace talks in Minsk - for the first time. Could be very positive signs.

The Defense Minister Valeriy Heletei has apparently said that the "anti-terrorist operation is over" and 'Russia has lost', though it's not clear whether anything has changed on the ground.

I've booked to go to Kyiv for a few days next month and it'll be interesting to get a sense of what's going on politically. Criticism of Poroshenko for failing to deliver on election promises has already started.

My folks on the ground (young educated ethnic Russians who are pro-Europe) are despairing and wishing Putin would fuck off so they can stop being on the same side as some really gross fascists.

Whether the actual fascists on Maidan made them more or less certain of this, I don’t know, but hearing it gave body to something the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko had said to me in Kiev: ‘It was the liberals’ tolerance of the nationalists on Maidan that led to this. If they had rejected them right away, things might have turned out differently. It might have led to the collapse of Maidan. It might even have meant that Yanukovych remained president. But at least there would have been peace.’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-not-kill-them-all

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told a European official that he could “take Kiev in two weeks” if he wanted to, adding a new dimension to the tensions building in Ukraine as Russian forces become more involved in the fighting there.

The Gessen piece is probably the best thing i've read about this so far.

Ishchenko is probably right but, practically speaking, i'm not sure how a protest movement with no weapons, no leaders and no collective objectives could have rejected a well-drilled, well-financed and well-armed fascist element, particularly given the latter's willingness to attack other pro-Maidan groups. The far-right were taking their own action - occupying buildings, attacking police, threatening politicians, etc - and i'm not sure that any of the liberal protesters could have done much about it, short of all packing up and going home. There was an EU deal on the table which would have meant a unity government and early elections but it was rejected outright by the fascists and it's tough to see how it could have succeeded with just the liberal backing.

To some extent, a fairly straight line can be drawn from the perceived need to pander to the nationalist right when Yanukovich fell to elements of the separatist reaction to the need to utilise openly fascist militia like Azov when the regular Ukrainian army refused to kill their own people. At what point that could have been stopped will probably be argued for decades.

There are two fairly worrying elements for the future, one of which Gessen picks up on. The first is what happens when, as is almost inevitable, the war ends in compromise and you have thousands of far-right activists who have killed and risked their lives for an ethnically pure Ukraine free of Russian and Jewish elements coming back home to a government that looks almost exactly the same as Yuschchenko's and a deeper economic crisis.

The second is, as Gessen mentions, the open contempt Ukrainian (and Russian) liberals have for the rest of their countries. To what extent can you have a 'liberal' future when so many of the liberals look on poor Ukrainians and Russians as backwards peasants whose opinions (and in some cases, lives) are worth less than theirs? It's pretty common to hear people in Kyiv, Moscow and St Petersburg suggest that civilisation effectively stops about 20km from their city limits. It's those unloved provincials that Putin is now aggressively courting.