KyivPost Newspaper
http://www.kyivpost.com/newspaper/
Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/?insrc=hpss
From Moscow
to London to New York, the Ukrainian revolution has been
seen through a haze of propaganda. Russian leaders and the Russian press have
insisted that Ukrainian protesters were right-wing extremists and then that
their victory was a coup. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, used the same
clichés after a visit with the Russian president at Sochi. After his regime was overturned, he
maintained he had been ousted by “right-wing thugs,” a claim echoed by the
armed men who seized control of airports and government buildings in the
southern Ukrainian district of Crimea on Friday
Interestingly, the
message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and
Kiev was not so
different from some of what was written during the uprising in the
English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far
right. From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s
newsletter through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the
same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the
idea of a nationalist, fascist, or even Nazi coup d’état.
In fact, it was a
classic popular revolution. It began with an unmistakably reactionary regime. A
leader sought to gather all power, political as well as financial, in his own
hands. This leader came to power in democratic elections, to be sure, but then
altered the system from within. For example, the leader had been a common
criminal: a rapist and a thief. He found a judge who was willing to misplace
documents related to his case. That judge then became the chief justice of the
Supreme Court. There were no constitutional objections, subsequently, when the
leader asserted ever more power for his presidency.
In power, this
leader, this president, remained a thief, but now on a grand, perhaps even
unsurpassed, scale. Throughout his country millions of small businessmen and
businesswomen found it impossible to keep their firms afloat, thanks to the
arbitrary demands of tax authorities. Their profits were taken by the state,
and the autonomy that those profits might have given them were denied. Workers
in the factories and mines had no means whatsoever of expression their own
distress, since any attempt at a strike or even at labor organization would
simply have led to their dismissal.
The country, Ukraine, was in
effect an oligarchy, where much of the wealth was in the hands of people who
could fit in one elevator. But even this sort of pluralism, the presence of
more than one very rich person, was too much for the leader, Viktor Yanukovych.
He wanted to be not only the president but the oligarch-in-chief. His son, a
dentist, was suddenly one of the wealthiest men in Europe.
Tens of billions of dollars simply disappeared from the state budget.
Yanukovych built for himself a series of extravagant homes, perhaps the ugliest
in architectural history.
It is hard to have
all of the power and all of the money at the same time, because power comes
from the state, and the state has to have a budget. If a leader steals so much
from the people that the state goes bankrupt, then his power is diminished.
Yanukovych actually faced this problem last year. And so, despite everything,
he became vulnerable, in a very curious way. He needed someone to finance the
immediate debts of the Ukrainian state so that his regime would not fall along
with it.
Struggling to pay his
debts last year, the Ukrainian leader had two options. The first was to begin
trade cooperation with the European Union. No doubt an association agreement
with the EU would have opened the way for loans. But it also would have meant
the risk of the application of the rule of law within Ukraine. The
other alternative was to take money from another authoritarian regime, the
great neighbor to the east, the Russian
Federation.
In December of last
year, the leader of this neighboring authoritarian regime, Vladimir Putin,
offered a deal. From Russia’s
hard currency reserves accumulated by the sale of hydrocarbons he was willing
to offer a loan of $15 billion, and lower the price of natural gas from Russia. Putin
had a couple of little preoccupations, however.
The first was the gay
conspiracy. This was a subject that had dominated Russian propaganda throughout
last year but which had been essentially absent from Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine could
join in? Yes indeed: the Ukrainian prime minister began to explain to his
population that Ukraine
could not have closer cooperation with Europe,
since the EU was interested chiefly in gay marriage.
Putin’s second
preoccupation was something called Eurasia.
This was and is Putin’s proposed rival to the European Union, a club of
dictatorships meant to include Russia,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
Again, perhaps Ukraine
could join? Yanukovych hesitated here, seeing the trap—the subordination of Ukraine of
course meant his own subordination—but he did allow himself to be jollied along
toward the necessary policies. He began to act like a proper dictator. He began
to kill his own people in significant numbers. He bloodied his hands, making
him an unlikely future partner for the European Union.
