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

Cracks In Washington’s Empire | Dissident Voice

Washington’s EU vassals might be finding their backbone. Britain, Germany, France, and Italy are reported to have defied Washington’s orders and applied to join the Chinese-led Asian Investment Bank. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and Luxembourg might also join.

Washington uses its development banks such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, along with the IMF, in order to exercise financial and political hegemony. These banks are crucial elements of American economic and political imperialism.

The Chinese-led bank will, of course, be much more effective. The Chinese will use the bank to actually help countries and thereby make friends and grow trust, whereas Washington uses its banks for domination by force.

This new bank, with the BRICS Bank, will provide countries with escape routes from Washington’s domination.

The Evil Empire is beginning to crack. It will crack more as the Russian-Chinese alliance unfolds its potentials and when European capitals understand that hegemonic Washington has put their existence at risk in order to try to prevent Russia’s rise. The crazed American and British neocon nazis, and their dupes among the populations, comprise the greatest human threat that the world has ever known. The sooner the Evil Empire collapses, the safer the world will be.

Complete story at - Cracks In Washington’s Empire | Dissident Voice

The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | NATO’s Shadow of Nazi Operation Barbarossa

NATO’s Operation Atlantic Resolve paced ahead this week with the latest arrival of more US military forces in the Baltic region. Under the guise of defending eastern Europe from «Russian aggression», more than 100 Abrams tanks and Bradley armoured personnel carriers rolled into Latvia. Last month, a similar motorised display of military support was deployed in Estonia – in the town of Narva – with American flags flown by the US Army’s Second Calvary Regiment just 300 metres from the Russian border.

Narva protrudes sharply eastward – like a metaphorical blade – into Russian territory. It is only some 100 kilometres from St Petersburg – Russia’s second city after Moscow, and with a searing history of military assault by Nazi Germany during 1941-44. The siege of St Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, caused over one million Russians to perish, mainly from hunger, before the German Wehrmacht was eventually pushed back and defeated by the Soviet Red Army. More on that in a moment.

Back to the present: US General John O’Conner said of the latest deployment in Latvia that American troops would «deter Russian aggression», adding with Orwellian prose: «Freedom must be fought for, freedom must be defended».

The US-led Operation Atlantic Resolve has seen a surge in American military presence in the Baltic countries and other eastern European members of the NATO alliance over the past year. Technically, it is claimed that the US forces are «on tour duty» and therefore not transgressing past agreements with Russia to limit NATO permanent forces on Russia’s borders. But semantics aside, it is hard not to see that Washington has, in effect, significantly stepped up its military footprint in a geo-strategically sensitive region, in brazen contravention of erstwhile commitments made to Moscow. NATO warplane sorties have increased four-fold in the Baltic region over the past year, as have NATO warships in the Black Sea.

Complete story at - The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | NATO’s Shadow of Nazi Operation Barbarossa

ClubOrlov: The Rage of the Cultural Elites

A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution—a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong—was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

It so happened that my aunt, then a sensitive and somewhat dreamy young woman, had stubbornly and haplessly clung to certain musical tastes which at that time in China came to be regarded as politically incorrect, being said, in the trendy ideological jargon of that time, to reflect “decadent bourgeois revisionist aesthetics.” To wit, my aunt had kept in her record collection a rendition of “The Urals Mountain-Ash” (Уральская Рябинушка), a Russian folk song in which a young girl meets two nice boys under a mountain-ash tree and must choose between them, performed by the National Choir of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was an old-style LP spinning at 78 RPM. It had a red emblem in the middle emblazoned with “CCCP.”

One of my aunt's roommates, who probably had always resented her for one reason or another, found out about it and reported her to the authorities. For this rather serious infraction, student members of the Red Guard made my aunt publicly smash her beloved record, then kneel upon the fragments and recite an apology to Chairman Mao while fellow-students threw trash at her face shouting “Down with Soviet revisionists!” This generation of Chinese young people, who once donned Red Guard uniforms, beat people up around the country and smashed various cultural artifacts, is now mostly living on government pensions or earning meagre profits from home businesses, but some have prospered and can be found among the upper crust of contemporary China’s business, cultural, and political elites.

This episode came to my mind when in the summer of 2014 I came upon video clips of Ukrainian student activists storming university classrooms in mid-lecture and ordering everyone to stand up and sing the Ukrainian national anthem, then forcing the professor to apologize for the lecture not being adequately patriotic. There were also ghastly spectacles of “Enemies of the People” (guilty only of having served under the overthrown president Yanukovich) being paraded around in trash bins. In Ukrainian schools, children were made to jump up and down, and told that “Whoever doesn't jump is a Moscal” (a derogatory term for “Russian”).

Add to this the destruction of public monuments to World War II and the ridiculous rewriting of history (turns out that, during World War II, Germany liberated Ukraine, but then Russia invaded and occupied Germany!) and a complete picture emerges: the Ukrainian Maidan movement is one of a species of “cultural revolution.” The new, fashionable term being thrown around is “civilizational pivot,” but it and the old “cultural revolution” can be understood as approximate synonyms, sharing the need for frenzied spectacles of mass humiliation and destruction.

