https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shershen

“I was mentally ready to die,” Krypychenko, 36, tells The Daily Signal in an interview following his release Feb. 20 after 195 days as a prisoner of war in the hands of combined Russian separatist forces.

“It was a wonder that I lived,” he adds.

Months into his captivity, while isolated in solitary confinement and with his body covered in wounds from bouts of torture, Krypychenko turned to his religious faith, and even a little humor, to avoid succumbing to despair.

“I felt grateful to God,” he says. “I’m a believer. I was grateful that God saved me from the worst. I was still alive at least. But the hardest part was not knowing what to expect each day.”

In the dank solitude of his cell, Krypychenko would laugh to himself as he recalled funny childhood memories. In particular, he remembered a trip to a zoo as a boy when a friend stuck his fingers inside a bear cage.

“The bear bit off one of his fingers,” Krypychenko says, smiling. “At the time, it was horrible. But when I thought back on it, it seemed so funny for some reason. Humor is helpful in all situations.”

. . . .

The interrogations were “very rude,” Krypychenko says, as he describes how his captors tortured him with electric shocks and beat him with their fists and wooden planks.

The first interrogation lasted for about three hours, he explains, but they got shorter as time went on. He was never threatened with execution during those sessions, but the guards occasionally made offhand death threats.

. . . .

His captors held Krypychenko in solitary confinement for the entirety of the 195 days. They allowed him to leave his cell and go outside under open skies only two times, each at night for about two minutes, so that he could smoke a cigarette.

http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/25/i-cant-believe-im-free-a-ukrainian-pow-returns-home/

Great discussion of German delusion.

When it comes to Germany’s policies vis-à-vis Russia there are plenty of such self-delusions that drive Berlin’s foreign policy. This fact is more important given that Berlin heads the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which runs the two observer missions that are supposed to monitor the implementation of the Minsk II agreements in Ukraine. In January 2016, Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, laid out the priorities for the OSCE chairmanship — and they could hardly be more revealing. They indicate all that is wrong with the German approach to European security. Steinmeier seems to believe that the current insecurity in Europe is the result of a lack of trust stemming from a breakdown in communications between Moscow and Western nations. No wonder, then, that Germany’s emphasis is on dialogue to restore trust and ultimately make Europe secure again.

Unfortunately, this logic has it backwards. There is indeed a lack of trust. However, that lack of trust is a direct consequence of Russian aggression, not Western miscommunication.

http://warontherocks.com/2016/02/germany-and-russia-berlins-deadly-self-delusions/

A newly-published transcript of Ukrainian crisis talks two years ago indicates that EU powers and the US urged Kiev not to resist Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

The document, published by a Ukrainian parliament committee on Tuesday (23 February) contains the official minutes of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council on 28 February 2014.

The meeting, chaired by then acting president Oleksandr Turchynov, was called one week after former president Viktor Yanukovych fell from power and one day after Russian special forces seized government buildings in Crimea.

Turchynov wanted to declare a state of war and fight back.

But ministers and others warned him that Ukraine couldn’t do it alone and that the West wouldn’t help.

https://euobserver.com/foreign/132425

In April 2014 Ukraine agreed a $17 billion bail-out with the IMF. Then in March 2015 Ukraine agreed a new, $17.5 billion dollar bail-out. You would be forgiven for thinking that in the last two years the IMF had disbursed $35-odd billion to Ukraine.

In reality, as it does to other countries, the IMF drip-feeds money; it does this in order to ensure that the conditionalities it sets down in the bail-out agreements are being followed.

Ukraine, particularly the finance ministry, is meeting some of these targets. It is embarking on a severe austerity programme (for which the hapless Mr Yatsenyuk is taking much of the criticism). Pensions have fallen by about 40% in real terms in the last two years and the number of teachers has been cut by about 15%. Austerity is highly likely to have cut into growth and reduced living standards.

The finance ministry has won plenty of plaudits from international creditors. But because the wider situation in Ukraine has been so unstable (there is a war going on, after all), in reality the IMF has only doled out about $11 billion in the last two years (see chart), ie, about a quarter of what you might assume. (The currency used in the chart is “special drawing rights”, an international reserve asset where 1 SDR is worth about $1.40.)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/02/not-exactly-profligate

Fantastic. Huge anti-corruption, confidence building move if this happens.