Enter a lonely,
courageous Ukrainian rebel, a leading investigative journalist. A dark-skinned
journalist who gets racially profiled by the regime. And a Muslim. And an
Afghan. This is Mustafa Nayem, the man who started the revolution. Using social
media, he called students and other young people to rally on the main square of Kiev
in support of a European choice for Ukraine. That square is called the
Maidan, which by the way is an Arab word. During the first few days of the
protests the students called it the Euromaidan. Russian propaganda called it,
predictably enough, the Gayeuromaidan.
When riot police were
sent to beat the students, who came to defend them? More “Afghans,” but
“Afghans” of a very different sort: Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet Red Army,
men who had been sent to invade Afghanistan
during after the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979. These men came to
defend “their children,” as they called the students. But they were also
defending a protest initiated by a man born in Kabul at the very time they were fighting
their way toward it.
In December the
crowds grew larger. By the end of the year, millions of people had taken part
in protests, all over the country. Journalists were beaten. Individual
activists were abducted. Some of them were tortured. Dozens disappeared and
have not yet been found. As the New Year began the protests broadened. Muslims
from southern Ukraine
marched in large numbers. Representatives of the large Kiev Jewish community were prominently
represented. Some of the most important organizers were Jews. The telephone hotline
that people called to seek missing relatives was established by gay activists
(people who have experience with hotlines). Some of the hospital guards who
tried to stop the police from abducting the wounded were young feminists.
In all of these ways,
the “decadent” West, as Russia’s
foreign minister put it, was present. Yes, there were some Jews, and there were
some gays, in this revolution. And this was exploited by both the Russian and
Ukrainian regimes in their internal propaganda. The Russian press presented the
protest as part of a larger gay conspiracy. The Ukrainian regime instructed its
riot police that the opposition was led by a larger Jewish conspiracy.
Meanwhile, both regimes informed the outside world that the protestors were
Nazis. Almost nobody in the West seemed to notice this contradiction.
On January 16,
Yanukovych signed a series of laws that had been “passed” through parliament,
entirely illegally, by a minority using only a show of hands. These laws,
introduced by pro-Russian legislators and similar to Russian models, severely
constrained the freedom of speech and assembly, making of millions of
protesters “extremists” who could be imprisoned. Organizations that had
financial contacts with the outside world, including Catholic and Jewish
groups, were suddenly “foreign agents” and subject to immediate harassment.
After weeks of
maintaining their calm in the face of repeated assaults by the riot police,
some protesters now chose violence. Out of public view, people had been dying at
the hands of the police for weeks. Now some of the protesters were killed by
the regime in public. The first Ukrainian protester to be killed was an
Armenian. The second to be killed was a Belarusian.
Then came the mass
killings by the regime. On February 18 the Ukrainian parliament was supposed to
consider a compromise that many observers believed was a first step away from
bloody confrontation: a constitutional reform to return the state to
parliamentary democracy. Instead, the riot police were unleashed in Kiev, this time armed not
only with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets, but also with live
ammunition. The protesters fell back to the Maidan and defended it, the way
revolutionaries do: with cobblestones, Molotov cocktails, and in the end their
bare hands.
On February 20, an EU
delegation was supposed to arrive to negotiate a truce. Instead, the regime
orchestrated a bloodbath. The riot police fell back from some of the Maidan.
When protesters followed, they were shot by snipers who had taken up positions
on rooftops. Again and again people ran out to try to rescue the wounded, and
again and again they were shot.
Who was killed? Dozens of people, in all about
a hundred, most of them young men. Bohdan Solchanyk was a young lecturer at the
Ukrainian Catholic University, a Ukrainian speaker from western Ukraine. He was
shot and killed. Yevhen Kotlyov was an environmentalist from Kharkiv, a Russian
speaker from eastern Ukraine.
