On Hitler's Birthday, US to Begin Openly Training Neo-Nazi Integrated Forces in Ukraine - Washington's Blog

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Robert Barsocchini

The US has long be openly coordinating with, advocating for, and supporting neo-Nazi and neo-Nazi integrated forces in Ukraine.

Here is Victoria Nuland, a high-ranking and corrupt member of Obama’s executive, meeting with far-right figures Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Vitali Klitschko, and officially designated neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok:



In 2012, the EU officially designated Svoboda, the militant group led and co-founded by Tyahnybok, as an anti-democratic, “racist”, “anti-Semitic” group, and the World Jewish Congress designated it a “neo-Nazi” group.

In a leaked phone call, Nuland was caught determining who should assume the post of prime minister after the Ukrainian coup d’etat was completed, or, in Nuland’s term “midwifed”. She picked Yatsenyuk, and, indeed, he took the position after the coup. Nuland suggested that he should meet with Tyahnybok “four times a week”.

For his part, also exhibiting a Nazi-influenced outlook, Yatsenyuk later wrote on a government website:

“They lost their lives because they defended men and women, children and the elderly who found themselves in a situation facing a threat to be killed by invaders and sponsored by them subhumans. First, we will commemorate the heroes by wiping out those who killed them and then by cleaning our land from the evil”

Complete story at - On Hitler's Birthday, US to Begin Openly Training Neo-Nazi Integrated Forces in Ukraine Washington's Blog

Backtracking From the Brink in Ukraine | Stratfor

By Jay Ogilvy

If ever there were a flashpoint — to invoke the title of George Friedman's new book — Ukraine is it. The fragile cease-fire now in place in eastern Ukraine is the pilot light to a new Cold War between the United States and Russia as their proxies poise to reload.

At this critical moment, American media have been fanning the flames of this flashpoint. While Russia has hardly been innocent of violating international law in its annexation of Crimea, it is worth taking stock of some history, near and distant, to temper the narratives that could escalate into a shooting war that should be entirely avoidable.

Ever since the lead-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the American media have been filled with Vladimir Putin bashing. For Americans, Putin is an easy target with his KGB background, bare-chested bravado and anti-gay policies. But this obsessive focus on Putin's personality obscures much more important geopolitical realities.

False Parallels

The dominant U.S. narrative for Ukraine is that Ukraine is simply one more Eastern European country trying to pry itself out from under seven decades of Soviet oppression. This narrative is profoundly misleading. Ukraine is not Poland and it is not Latvia or Romania. These countries are each largely united by a shared language and culture. They are also further fused through suffering from prior Russian incursions.

Ukraine is different from most of its neighbors in Eastern Europe. It is both deeply divided, culturally and politically, and its eastern half is strongly bound to Russia.

Just look at the maps of the presidential elections of 2004, 2010 and 2014.


Note the similarity between these electoral maps and the distribution of Russian speakers:

Complete story at - Backtracking From the Brink in Ukraine | Stratfor

Beyond Left and Right, Beyond Red and White: Framing the Liberation War in Donbass | Nina Kouprianova

by Nina Kouprianova

“There are no separate Russia or Ukraine, but one Holy Rus” – Elder Iona of Odessa

The year 2014 saw an unprecedented surge of patriotism in contemporary Russia, which resulted in popularizing the notion of the Russian World. One reason for increased patriotic sentiment was Crimea’s return to the home port after the overwhelmingly positive vote by its majority-Russian residents in a referendum one year ago. The onset of the liberation war in Donbass from the West-backed Kiev regime was the other. This war truly delineated the stakes for the existence of the Russian World. The latter is not an ethnic, but a civilizational concept that encompasses shared culture, history, and language in the Eurasian space within a traditionalist framework. To a certain extent and despite the obvious ideological differences, the Russian Empire and the USSR embodied the same geopolitical entity. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the ongoing crisis in Donbass is the symbolism—religious and historic—that surpasses the commonly used, but outdated Left-Right political spectrum. In the Russian context, this also means overcoming the Red-White divide of the Communist Revolution. That this war pushed Russians to examine their country’s raison d’être is somewhat remarkable: for two decades its citizens did not have an official ideology, prohibited by the Constitution that is based on Western models. The emergence of a new way of thinking in Russia will become clearer once we refer to the meaning of religious insignia, wars—Russian Civil and Great Patriotic, as well as the question of ideology in the Postmodern world.

