http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/11/06-nato-no-promise-enlarge-gorbachev-pifer
Author Archives: RomanInUkraine
Monkeys and Apes — same word in Ukrainian
No wonder I couldn’t explain.
There are a number of places where English has two words and Ukrainian just one.
monkey, ape == mavpa
pumpkin, squash = harbuz
There are a number of places where it’s the opposite
blueberry, wild blueberry == chronytsia, loxyna
strawberry, wild strawberry == polunytsia, sunytsia
cherry, sour cherry == chereshnia, vyshnia
Putin ally & head of Russia’s top bank: oil era has ended; Russia lost race to modernity; we need to change the govt
This Is How Ukraine’s Controversial ‘Decommunization’ Looks Like
I like how some other countries put all their communist statues in one park somewhere.
London. From Ukraine with Cash
Thanks for the link, Walt!
A Fallen Russia Oligarch Sends Warning to Rest of Putin Insiders
He was one of the most powerful men in Russia for a decade, an old pal of the president who oversaw a million workers and a rail network spanning 11 time zones. But then Vladimir Yakunin was suddenly out. “This circle will continue to rotate,” Yakunin said in his private office in Moscow during a 90-minute interview.
Fantastic overview of the Transnistrian Conflict between Russia and Moldova.
Another whistle blower found dead in Moscow
Vladimir Pribylovsky, coauthor of “The Corporation: Russia & KGB in the Age of President Putin” found dead in Moscow
Ukraine sending cargo along a new route to avoid Russia
Today #Ukraine sent 1st cargo #train via the #Transcaspian route (via #Georgia & #Azerbaijan) to #Kazakhstan: pic.twitter.com/sP9QRuAAma
— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) January 15, 2016
An Especially Beautiful End to a Lenin Monument
Comment on Russian Propaganda from a conservative/libertarian Swede who served in Azov
If I would get a penny for every westerner that became a Putinist after discovering:
1.) Americas foreign politic in MENA sucks.
2.) Western liberal media lies.
I would be rich.
That:
1.) They are giving away Eastern Europe to Putin.
2.) That Putin media lies as well but in other areas.
3.) That Putin is as corrupt as they come.
Doesn’t bother them.
Westerners seem to have become very single minded. When before they swallowed American/liberal media propaganda they now instead swallow Russian propaganda.
Ruble Falls to 77 to $1, As Brent Crude Falls Below $31
Declassified documents prove U.S. DID help cover up 1940 Katyn massacre where Soviets slaughtered 22,000 Polish officers
Newly declassified U.S. army documents reveal that two American POWs sent secret coded messages to Army intelligence after their 1943 visit to Katyn, pointing to Soviet guilt for the 1940 massacre.
After witnessing rows of corpses in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, the American POWs told Washington they believed the Nazi claims that Soviets had carried out the killings of 22,000 Polish officers.
Having seen the advanced state of decay of the bodies, the POWs concluded that the killings must have been carried out by the Soviets rather than the Nazis who had only recently invaded the area surrounding the Katyn forest.
The documents shed further light on decades of suppression of Soviet guilt within the U.S. government which began during WWII when the blame for the massacre was being pointed at Nazi Germany.
Russia highway robbery: Official ‘stole 50km road’
Police said Alexander Protopopov, acting deputy chief of Russia’s prison service, oversaw the dismantling of the road in the far-northern Komi region.
He then sold off its 7,000 reinforced concrete slabs for personal profit, they added.
Officials believe the scheme cost the government more than 6m roubles ($79,000; £54,000).
The road was “dismantled and driven away” over the period of more than a year, between 2014 and 2015, the Investigative Committee said in a statement quoted by the AFP news agency.
The concrete slabs were then used by a commercial company which also sold them on for a profit, it added.
National Bank of Ukraine’s corrupt “stress tests”. Association of Banks calls for IMF help.
Even more important, and far more disturbing, is that it appears the NBU may be using different stress test standards for different banks and that the differences have little to do with anything related to safety and soundness. Instead, the different financial rules and methodologies being applied may well be related to political considerations that make Biden’s words from several weeks ago even more meaningful.
The NBU’s lack of transparency on methodology and rules were of such concern that the Independent Association of the Banks of Ukraine wrote to the International Monetary Fund last month to ask that it intervene in the situation. It specifically cited NBU’s “inconsistencies” in stress test calculations, its “unreasonable overstatement and misrepresentation of stress test results” and a subsequent restatement of each bank’s required re-capitalization using new definitions of acceptable collateral that differed from those applied by IMF itself.
Albert Camus might have been killed by the KGB for criticising the Soviet Union, claims newspaper
When the French philosopher, author and inveterate womaniser Albert Camus died in a car accident in 1960 just two years after winning the Nobel prize for literature, France’s intellectual beau monde mourned what seemed an almost freakish tragedy.