Ukraine Bonds Jump on Reports Jaresko Offered Prime Minister Job

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-07/ukraine-bonds-jump-on-reports-jaresko-offered-prime-minister-job

Curious question: What are the most prominent military alliances of modern history which do not involve any Europeans?

Arab League?
ECOMOG?

Does the rest of the world have a trust problem? I think so. And I think that’s why all this talk of a Chinese-Russian alliance is rightly dismissed as an attempt at honor among thieves.

Ukrainian soldier Vasyl Kovbel, 62, has been serving in the Ukraine war for more than a year. He has two children and six grandchildren. An artist, he was ostracized in the Soviet Union for religious imagery in his paintings. In combat, he draws strength from doing what he can to protect the younger soldiers.

“The war has made me believe in God even more,” he told me. “Life will go on. There is no better medicine than love. I tell my family that. Love can solve anything.”

1. Under Russian citizen and Minister of Defence’s Dmitri Salamatin the database of conscripts was destroyed. Under Ministers of Defence Salamatin, Pavel Lebedev and Mykhaylo Yezhel, Ukraine’s military budget was severely reduced and military equipment was sold or transferred to Russia. Salamatin planned to reduce Ukraine’s armed forces to 75, 000 by 2017. Russian citizen Yuri Boriskin was appointed head of the General Staff at the Ministry of Defence. Yezhel’s daughter is married to an admiral of Russia’s Pacific Fleet.

2. The head of Yanukovych’s personal bodyguards, Viacheslav Zanevskiy, was a Russian citizen.

3. During Yushchenko’s presidency, Russia’s intelligence services operated covertly but under Yanukovych they were permitted to operate overtly in the Crimea, Donbas and elsewhere without hindrance. 90 percent of SBU activities were directed against the opposition in the form of illegal wiretapping, surveillance and organisation of vigilantes for election fraud and violence against opposition members and journalists. The FSB was given complete reign over the SBU and commandeered data on 22, 000 officials and informants. Hard drives and flash drives not taken to Russia were destroyed. Valentyn Nalyvaychenko said they took ‘everything that forms a basis for a professional intelligence service.’ SBU Chairman Aleksandr Yakymenko, Russian citizen Igor Kalinin and 4 top intelligence chiefs fled to Russia. 235 SBU agents were arrested of whom 25 were charged with high treason, including the counter-intelligence chief. After the Euromaidan all regional SBU directors were replaced. The FSB reportedly introduced surveillance technology on Ukraine’s mobile telephone network. The extent of Russian intelligence penetration came to light in spring-summer 2014 when Ukrainian missions in the ATO were compromised by intelligence leaks that provided the Russians and separatists with sufficient time to consolidate their positions in the crucial first months of the conflict. Obviously, not all the traitors have been removed from the SBU and over the last 8 months, 30 SBU officers have been arrested for corruption and treason (http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2016/02/29/7100681/).

4. During the Euromaidan, 30 FSB officers visited Ukraine on 3 occasions in 13-15 December 2013, 26-29 January and 20-22 February 2014 and used the SBU sanatorium at Koncha Zaspa, near Kyiv as their base of operations. Their main liaison was SBU Counter-Intelligence Chief Volodymyr Buk. Their goals were to increase protection of their Russian assets; ensure continued access to SBU files, special communications and headquarters; provide training for ‘antiterrorism’ exercises; and supply anti-terrorist and crowd control equipment for the SBU Alpha special forces and Ministry of Interior Berkut to destroy the Euromaidan.

Who Committed Treason in Ukraine?

Gary Kasparov:

I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.

China has no imperial ambitions. They regard Russia as a historic aggressor.

Right as China was losing the Opium War to Britain and France, the Russia militarily threatened them into ceding 600,000 square kilometers including the prized warm water port that became Vladivostok.