Background to the Ukrainian Conflict

Prior to examining these factors, let us recap the recent historic events that led up to them. Since 1991, NATO has been moving closer to Russia’s borders despite its promises otherwise at the time of the Soviet collapse. Western officialdom used project Ukraine—not without its oligarchic elites’ own volition—as project anti-Russia, based upon the negative identity of the Western Ukrainian minority. Large sums of money were invested into establishing aggressively anti-Russian cadres in the media and opinion-making in places like Kiev, where none existed before. Internally, post-Soviet Ukraine was a historically problematic entity from the onset. Indeed, it attempted to house two conflicting identities without much effort at reasonable cohesion: Russians left behind across the newly instituted border as well as eastern and central Ukrainians sharing roots with today’s Russia (historically, eastern Orthodox Novorossia and Malorossia) on the one hand, and Western Ukrainians, such as Galicians (Greek Catholics in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) seeking greater ties with Europe, on the other.

In February of 2014, these two identities came to a clash, when the country saw a West-backed coup d’état under the banner of European integration. A siren song, the latter was essentially meant to transform Ukraine into a large market for dumping European goods, economically, NATO bases, militarily, with a slew of other negative possibilities that surface whenever IMF credits are involved. The coup channeled a certain level of popular discontent with the Yanukovich government, expressed at the Maidan, to bring about the logical conclusion to project Ukraine. This was an ideologically anti-Russian state—based on the ethnic fundamentalist views of its Western minority—that ignored the wishes of eastern Ukrainian residents. Its violent inception led to another logical conclusion. When the Kiev government denied that region its basic rights of language and popular representation through federalization, and attempted to crush them by force, a liberation war in Donbass—historic Novorossia since the time of Catherine the Great—began as a response. Those that Maidan attendees called “slaves” sought to be free after all.

A year and 50,000 deaths later—if the German secret service is to be believed—this conflict remains on the lips of political analysts. Donbass infrastructure is destroyed, 2.5 million refugees fled into Russia (including previous guest workers), Ukraine’s economy is collapsing, and half of its best farm lands had already been purchased by the oligarchs and foreign companies. There is even growing disagreement within Europe—over the questions of Ukraine and the consequent Russian sanctions—the atomization of which would benefit Washington’s ability to exert even greater influence in the region over increasingly un-sovereign states.

Complete story at - Beyond Left and Right, Beyond Red and White: Framing the Liberation War in Donbass | Nina Kouprianova

U.S. Ships 50 Bradley Tanks to Ukraine: Europeans Are Furious Washington's Blog

Eric Zuesse

Apparently, Obama, though he says he hasn’t made up his mind about whether to send weapons to Ukraine, actually has and is. He now seems to be quietly trashing the spirit though no provision in the Minsk II truce that was arranged by Merkel, Hollande, Putin, and Poroshenko, and signed by the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine, and both of the rebelling former parts of Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic. Obama now appears to be sending heavy weapons to Ukraine, and thus assisting Ukraine to resume attacking the DPR & LPR.

Even conservative Europeans are expressing outrage. Followers of Italy’s Sylvio Berlusconi, and even the leader of Austria’s anti-immigrant “Freedom Party,” are shocked and appalled by this Obama action.

Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, posted online a photo alleged to be of Bradley tanks now on rail-cars in Linz Austria en-route to Ukraine; he estimated 50 of them.

Complete story at - U.S. Ships 50 Bradley Tanks to Ukraine: Europeans Are Furious Washington's Blog

Colonel Cassad (in English) - Destabilizing the old world order

Britain's Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond gave a speech in London in which he again spoke about the destabilizing role of Russia in the Ukrainian crisis.

"President Putin's actions — illegally annexing Crimea and now using Russian troops to destabilize eastern Ukraine – fundamentally undermine the security of sovereign nations of Eastern Europe," — said Hammond, speaking in the Royal United Services Institute in London.

According to Hammond, Putin is not going to follow the rules accepted in the international community, the goal of which is to keep peace between nations. Quite the opposite he is bent on "subverting it", due to which Russia is potentially the "single greatest threat to Britain's security."
Earlier in his BBC interview the head of the British Foreign Office said that there are no signs of changing the Moscow's policy towards the Ukrainian conflict.

