ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

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.