In 1971 the Vietnam War began to draw toward an agonizing and, from the American government’s point of view, highly unfulfilling conclusion. That same year Dr. Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing, flying in from a military airport in Pakistan. This was followed by the joint Nixon-Kissinger summit in 1972, which culminated in Nixon's historic handshake with Mao Zedong, completing China's civilizational pivot away from the USSR and toward the west. In hindsight, this dramatic opening could only be properly characterized as a swift dagger-in-the-back against the USSR, in both geopolitical and ideological senses. The decrepitating, inflexible body of the USSR never recovered from this stab wound, leading to its final collapse, from a multitude of internal and external causes, two decades later.

In late February, 2014, just as Ukraine was attempting its civilizational pivot away from Russia and toward the west, I interviewed a senior captain of the Right Sector, a radical Ukrainian nationalist group with neo-Nazi stylings. The burly man looked aggressive in his paramilitary garb, and arrived with bodyguards, but turned out to be rather amiable. He was particularly glad to see me because I look Chinese. He spoke Russian, reluctantly, after announcing that he was ashamed of it. (This is typical; Ukrainians use Ukrainian to spout nationalist nonsense, but when they need to make sense they lapse into Russian.) He said that he had served in the Red Army and had been stationed in the Far East, on the Chinese border. He expressed hope that China would soon do something big in Siberia.

Complete story at - ClubOrlov: The Rage of the Cultural Elites

The Good Fight of the Polish Farmers | New Eastern Outlook

Poland’s farmers are in a very important and very good fight with their government and with their parliament. They are literally fighting for the future health and safety of their families, their grandchildren’s generation, their countrymen and even for the health and safety of the rest of the European Union that believes they have a right to enjoy eating healthy, nutritious food. That’s good and in my view should get more attention for the good it is.

In the week of February 12, all across Poland, thousands of farmers with tractors protested the right-wing Polish government’s planned farm legislation. Many were organized by the farmers’ arm of the Solidarność trade union organization. More than 150 tractors have blockaded the A2 motorway into Warsaw since February 3, hundreds more have closed roads and are picketing governmental offices in other regions. The farmers are vowing to continue the struggle until the government agrees to enter talks with the union and commit to addressing what they see as a crisis in Polish agriculture. And they are right.

ICPPC directors, Jadwiga Lopata and Julian Rose, joined more than 200 farmers at a Solidarity protest in Kielce, South East Poland. The actions represent a dramatic escalation of protests that have been taking place on a smaller scale across the country over the last year. Edward Kosmal, chairman of the farmers protest committee for West-Pomeranian Region said: “We are ready for dialogue. We look forward to meeting with you Prime Minister and beginning a comprehensive government commitment to solving the problems of Polish agriculture. If you do not enter into a dialogue with the Union, we would be forced to tighten our forms of protest.”

• What is of vital importance are the demands of the farmers to the new government of Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz. They are four:

• Land rights: implement regulation to prevent land-grabs by Western companies and to protect family farmers’ rights to land. Beginning 2016 the government plans to allow foreign buyers to buy Polish farmland for the first time.

• Legalize direct sales of farm produce: the government must take action to improve farmers’ position in the market, including the adoption of a law enabling direct sales of processed and unprocessed farm products (Right now Poland has the most exclusionary policies in Europe around on-farm processing of food products and direct sales, making it impossible for family farmers to compete with bigger food companies. Oppressive ‘food hygiene’ and other regulations effectively prevent small scale farmers from selling their produce on-farm and in local markets, where their mostly organic but ‘uncertified’ produce is widely respected as of higher quality than food gown on modern industrial agribusiness farms.

• Ban the cultivation and sale of Genetically Modified Organisms in Poland. A new EU rule passed in the European Parliament in January essentially leaves it up to national governments to permit GMO planting or not.

• Extend inheritance laws to include land under lease as a fully legal form of land use.

Complete story at - The Good Fight of the Polish Farmers | New Eastern Outlook

Russia outraged over attempts to frame Syrian government for chemicals use | Electronic Resistance

Moscow, SANA-Russian Foreign Ministry said Russia is outraged over Western attempts to frame the Syrian government for using chemical weapons in Syria.

“Statements by Western officials and commentaries in foreign newspapers had emerged blaming, uncorroborated, the Syrian government for incidents involving the use of chlorine gas in Syria,” said the Russian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

“They claim that the UN latest resolution 2209 amounts to be a warning to the Syrian government that punitive measures are likely in the future under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which is an irksome matter,” the statement added.

The UN resolution, the statement said, stopped short of finger-pointing in the chemical weapons’ issue; hence any other interpretation of the resolution is “a biased reading.”

“Had nailing down culprits in the issue been that easy, there would be no point in the OPCW mission probing the use of chlorine continuing its work,” said the statement.

The statement said that the OPCW, the UN chemical weapons watchdog, will go ahead with investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria, taking into account the information that the Syrian government passed to the organization in December 2014.

The information revealed that non-governmental sides had seized amounts of chlorine, which lends authenticity to the assumption that the Syrian opposition’s fighters might be involved in the use of the chemical agent.