He added that additional sanctions against Russia may be passed in the case of the worsening situation in Ukraine.

Ukrainian authorities and the western countries accuse Russia of giving military aid to the separatists in the east of Ukraine and of sending military force to participate in the conflict.

Moscow consistently denies direct participation in the armed conflict in Donbass and accuses the west of not having the desire to settle the crisis peacefully.

Merkel convinced Obama.

On Monday evening it became known that the US president Barack Obama decided not to ship lethal weapons to Ukraine for now.

As the Associated Press agency was told by the ambassador of Germany in Washington Peter Wittig, Obama made this decision in February after the talks in the White House with Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to Wittig, the American president agreed with Merkel that more room needs to be given to diplomacy in the situation of the cease-fire that started.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/uk/2015/03/150310_hammond_speech_russia_threat_europe (in Russian) — link

The only thing in which it is possible to agree with Hammond is that the current Russian line is destroying the existing world order, willingly or unwillingly, which its current masters naturally don't like. Few can be deceived by hypocritical lamentations that the existing world order served the goal of keeping peace, because it is precisely the masters of the existing world order who lead in the number of aggressive wars and foreign-inspired coups, which violate the sovereignty of independent and formally independent countries. It is hard to say that Russia consciously sought actions that destroy this world order. For many years Russia tried to integrate into this system, but no matter how our westernizers tried, they were regularly shown the door. In the end, Russia was forced to throw monkey wrenches into the works of the wheels of the existing world order, first in Georgia, then in Syria, and now in Ukraine. Not in any single one of these crucial events Russia wasn't the initiator of the process. Rather, it stood in defense, in some cases successfully, in other cases not so much. But this is unacceptable for those who benefit the most from the fact that our world works in this specific way and not in some other way.

Russia is currently unable to offer some kind of global project or a paradigm of development to the world. The rejection of superpower status is fixed at the level of the basic ideological postulates. Russia cannot replace the USA, even if she strongly wanted it. So there is no speaking about Russia trying to bring the USA down from their high horse and take the place of the world hegemony. Only China may entertain such ideas, and only in the long term. Russia simply wants to lock certain spheres of influence behind her and to review the rules of the game where the USA act as not the first among equals bur rather like a sovereign among vassals (perhaps, disloyal vassals). That is why the conflict based on the foundation of such postulates destroys and will continue to destroy the existing world order, both due to the natural development of the cold war between the USA and the RF and also due to the long-term consequences of wars and political and economic crises generated by this conflict.

Complete story at - Colonel Cassad (in English) - Destabilizing the old world order

Clinton Foundation Received $10 Million from Ukrainian Oligarch - Russia Insider

Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.

In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

The Pinchuk foundation said its donations were intended to help to make Ukraine “a successful, free, modern country based on European values.” It said that if Mr. Pinchuk was lobbying the State Department about Ukraine, “this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing.”

Complete story at - Clinton Foundation Received $10 Million from Ukrainian Oligarch - Russia Insider

Ukraine crisis takes its toll on country’s oligarchs | beyondbrics

Ukraine’s billionaires are losing their cash, especially those with significant assets in the Donbas, an area that has become a battlefield between pro-Russian rebels and units loyal to Kiev. According to Forbes’ 2015 billionaires list, Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, has lost as much as $5.8bn over the past year.

The mining, steel-making, energy and heavy engineering units of Akhmetov’s SCM Group have been forced to halt operations or reduce their capacity in territories controlled by separatists or near the front line. The Group’s media, telecommunications and banking businesses are also feeling the effects of the rebellion.

On Friday, SCM’s power generator and coal producer DTEK posted a full-year net loss of 19bn hryvnia ($850m) in 2014, after a net profit of 3bn hryvnia in the previous year. “Military operations and difficult macroeconomic situation in Ukraine have resulted in a significant decrease in the net profit of DTEK’s companies,” Piotr Fokow, finance director, said in a statement.

DTEK’s mines and power plants have been damaged by shelling, by pro-Kiev forces and by pro-Russian separatists; they have experienced power blackouts and other logistical problems.

Two of DTEK’s producers of anthracite, Rovenkianthracite and Sverdlovanthracite, have been running at between a quarter and a third of capacity, mainly due to the destruction of railway infrastructure. In peacetime, they produce up to 40,000 tonnes of coal a day; now, they are managing just 8,000 tonnes.