He was shot and killed. One of the people killed was a Russian citizen; a
number of Russians had come to fight—most of them anarchists who had come to
aid their Ukrainian anarchist comrades. At least two of those killed by the
regime, and perhaps more, were Jews. One of those “Afghans,” Ukrainian veterans
of the Red Army’s war in Afghanistan,
was Jewish: Alexander Scherbatyuk. He was shot and killed by a sniper. Another
of those killed was a Pole, a member of Ukraine’s Polish minority.
Has as it ever before
happened that people associated with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian,
Polish, and Jewish culture have died in a revolution that was started by a
Muslim? Can we who pride ourselves in our diversity and tolerance think of
anything remotely similar in our own histories?
The people were
victorious as a result of sheer physical courage. The EU foreign ministers who
were supposed to be treated to a bloody spectacle saw something else: the
successful defense of the Maidan. The horrifying massacre provoked a general
sense of outrage, even among some of the people who had been Yanukovych’s
allies. He did something he probably had not, when the day began, intended to
do: he signed an agreement in which he promised not to use violence. His
policemen understood, perhaps better than he, what this meant: the end of the
regime. They melted away, and he ran for his life. Power shifted to parliament,
where a new coalition of oppositionists and dissenters from Yanukovych’s party
formed a majority. Reforms began, beginning with the constitution. Presidential
elections were called for May.
Still, the propaganda
continued. Yanukovych stopped somewhere to record a video message, in Russian,
claiming that he was the victim of a Nazi coup. Russian leaders maintained that
extremists had come to power, and that Russians in Ukraine were under threat. Although
the constitutional transition is indeed debatable in the details, these charges
of a right-wing coup are nonsense.
The Ukrainian far
right did play an important part in the revolution. What it did, in going to
the barricades, was to liberate itself from the regime of which it had been one
of the bulwarks. One of the moral atrocities of the Yanukovych regime was to
crush opposition from the center-right, and support opposition from the far
right. By imprisoning his major opponents from the legal political parties,
most famously Yulia Tymoshenko, Yanukovych was able to make of democracy a game
in which he and the far right were the only players.
The far right, a
party called Svoboda, grew larger in these conditions, but never remotely large
enough to pose a real challenge to the Yanukovych regime in democratic
elections. In this arrangement Yanukovych could then tell gullible westerners
that he was the alternative to the far right. In fact, Svoboda was a house
opposition that, during the revolution, rebelled against its own leadership.
Against the wishes of their leaders, the radical youth of Svoboda fought in
considerable numbers, alongside of course people of completely different views.
They fought and they took risks and they died, sometimes while trying to save
others. In the post-revolutionary situation these young men will likely seek
new leadership. The leader of Svoboda, according to opinion polls, has little
popular support; if he chooses to run for president, which is unlikely, he will
lose.
The radical
alternative to Svoboda is Right Sector, a group of far-right organizations
whose frankly admitted goal was not a European future but a national revolution
against all foreign influences. In the long run, Right Sector is the group to
watch. For the time being, its leaders have been very careful, in conversations
with both Jews and Russians, to stress that their goal is political and not
ethnic or racial. In the days after the revolution they have not caused
violence or disorder. On the contrary, the subway runs in Kiev. The grotesque residences of Yanukovych
are visited by tourists, but they are not looted. The main one is now being
used as a base for archival research by investigative journalists.
The transitional
authorities were not from the right, or even from the western part of Ukraine, where
nationalism is more widespread. The speaker of the parliament and the acting
president is a Baptist preacher from southeastern Ukraine. All of the power ministries,
where of course any coup-plotter would plant his own people, were led by
professionals and Russian speakers. The acting minister of internal affairs was
half Armenian and half Russian. The acting minister of defense was of Roma
origin.