The UN Security Council had passed a resolution on March 6 condemning the use of chlorine gas in Syria. The resolution did not identify who was behind it.

Complete story at - Russia outraged over attempts to frame Syrian government for chemicals use | Electronic Resistance

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

Odessa May 2 trial turns into farce | Ukraine solidarity campaign солідарність України кампанія

Notes: The author tries to explain their pro-Ukraine leanings, but after all that, this article can't really be viewed as pro-Ukraine.

 March 14, 2015 · by ukrainesolidaritycampaign · in Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Odessa, Ukrainian Far-Right

By Halya Coynash Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

 Whatever the reasons for delays and flaws in investigating and prosecuting crimes related to the disturbances, fire and deaths on May 2, 2014 in Odessa, procrastination serves only the interests of Russian propaganda's 'massacre' claims.

 Forty-eight people died in Odessa on May 2, 2014 during disturbances in the city and as the result of a fire in the Trade Union building on Kulikovo Pole. Full clarity about what happened and accountability are vital, both for the sake of the victims and their families and because Russian propaganda is relentlessly distorting the facts to present a terrible tragedy as a 'massacre'. Yet almost 10 months after the events, the investigation into the fire is still far from complete, and the trial that had begun over the earlier disturbances has been delayed due to significant irregularities and most of the defendants facing dangerously vague charges.

 When police snipers were deployed on Maidan in Kyiv in February 2014, resulting in the deaths of around 100 mostly unarmed protesters, there was a large media presence showing the harrowing images. In contrast, the events in Odessa on May 2 were largely learned about after the fire in which most of the 48 victims died. Russian propaganda channels immediately began spinning and have ever since pushed claims of a 'massacre' with anti-Maidan activists allegedly 'burned alive' or murdered as they tried to escape. The same channels talk less about the earlier disturbances but claim that these were the work of 'Right Sector' and other far right 'radicals'. Considerable resources have been poured into efforts to push the 'massacre' line, including organization of an 'exhibition' taken around European cities, along with carefully selected 'witnesses'.

 The propaganda version of events has been refuted by the United Nations Monitoring Mission in Ukraine and by the May 2 Group, a journalist and civic initiative that includes representatives of both sides, which has been investigating the events and the copious video footage available (detailed examples here).

However, the propaganda narrative continues to be fuelled by the ongoing failure to complete the investigation into the events of May 2 and to bring to justice those whose actions or negligence caused deaths that day.

For chronological reasons, and since most of the new developments concern a trial over the disturbances earlier in the day, we begin with those. Worth noting, however, that far more people died as a result of the later fire. Given that most of the deaths could have been averted had the fire service not taken 45 minutes to appear, the failure to address this is deeply disturbing.

Complete story at - Odessa May 2 trial turns into farce | Ukraine solidarity campaign солідарність України кампанія

EU Unlikely to Extend Russia Sanctions at Upcoming Summit | Business | The Moscow Times

European Union leaders are unlikely to reach an agreement at their summit next week to prolong economic sanctions on Russia that expire in July, a senior EU official said Friday.

New sanctions on Russia are also off the table for now because EU governments want to give a chance to a fragile cease-fire in eastern Ukraine.

But some of the EU's 28 member states had pushed for an early decision on extending sanctions on Russia's financial, energy and defense sectors adopted in July last year over Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

While leaders will discuss sanctions at next week's summit, the senior EU official said a majority would probably want to hold over discussion of renewing the economic sanctions on Russia until July.

 "I don't think there is unanimity at all for the rollover of sanctions, the sanctions that are due in July," the official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said.

 Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said Friday that new or extended EU sanctions against Russia would not help the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine.

 Complete story at - EU Unlikely to Extend Russia Sanctions at Upcoming Summit | Business | The Moscow Times

Kiev, not Moscow, should be the choice for marking V-E Day - LA Times

Note that the three authors of this piece are all former US Ambassadors to Ukraine.  Also note that they use the term "V-E" day instead of Victory Day.  V-E day is the term used widely in Europe and is celebrated on May 8th.  Victory Day is used in the former Soviet Union and is celebrated on May 9th.  Discussions have been held about dropping the May 9th date and moving to May 8th for the celebration, but official calendars are not reflecting a change as of now.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron have rightly turned down Vladimir Putin's invitation to go to Moscow on May 9 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allies' victory in Europe, and President Obama may soon follow suit.

 However, there is still a way for Western leaders to attend a commemoration that honors the heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet people during World War II, and Merkel, Cameron and Obama should seize the opportunity because this will be the last major anniversary for so many veterans and other war survivors.

 Instead of commemorating V-E Day in Moscow, they should go to Kiev.

 It was the combined efforts of the Soviet Union, United States, Britain, France, Canada, Poland and others that defeated Nazi Germany. Many Americans, however, do not appreciate that, for much of the war, the Red Army carried the brunt of the fight against Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht. Soviet forces confronted and destroyed far more German divisions than did the Western allies' armies once they landed in Italy in 1943 and France in 1944.

 Complete story at - Kiev, not Moscow, should be the choice for marking V-E Day - LA Times