Complete story at - Ukraine crisis takes its toll on country’s oligarchs | beyondbrics

The Making of a Christian Taliban in Ukraine - The Intercept

THE RECRUITMENT POINT for volunteers in Dmytro Korchynsky’s holy war is located in the basement of a building in central Kiev, on Chapaev Street, in what used to be a billiard club. Anyone can sign up, and the location isn’t secret — its address and phone number is on the Internet.

Inside, lying on the billiard tables, are toy Kalashnikovs, which recruits can use to shoot at targets on the wall. Behind the bar, shelves are lined not with liquor bottles but with Molotov cocktails left over from the violent protests that ousted the government a year ago; the firebombs may be useful in the next stage of Ukraine’s upheavals.

Along with being a recruitment center, the former billiard club also serves as the headquarters of Korchynksy’s political organization, “Bratstvo” (in English, the Brotherhood). I find Korchynsky in a side room furnished with a large billiard table, worn-out leather sofa, armchairs and a piano. Lying on the piano are the notes of Chopin’s funeral march and the lyrics to the German national anthem, whose first verse, beginning “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” harkens back to the Nazi era. It is perhaps an unfortunate choice of song for a political figure that is often described as an extremist, ultranationalist and fascist.

Korchynsky does not pretend to be moderate, but he doesn’t appreciate the worst epithet used against his forces.

“We are not Nazis,” he tells me. “We are patriots and nationalists.”

Korchynsky is nearly a caricature of a Russian-hating Ukrainian nationalist. His silver hair contrasts with his dark, bushy mustache, which is turned down at the edges in the Cossack style. The St. Mary’s Battalion, which is one of more than a dozen private groups fighting alongside the Ukrainian Army against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, is Korchynsky’s creation. It is also one of the more unusual volunteer formations in the ragtag forces taking on the separatists, incorporating an ideology that manages to mix Christian messianism with Islamic jihadism.

Complete story at - The Making of a Christian Taliban in Ukraine - The Intercept

Ukraine needs more bailout financing – Ukraine finance minister

Ukraine needs more bailout financing than currently promised to help jump-start the embattled nation’s economy, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko said Monday in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

"The package that we have is going to stabilize the financial banking system, but it’s not enough to seriously restart growth and promote growth," Jaresko said after meetings with U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

The newspaper said that in meetings with senior U.S. Treasury, State Department and White House officials and lawmakers, Jaresko this week is making the case that backing Ukraine will pay geopolitical dividends.

"If, for whatever reason, one of our partners is not willing to come up with, or not able to come up with defensive military support, then provide us with financial support," Jaresko said.

But aside from promising to guarantee $2 billion of new Ukraine debt and working with the World Bank, Europe and other international lenders to provide support, U.S. officials haven’t indicated they are prepared to cough up any more cash, the newspaper said.

"Right now the coalition seems to be unified," the finance minister said.

Complete story at - Ukraine needs more bailout financing – Ukraine finance minister

Russia Won't Return Crimea To Ukraine Despite Threat Of Continued Sanctions, Kremlin Says

Russia reiterated Tuesday it will not return Crimea to Ukraine, one year after its much-criticized annexation of the region despite objections from Western leaders. The United States and European Union have each said they will not lift economic sanctions against Russia unless Crimea was returned to Ukrainian control.

“There is no occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a region of the Russian Federation and of course the subject of our regions is not up for discussion,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 following the disputed results of a referendum and one month after Russian soldiers entered the peninsula to quell unrest that forced pro-Russia former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to resign. Russian President Vladimir Putin said 97 percent of Crimean citizens had voted to join Russia, though many in the international community disputed the referendum’s alleged results.

The annexation of Crimea led to an ongoing conflict between pro-Russian separatist rebels and pro-government Ukrainian forces, resulting in the deaths of more than 5,800 people since last summer. Western leaders have accused Russia of providing the rebels with direct and logistical support, and both the United States and the European Union instituted economic sanctions as punishment. A U.S. State Department spokeswoman and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini each reiterated this week that sanctions will remain intact so long as Russia continues to control Crimea.

Despite international outrage, support for Putin has increased since Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Recent polls found Putin’s approval rating at between 80 percent and 90 percent.