The provisional
authorities are now being supplanted by a new government, chosen by parliament,
which is very similar in its general orientation. The new prime minister is a
Russian-speaking conservative technocrat. Both of the major presidential
candidates in the elections planned for May are Russian speakers. The likely
next president, Vitali Klitschko, is the son of a general in the Soviet armed
forces, best known in the West as the heavyweight champion boxer. He is a chess
player and a Russian speaker. He does his best to speak Ukrainian. It does not
come terribly naturally. He is not a Ukrainian nationalist.
As specialists in
Russian and Ukrainian nationalism have been predicting for weeks, the claim
that the Ukrainian revolution is a “nationalist coup,” as Yanukovych, in
Russian exile, said on Friday, has become a pretext for Russian intervention.
This now appears to be underway in the Crimea,
where the Russian flag has been raised over the regional parliament and gunmen
have occupied the airports. Meanwhile, Russia
has put army battle groups on alert and sent naval cruisers from the Baltic Sea
to the Black Sea.
Whatever course the
Russian intervention may take, it is not an attempt to stop a fascist coup,
since nothing of the kind has taken place. What has taken place is a popular
revolution, with all of the messiness, confusion, and opposition that entails.
The young leaders of the Maidan, some of them radical leftists, have risked
their lives to oppose a regime that represented, at an extreme, the inequalities
that we criticize at home. They have an experience of revolution that we do
not. Part of that experience, unfortunately, is that Westerners are provincial,
gullible, and reactionary.
Thus far the new
Ukrainian authorities have reacted with remarkable calm. It is entirely
possible that a Russian attack on Ukraine will provoke a strong
nationalist reaction: indeed, it would be rather surprising if it did not,
since invasions have a way of bringing out the worst in people. If this is what
does happen, we should see events for what they are: an entirely unprovoked
attack by one nation upon the sovereign territory of another.
Insofar as we have
accepted the presentation of the revolution as a fascist coup, we have delayed
policies that might have stopped the killing earlier, and helped prepare the
way for war. Insofar as we wish for peace and democracy, we are going to have
to begin by getting the story right.
March 1, 2014, 11:15 a.m
Fighting for the Soul
of Ukraine
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/fighting-soul-ukraine/?insrc=rel
Antigovernment
protesters with a flag showing imprisoned former prime minister Yulia
Tymoshenko, Kiev, Ukraine, November 24, 2013
Brian Bonner: Putin's
big mistake
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/brian-bonner-putins-big-mistake-338071.html
Activists of the
Russian "National Liberation Movement", one wearing a vest with a
picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin, attend a rally to hand out
leaflets in the industrial Ukrainian city of Donetsk on March 1, 2014. More than 10,000
people carrying Russian flags protested in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the stronghold
of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych. Protesters declared they supported
"the aspirations of Crimea to rejoin Russia",
referring to Ukraine's
pro-Russia peninsula further south where Kiev
has accused Moscow
of launching an "armed invasion." AFP PHOTO/ ALEXANDER KHUDOTEPLY
So now we know what
Vladimir Putin really thinks about the EuroMaidan Revolution.
After several days of
silence, interrupted by a fake diplomatic initiative to work with Ukraine's new
rulers, the the little Russian tyrant showed once again that he's a man of
action.
His vanity Sochi Winter Olympics ended on Feb. 23, giving Putin time
to focus his bottomless hatred on the next object of his ire: the fact that Ukraine
remains an independent nation.
His disdain for
Ukrainian sovereignty is legendary, with dismissive asides about how Ukraine's contribution to World War II wasn't
needed and his legendary 2008 lecture to U.S. President George W. Bush about
how Ukraine
isn't a real country.
This is a guy who
knows how to exploit weakness where he sees it -- and there was plenty to see
in Ukraine's
chaotic crisis of the last three months.
At the same time
Putin's soldiers were seizing Crimean strategic assets, I was predicting to an
interviewer that I didn't think he would actually do it. Sure I feel silly
about being wrong, but the reason is that I didn't think anybody would do
something so dumb, even Putin.