In Camus’s pocket was an unused return train ticket from his home in Provence to Paris. The 46-year-old writer had intended to travel back after the Christmas holidays by train with his wife Francine and their teenage twins Catherine and Jean. Instead, his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard offered to drive him.
Camus was killed instantly when Gallimard’s powerful Facel Vega car left the icy road and ploughed into a tree. Gallimard died a few days later. As well as the train ticket, police found 144 pages of handwritten manuscript in the wreckage entitled The First Man, an unfinished novel based on Camus’s childhood in Algeria and which he had predicted would be his finest work. The tragedy shocked and saddened France. But no one imagined that the crash had been anything other than an accident.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has now suggested that Soviet spies might have been behind the crash. The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, and published as a book entitled Celý život, was missing from the Italian translation.
In the missing paragraph, Zábrana writes: “I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.
“The order was given personally by [Dmitri Trofimovic] Shepilov [the Soviet foreign minister] as a reaction to an article published in Franc-tireur [a French magazine] in March 1957, in which Camus attacked [Shepilov], naming him explicitly in the events in Hungary.” In his piece, Camus had denounced the “Shepilov Massacres” – Moscow’s decision to send troops to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
A year later, Camus further angered Soviet authorities when he publicly supported the Russian author Boris Pasternak, a fellow Nobel laureate and author of Doctor Zhivago, a work banned by Stalin. Corriere della Sera concludes that there were enough reasons for “Moscow to order [Camus’s] assassination, in the usual professional style of its KGB agents”. If true, it would reopen wounds among the millions of devotees of Camus’s work.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/07/albert-camus-killed-by-kgb
EU-Ukraine Free Trade Deal Comes Into Effect
This could be huge. Let’s keep on eye on it.
Ukraine’s free-trade agreement with the European Union came into force on January 1, coinciding with the start of Moscow’s food embargo against Kyiv.
The free-trade deal, signed in June 2014, is part of the broader EU Association Agreement and stands at the heart of the drastic deterioration of Ukraine’s relations with Russia.
http://www.rferl.org/content/eu-ukraine-free-trade-deal-comes-in-effect/27461508.html
Send post cards to Ukrainian political prisoners imprisoned in Russia.
Ukraine and Russia — Economic / Tourists Stats
Bad for Ukraine, but for Russia, no bottom in sight.
In 2014, only 4.6 million Ukrainians traveled to Russia — less than two-thirds as many as to Poland.
Last year’s statistics are not in yet, but another drop in travel to Russia is highly likely, because Moscow has been tightening regulations to make it harder for Ukrainian migrant workers to stay indefinitely and because, as of last summer, there are no more direct flights between the two countries. Besides, starting in mid-2016, Ukrainians will be able to travel visa-free to the European Union, which will likely make travel to Europe vastly more popular.
As for bilateral trade, it has plummeted. Though both Russia and Ukraine have suffered declines in international trade because of sharply devalued currencies (the ruble has lost 20 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar last year, and the hryvnia lost 34 percent), the decline in exports and imports between the two countries has been more pronounced than with the rest of the world. For example, Ukraine’s exports to Russia stood at 44 percent of the 2014 level in the first 10 months of last year, while total exports were at 67 percent.
Ukrainian businesses have fought to maintain sales to Russia, using a free economic zone in Crimea that the two countries quietly maintained as a window for cheap Ukrainian food. In the fall of 2015, though, Crimean Tatar and right-wing Ukrainian activists cut off the traffic, and Kiev decided against interfering. On the import side, Russian natural gas supplies have shrunk because much of Ukraine’s energy-intensive industry is in the war-torn east, the winter has been mild and the government has managed to secure alternative supplies from Europe. . . .
Russia’s GDP will go down by 3.8 percent this year, according to the Bloomberg consensus forecast, and the Kremlin’s ham-handed response to Ukraine-related ostracism is probably as much to blame for this as cheap oil. It has hastened the end of the consumption-driven growth model that sustained Russia through the last decade.
Ukraine, for its part, has lost about 3 million residents compared with 2013, despite one of the worst natural population growth rates in the world. The Crimea annexation is mainly to blame. Ukraine also saw a 20 percent decline in industrial production, largely because the factories in the east stopped working.
This, of course, is a disaster for a country that was poor to start with and that is now the poorest in Europe. Yet there is one good reason to believe the steep fall has bottomed out: Russia has no appetite for further military adventures in Ukraine. Recent month-on-month indicators show a cautious rebound is already under way. Though this year, the Bloomberg consensus forecast is for a 10.7 percent economic decline, economists believe Ukraine will grow 1.4 percent next year. For Russia, a 0.2 percent decline is forecast.
PM Yatzeniuk on Ukraine’s fuel prices.
PM Yatzeniuk says they will look into lowering fuel prices. (Ukraine’s haven’t dropped despite the precipitous decline in the price of oil.