Putin said in a documentary that aired Sunday that he was “ready” to place Russia’s nuclear weapons on standby if other nations attempted to interfere in Crimea’s annexation. He added the military intervention was enacted in part to save Yanukovich’s life, according to Reuters.

Complete story at - Russia Won't Return Crimea To Ukraine Despite Threat Of Continued Sanctions, Kremlin Says

Yatsenyuk: One Quarter of Economy Lost, Hundreds of Companies Closed / Russian peacekeeper

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Tuesday his country has lost 25 percent of its economy because of the conflict in Donbass, hundreds of businesses have been closed.

"We have lost a quarter of the Ukrainian economy. Because of the war…hundreds of companies have been closed, but we were able to collect more taxes than last year," Yatsenyuk said at a meeting with governors. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved $17.5-billion financial aid for Ukraine. In exchange for money Kiev committed to implementing deep political, social and financial reforms.
Yatsenyuk said Ukraine needs a new constitution, the main provisions of which should be approved in a referendum: "The will of the people, expressed through a referendum, should define Ukraine’s new constitution." Yatsenyuk said the new constitution would give the Ukrainian regions more powers, and would introduce a European legal system. Earlier in March, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree to set up a commission to amend the country’s constitution.

Complete story at - Yatsenyuk: One Quarter of Economy Lost, Hundreds of Companies Closed / Russian peacekeeper

U.S. war moves in Ukraine: Watch what they do, not what they say | Workers World

As activists, students and workers gather in Washington, D.C., for the “Spring Rising” anti-war mobilization March 18-21, many are probably unaware that 300 U.S. troops arrived in Ukraine this month, with another 300 expected to join them shortly.

The U.S. soldiers are stationed at the Yavoriv Training Area in Lviv, near the Polish border in western Ukraine. Their mission, according to the Pentagon, is to train divisions of the Ukrainian National Guard.

But their presence also establishes a provocative U.S. military “footprint” in this key agricultural and industrial country on the Russian Federation’s western border.

The first open and public U.S. military presence on Ukrainian soil comes amid a civil war raging in former southeastern Ukraine, now the independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, also called Novorossiya. It’s accompanied by unprecedented NATO war games and military buildup threatening Russia.

All this despite a ceasefire agreement, negotiated by Russia, Germany and France, which went into effect Feb. 15. As happened during previous ceasefires, the U.S.-backed government in Kiev routinely violates the terms and is using the “breathing spell” to rebuild its military forces to assault the embattled Donbass mining region.

“Before this week is up, we’ll be deploying a battalion minus … to the Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces for the fight that’s taking place,” the U.S.’s 173rd Airborne Brigade commander, Michael Foster, told a meeting of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington on March 3. (Global Research, March 3)

Complete story at - U.S. war moves in Ukraine: Watch what they do, not what they say | Workers World

Busting Ukraine Fakes (#1) – How Ukraine’s Media Works (Fakes) | The Truth Speaker

Graham Phillips

A series, looking at the fakes behind perhaps the world’s most dishonest media...

When Ukrainian media fakes about myself hit the hundreds, I stopped keeping track. To come in future instalments, but they did everything, from faking civilian cemeteries for cemeteries of the ‘Russian soldiers’ , to seeing ‘Russian soldiers‘ in every single fighter in Donbass (incidentally all Donbass citizens are ‘Russian actors’, in Ukrainian media).

Having been on the receiving end so often, I can tell you just how Ukraine’s mendacious media works – exemplified by this recent case in point. I arrived at Heathrow airport on March 4th, after having taken part in the MH17 investigation in the Netherlands. At Heathrow, I was detained for four hours, questioned by British authorities about my role in the conflict in Donbass, released without charge. I gave many interviews on the subject, describing exactly what had happened.

How this came out in the Ukrainian media was, such – ‘ ‘Journalist’ Graham Phillips passed on information about Russian occupant troops in Donbass to British Special Services’ - this from state-funded news portal http://antikor.com.ua/, this then disseminated into at least half a dozen Ukrainian news sites, countless social media.

Looking past the clumsily loaded terminology, let’s get to the article itself – ‘Phillips underwent many hours of questioning about my illegal activities in Donbass’ – ok, let’s look past some more troweled-on loaded terminology to get to the article itself.

‘After literally 5 minutes, Phillips agreed to cooperate with British authorities.’