The Soviet Union collected the debt incurred by China’s communist revolution in a very brutal way. When the money ran out, China paid the national debt in eggs. I’m told by the son of a Chinese political figure that the process used by the Russians to collect the debt was having every single egg was laid on a hoop. The eggs which were too small fell through and broke on the ground, because . . . fuck you. Because Russia wants to intimidate. Always.

Again, and again, we see the wisdom of Thomas Sowell’s observation that the right sees in the world in terms of trade offs, while the left sees the world in terms of right and wrong.

For the left, it’s a never ending parade of savage injustices which must be vanquished from the face of the Earth, and no cost is too high.

Just months ago, the big enemy of the people was money in politics (lion-hunting dentists aside). Now a political outsider is winning and vastly under-spending candidates who’ve received HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars (Hillary – $188 Million, Jeb – $158 Million, Ted Cruz – $104 Million, also Bernie – $96 Million), and what happens?

In the blink of an eye, one enemy to end all enemies is gone, and another one arrives. Trump ($27 Million) won’t denounce the long list of people they demand he denounce.

In their eyes civilization is always teetering on the brink. Imminent destruction is the steady rock in the lefts otherwise rapidly changing narrative. What happened to the lack of medical care? The anti-war movement with code pink? Peak oil? Over population — weren’t famines imminent by 2000? Originally, communism was great because it produced MORE material wealth? Since then, material wealth itself has had it’s stage time as the great evil to end all evils.

Again and again and again. It’s the nurturing instinct run amok. Every whim and fad masquerades a universal principal and dividing line between good and evil. Every inconvenience is a fault in the structure of civilization, and the only remedy is burning the civilized world.

Again and again. If there’s an anthem to the imbecile, catastrophic march of the left, it’s this quote post-modernist philosopher Richard Rorty betraying the hollowness of the left: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”

And yes, there’s a reason all the post-modernists were radical leftist. Once the pitiful disasters of “scientific socialism” became too monstrous to ignore, the left needed a weapon with which to attack epistemology.

And they got it. The university replaced the church. Departments are the new temples and tenured professors are the new priesthood. Like the church, they attempt to bend reality by chanting desirable lies. Like the church, they loathe heretics, and denounce them when physical violence is out of reach. The university is the new moderator of morality.

I say as others do: burn the Cathedral — for the sake of modern civilization.

The house where Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) lived in exile, in the Russian city of Orenburg, has been destroyed. The Ukrainian Minister of Culture Vyacheslav Kyrylenko revealed the information at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

http://uatoday.tv/society/russia-destroys-home-of-celebrated-ukrainian-poet-598465.html

Pseudoscience has found a comfortable home in Russia’s “anything goes” culture, and is routinely aided by propaganda and unscrupulous media outlets. But the scientific community has begun to fight back, and is looking at inventive ways to debunk irrational beliefs, non-scientific myths and interpretations. . . .

In 2015, a young team of Moscow-based scientists led by Alexander Panchin and his friend Stanislav Nikolsky launched the Harry Houdini Award project. Their proposition was that the extrasensory industry was bogus, and they called on magicians and psychics to prove them wrong.

Similar to “Battle of the Psychics,” the Houdini Award gives magicians an opportunity to demonstrate otherworldly abilities in a series of experiments. They even offered a reward of 1 million rubles ($12,900) to any person able to demonstrate such skills. Unlike “Battle of the Psychics,” the Houdini Award experiments are strictly scientific, and have removed factors of luck and dishonesty from the contest.

The scientists say anyone who thinks they have paranormal abilities can take part in the Houdini Award contest. When applying, Houdini nominees are asked to list their paranormal talents, and after that the organizing committee designs an experiment to test the claims.

“We can only test supernatural abilities that we can model in the course of an experiment. For example, we can’t test the ability to cure cancer or predict the future,” Nikolsky, co-founder of the project, said.

To win 1 million rubles, a nominee has to successfully complete two experiments — a preliminary one conducted in front of the press, and a final experiment, carried out in front of the experts. In 2015, the Houdini Award team tested five nominees. So far, unsurprisingly enough, no one has passed the preliminary stage.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/559889.html

http://forklog.net/the-worlds-first-state-auction-on-the-blockchain-being-tested-in-ukraine/

Unpaid Russian workers, like these protestors, are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the government and Putin