His seizure of Crimea
will get him nothing, except the enmity of most of Ukraine's 45 million people. Does
he really want to rule over more people who cannot stand him? I'm tempted here
to insert all the jokes about Crimea, that he
can have it and maybe he can do something about the lousy summer service and
dirty beaches. But nobody's in a joking mood now.
Putin's disdain for
the EuroMaidan Revolution oozes in his state-controlled media. Because Russia Today was doing a live
broadcast/simultaneous translation of the Russian
Federation Council's "debate" over Putin's
request to use military force in Ukraine on March 1, I was forced to
endure the Kremlin-funded station's propaganda.
I have to admit, if I
were not a critically thinking person and I had no access to other information,
I might hate the EuroMaidan Revolution as much as Russia Today's
"international experts" who denounced the toppling of Viktor
Yanukovych's presidency as a Western-funded putsch by anti-Semitic, fascist,
neo-Nazis who plan to take their revolution to Russia. (Message to anyone who
works at Russia
Today: How do you sleep at night after spending your days peddling such
dishonesty?")
Russia Today is
Russia's version of America's Fox News, only venerating Putin is the main
editorial policy. The station's entire existence shows how paranoid Putin is
about any democratic movements in his neighborhood.
However, the record
will likely show that Ukraine's
new leaders committed at least four immediate blunders that contributed to the
situation that exists today:
1. They failed to
catch Yanukovych on the way to Russia.
He should have been an easy catch. Now Ukraine has to live with the
specter -- however remote -- that he will return someday. Fortunately, Putin
has had the good sense to keep his distance from Ukraine's former president in
public, even though he shouldn't be harboring a man suspected of mass murder
and mass financial corruption;
2. Disbanding the
hated Berkut riot police may go down in history as a blunder akin to the United States'
disbanding of security forces loyal to deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
With that one move, Ukraine's
new leaders threw out onto the street a hate-filled, violence-soaked and highly
trained group of killers.
3. Recognizing
reality. After victory, Ukraine's
new leaders should have made a quick trip to Moscow to assure Putin that what he thinks
about the EuroMaidan Revolution is wrong. Moreover, considering the enormous
debts that Ukraine owes to Russia, as well as the deep historical, cultural
and economic ties, a sovereign Ukraine
still needs to understand that the two nations are inextricably linked.
4. Passing a language
law that downgraded Russian from its previous status as an official language.
This is really, really bad timing and pointless amid a national crisis, aside
from the fact that the law ignores the reality that much of the nation still
prefers to speak Russian.
Putin's grand
mistake, however, may work out in Ukraine's favor soon in at least
three ways.
For one, the West
should come to realize, once and for all, that there's no doing business with
Putin. As long as he keeps the finger off the nuclear weapon trigger, another
Cold War against him is fine and will help the world if it leads Russians to
get rid of him also.
Secondly, Yulia
Tymoshenko is back on the case. As despised as she is by some people, the newly
freed former prime minister knows how to talk to Putin and rally her nation.
Look for tactics that are more Gandhi than Ghengis Khan.
Thirdly, Ukraine's
EuroMaidan Revolution masked a lot of divisions by the participants that now
seem petty in comparison to the need to defend the nation's sovereignty from
attack.
But clearly Ukraine's new
interim leaders and the West, led by U.S. President Barack Obama, need to do
more. Their weak rhetoric backed up by even weaker action gave Putin the
opening that he needed -- and that he rammed thousands of his own soldiers
through.
When I heard Obama
talk about "costs" to Russia
of a military intervention in Ukraine
on Feb. 28, I cringed a bit because I thought he was just talking tough and
saying the right words without having a real plan. Soon we will see. The time
for statements of outrage are over. More actions, such as the Swiss and
Austrian seizures of assets of former Ukrainian officials, are needed.