Complete story at - Busting Ukraine Fakes (#1) – How Ukraine’s Media Works (Fakes) | The Truth Speaker

John Helmer: IMF Makes Ukraine War-Fighting Loan, Allows US to Fund Military Operations Against Russia, May Repay Gazprom Bill | naked capitalism

By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has agreed on a scheme of war financing for Ukraine. For the first time, according to Fund sources, the IMF is not only violating its loan repayment conditions, but also the purposes and safeguards of the IMF’s original charter.

IMF lending is barred for a member state in civil war or at war with another member state, or for military purposes, according to Article I of the Fund’s 1944-45 Articles of Agreement. This provides “confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.”

To deter Russian and other country directors from voting last week against the IMF’s loan, and releasing their reasons in public, the IMF board has offered Russia the possibility of, though not the commitment to repayment for Gazprom’s gas deliveries, and the $3 billion Russian state bond which falls due in December.

On March 11 the IMF board agreed to approve an Extended Loan Facility (EFF) for Ukraine for a total of 13.4 billion Special Drawing Rights (SDR), currently equivalent to $17.5 billion. Here are the IMF papers spelling out the details.

The first tranche agreed for payment amounts to $4.6 billion, and was paid on Friday. According to the IMF, another $4.6 billion may be released in three instalments later in the year – in June, September, and December. At the same time, the Ukrainian government is obliged to repay the IMF $840.1 million in past-due loan amounts and charges.

The Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde (lead image) did not claim in her press release that this is new money. Instead, she said the IMF is making a “change in the IMF-supported program from Stand-By Arrangement [SBA] to Extended Arrangement under the EFF, which is consistent with the more protracted nature of Ukraine’s balance-of-payment needs.” Lagarde also claimed the loan’s purpose is to “support immediate economic stabilization in Ukraine and a set of deep and wide-ranging policy reforms aimed at restoring robust growth.”

Complete story at - John Helmer: IMF Makes Ukraine War-Fighting Loan, Allows US to Fund Military Operations Against Russia, May Repay Gazprom Bill | naked capitalism

Russian Elites but Not Russian People, Ready to Capitulate to the West, Kagarlitsky Says | Johnson's Russia List

(Paul Goble – Window on Eurasia – Staunton, March 17, 2015)

The West does not understand Russia, but it does understand very well indeed Russia’s elites; and as a result, it has seriously miscalculated in its dealings with Moscow about Ukraine, according to Boris Kagarlitsky, who argues the elites are ready to capitulate in the face of sanctions but the Russian people never will be.

In fact, the Moscow analyst says, while increasing sanctions may increase the willingness of Russian elites to find compromises, they “not only will not frighten the population of Russia but on the contrary will push” all other Russians in the opposite direction and make them more anti-Western and anti-elite as well (stoletie.ru/vzglyad/elity_gotovy_kapitulirovat_627.htm).

Although the West and the elites assume the population will always be passive, in fact, that is not the case, and popular anger at anything that ordinary Russians view as a capitulation will be something the Kremlin will have to take into account. Indeed, Kagarlitsky says, this divide between elites and masses will form the core of Russian politics in the months ahead.

The Presidential Administration understands this, he says, but the government and even more the Russian liberal elites on whose views the West relies do not. And consequently, the West’s own actions instead of pushing Moscow in the direction it hopes for are in fact pushing the regime in very different ones.

And he argues that in this conflict, Moscow’s liberal intelligentsia will find itself in an ever weaker position because its support of the West on Ukraine means that it “has isolated itself from society and even from those of its strata which a year or two ago were ready to listen to its arguments.”

Complete story at - Russian Elites but Not Russian People, Ready to Capitulate to the West, Kagarlitsky Says | Johnson's Russia List

New Feature: Even More News for You

I'm making available today a new feature on my blog. While there is still a little bit more work that I want to do with it, I'd like to make it available to everyone right now in the hope that you'll find it useful. Click on one of the links below and you'll be taken there.

The new pages each contain a scrolling news widget. The news widgets are Russia News, Ukraine News, Novorossiya News, and Elsewhere in Ukraine News. This news widgets will allow access to a greater number of news stories than I could hope to post myself. Here's some basic information on each widget.

1. Russia News – the latest news concerning events and developments regarding Russia.

2. Ukraine News – the latest news regarding events and developments in Ukraine. This also includes NATO news, since we know that NATO is deeply involved in events in Ukraine.

3. Novorossiya News – news regarding the events Donetsk, Luhansk, and Novorossiya.

4. Elsewhere in Ukraine News – news regarding events elsewhere in Ukraine, with specific emphasis on cities and regions that may not remain in Ukraine for whole lot longer.

• Even More News for You - All four of the above feeds together on one page.


The first two categories have a larger number of news stories than the last two categories. This is not all that surprising. Because frankly, even a lot of alternative news sources are not covering these areas in much depth. Yet.

These news scrolls, while they contain a lot of current, up to the moment, news, are not updated instantaneously as news occurs. There will likely always be a couple hours delay. This is about the best that can be expected from a free solution. Yet, it will allow this website to be updated a lot more frequently than I could ever hope to update it myself.

Some caveats.

On the initial load, sometimes 1 or more news feeds don't load.  Refresh/reload the page and it should all work.  (Fingers crossed)

If you see a story that seems interesting, click it now. Once it disappears from the news scroll, it's gone and it won't come back.

Since the selection of these stories are computerized, there will no doubt be some stories that don't fit in well with the mission of this blog. As I discover these stories, I will go back and tweak the selection process in the hope that you see a more appropriate selection of stories.

If you see anything that appears not to be working too well, or doesn't seem to fit, feel free to leave a comment on the news scrolls page and I will look into it. And the feel free to drop me a comment and let me know how you like this new feature.

- Aaron Talka

Theft of Ukraine’s ‘Golden Loaf’ Reflects the Revolution’s Failings | TIME

The disappearance of a symbol of the revolution comes as President Poroshenko's approval rating crumbles

When revolutionaries stormed the mansion of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych one year ago, a few of them ran up the winding staircase to the master bathroom, expecting to find the golden toilet that was rumored to be in the house. Instead, as they rifled through the gaudy rooms that day, they found something better, or at least more bizarre: a golden loaf of bread, weighing about two kilograms, that a prominent businessman had given the President as a gift in an elaborate wooden box.

Of all the pieces of cartoonish opulence found on the palace grounds – including a stuffed lion, a golf course, a private zoo and a floating restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship – the golden loaf became the most famous token of the corruption that fueled the rebellion. In the months that followed, key chains and refrigerator magnets of the loaf were sold on Kiev’s Independent Square as mementoes of the revolution and its promise to make politicians stop stealing from the people. But on Tuesday, March 17, its symbolism came full circle when Ukraine’s new government announced that the loaf had itself been stolen.

“It turns out that the location of the famous golden loaf is unknown,” said Dmitri Dobrodomov, chairman of the committee in charge of combating corruption in Ukraine’s post-revolutionary parliament. “In essence, it was stolen. The question is: by whom?” said the lawmaker, an ally of Ukraine’s new President Petro Poroshenko.

It was another embarrassing setback for Poroshenko’s government, which has struggled to keep the pledges of the revolution over the past year as Ukraine fights a war with Russia’s proxy militias in its eastern regions. “With one hand we’re firing back at the aggressor, with the other we’re speeding up reforms,” Poroshenko said in a speech last month, on the one-year anniversary of the uprising that brought him to power. “Once we stop the war,” Poroshenko assured the nation, “it’ll just take a few years before everyone notices how Ukraine is changing.”

But Ukrainians are getting impatient. At the start of February, Poroshenko’s approval ratings dropped below 50% for the first time since he took office in June, according to a nationwide poll conducted by the Research & Branding Group, a leading Ukrainian pollster. More alarming for his government, nearly half of respondents in the survey (46%) said the revolution had failed to meet its goals of uprooting corruption. One in five said they were prepared to take part in another uprising to finish the work of the last one. “This is an incredibly huge number,” says Evgeny Kopatko, the director of the polling agency. “It shows that the protest potential is still extremely high. People just don’t see the changes that they were expecting.”