If the West is going
to ride to Ukraine's
rescue, now is the time to do it. Ukrainians are justifiably proud of the
heroism they displayed over the last three months. But they will have to rise
to a level of heroism now that perhaps they never imagined. In this struggle,
democratic nations need to be at their side. This is one battle in which
victory will require a united effort.
Kyiv Post chief
editor Brian Bonner can be reached at bribonner@gmail.com
Brian Bonner
Brian Bonner has
served as the chief editor of the Kyiv Post since 2008. He also held the job in
1999, three years after first arriving in Ukraine to teach journalism. Bonner
is a veteran American journalist who spent most of his professional life with
the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, where he covered international,
national and local news during a nearly 24-year career in which he was a staff
writer and an assigning editor. Bonner left the St. Paul
newspaper in 2007 to become the associate director of international
communications at the Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, D.C.
He also served as a political analyst with the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe during six election observation missions in Ukraine, Belarus,
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. To
contact: email bribonner@gmail.com ,
Facebook at www.facebook.com/brianbonner
,Twitter @BSBonner and Skype at brian.bonner1959 .
Ruski Vjesnik
Supruge velikih
pisaca: zajedno u ljubavi, stvaralaštvu i smrti
http://ruskivjesnik.com/arts/2014/01/28/supruge_velikih_pisaca_zajedno_u_ljubavi_stvaralastvu_i_smrti_25087.html
Slavni pisac, branitelj
opkoljenog Sevastopolja
U ovim djelima
Tolstoj ocrtava jednu od najherojskijih epizoda u povijesti ruskog naroda, a
najveća vrijednost ovih pripovijedaka je u iznošenju slika rata.
Brak Sofije Bers i
grofa Lava Tolstoja trajao je 48 godina i, dok je bio skladan, pomogao mu je da
stvori remek-djela „Rat i mir“ i „Anna Karenjina“. Vjenčali su se kada je
Tolstoj odlučio napustiti svoje navike iz mladosti.
Slavni pisac, branitelj
opkoljenog Sevastopolja, volio je piće, kocku i žene. Sve ovo priznao je
Sofiji, uz obećanje: „Neću u našem selu biti ni s jednom ženom, možda samo u
rijetkim prilikama, koje neću ni tražiti, ali ni sprečavati“. Zaista duhovito!
Rusija zahtijeva da
se poštuje vanblokovski karakter Ukrajine
http://ruskivjesnik.com/politics/2014/02/28/rusija_zahtijeva_da_se_postuje_vanblokovski_karakter_ukrajine_25787.html
O čemu šuti Putin
http://ruskivjesnik.com/politics/2014/02/27/o_cemu_suti_putin_25757.html
......Timošenko će iz još jednog razloga
morati obuzdati „nacionalnu revoluciju“. Ona, naime, treba zaustaviti namjere
nacionalista da „navale“ na istok i Krim, što bi moglo isprovocirati Rusiju da
se umiješa u događanja u Ukrajini.
Usprkos svim izmišljotinama Zapada i
ukrajinskih nacionalista, Rusija nije zainteresirana za podjelu Ukrajine. Ova
varijanta može biti iskorištena samo u krajnjem slučaju, ako započne ozbiljan
građanski rat i dođe do stvarnog raspada Ukrajine.
EU-Ukraine relations
http://www.kyivpost.com/hot/eu-ukraine-relations/
Ukrajina - Krimski rat
http://www.discoverserbia.org/sr/putovanja-ukrajina/krim-ukrajina/krimski-rat
Krimski rat
http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krimski_rat
Krimski rat 1853. -
1856., vodio se između Ruskog Carstva i alijanse koju su tvorili; Velika
Britanija, Drugo Francusko Carstvo, Osmansko carstvo i Kraljevina Sardinija.
Rat su karakterizirale katastrofalne odluke zapovijednog kadra Alijanse i loša
logistika svih zaraćenih strana (koja je rezultirala u velikim gubitcima
nevezanim za ratne operacije).
http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krimski_rat