Complete story at - Theft of Ukraine’s ‘Golden Loaf’ Reflects the Revolution’s Failings | TIME

Revealed: The harsh terms of IMF loans agreed by Ukraine gov't - New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond

By Ivan Katchanovski (University of Ottawa)

Ukraine for sale under IMF oversight Leaked documents, which were previously kept secret by the leaders of Ukraine, show that as a condition of getting a new IMF loan, the Ukrainian government agreed inter alia to the following:

raising prices for natural gas and heating to households to the level of prices for imported natural gas by April 2017, starting with the first increase in April 2015 cutting 20% of state employees in 2015 reducing the number of higher education institutions from 802 to 317 and raising the retirement age by 5 years. Such economic policy would increase the household prices for natural gas by more than ten times and bring the combined utility payments for energy to the levels approaching or exceeding wages and pensions of a significant percentage of Ukrainians. Such price shocks would be coupled with expected continuation of the economic crisis, which has already resulted in three fold devaluation of the Ukrainian currency, significant declines in GDP, industrial output, real wages, and export and significant increases of inflation and unemployment.

The Ukrainian central bank has asked the IMF to maintain its current practice of parallel exchange rates and currency controls, which include an official lower rate set by the central bank and much higher black market exchange rate.

The IMF agreement does not include political conditions, such as ending the civil war in Ukraine and democratization of its increasingly undemocratic political system.

The agreement and the economic policy based on the Washington Consensus fail to address key institutional issues that would prevent such shock therapy from working in Ukraine, such as corruption, property rights, social capital, and oligarchic capture of the state. The current agreement with the IMF is likely to be only partially implement as was the case with previous such agreements.
In either case, ordinary Ukrainians who were misled by the Maidan opposition leaders/current government leaders and the Ukrainian media with promises of EU standards of living, are likely to suffer the economic shocks without any prospects of reaching EU standards of living in the next years and decades.

Complete story at - Revealed: The harsh terms of IMF loans agreed by Ukraine gov't - New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond

Ukraine, land of plenty, now running on empty - Taipei Times

A Soviet tank mounted on a plinth outside a primary school attests to the last time the central Ukrainian town of Kagarlyk saw war up close. The tank is a leftover from the Soviet force that routed Nazi troops from Ukraine during World War II.

More than 70 years later, tanks have again been churning up the rich black soil of Ukraine as the country’s pro-Western government battles a pro-Russian insurgency. Seen on television from the comfort of a sitting room in Kagarlyk, a depressed town about 600km west of the frontline, the fighting that rumbles on at a low level despite a month-old truce seems remote. However, Ukrainians across the country are paying a high price for the conflict in the industrial Donbass region, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of national output.

Maria Polyvaniuk, a 27-year-old mother of two who lives in a drab Soviet-era apartment block, has watched aghast as the nation’s currency nosedived in the past year, triggering astronomical increases in the prices of imported food, clothes and other essentials. “Before, if we had something to celebrate, like a birthday, we could go to a cafe. We also ate more meat and fish,” says Polyvaniuk, a slight figure with wispy hair, describing life for a family of four on her electrician husband’s monthly salary of 2,000 hryvni in pre-war Ukraine. That salary was equivalent to US$250 a year ago, but just US$87 today.

“Nowadays, we cook mostly simple food, like soup and rice. As for clothes, we buy less and wait for sales,” she says.

Complete story at - Ukraine, land of plenty, now running on empty - Taipei Times

Why Ukraine Is a Mess and How It Got There | Johnson's Russia List

In Ukraine, the crisis is messy, the solutions elusive and the outlook bleak.

That is the view of Eugene Rumer, a senior associate and director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Rumer spoke at The Heritage Foundation recently about his new book, “Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order,” which chronicles the unfolding crisis in Ukraine “up until the first Minsk talk” of last September, which he called a “good place to stop” because the violence and movements had hit a stalemate.

“The purpose was not to offer a blow by blow,” he said, but to take a look at factors that led to the crisis.

First was the story of Ukraine itself.

“The history [of Ukraine] … [is one] that lacks a traditional statehood,” Rumer said. The country “does not have a living memory [of statehood].”

This hurt in two ways, he said. First, because of the historical conflicts, almost all of Ukraine’s neighbors have a claim against what is now Ukrainian territory, including Russia.

Second, Ukraine’s foray into self-government stumbled along lines predictable for a country with little history of self-governance. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, he said, an oligarchy rose in Ukraine, similar to the one in Russia. Once in charge, the oligarchs “fixed the political system” to ensure their own success.

Complete story at - Why Ukraine Is a Mess and How It Got There | Johnson's Russia List