http://www.businessinsider.com/putin-is-actually-in-serious-trouble-2015-8
Author Archives: RomanInUkraine
Russia’s GDP Plunges 4.6%
I think Russia believed its own propaganda about Western weakness. And I think the analysis in the west decided to avoid military confrontation and correctly estimated that Russia will break first.
Gross domestic product contracted 4.6 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier after a 2.2 percent decline in the previous three months, the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow said on Monday, citing preliminary data. That was worse than the median forecast for a 4.5 percent slump in a Bloomberg survey of 18 analysts. The Economy Ministry had projected that output shrank 4.4 percent in the period, calling it “the lowest point” for Russia.
[Ukrainian language] Article about Roxolana of the Ottoman Empire
The Russian State vs. Three Hungarian Geese
This is sooooo pathetic:
Marx & Engles
Today’s breakfast
The old lady at the bazaar outside my Kyiv office said these are forest-picked blackberries.
Russian offensive in Luhansk oblast goes terribly wrong. Two Russian APC-80 lost.
#Breaking video! Russian offensive in Luhansk oblast goes terribly wrong. Two Russian APC-80 lost.
All soldiers on video speak with central Russian accent.
This is how #Minsk-2 works.
Amateur hour:
Russia publishes books like “How the West Lost to Putin” and falsely attribute them to western authors.
The audacity of Russian propaganda, and the desperation to appear strong.
They publish books like “How the West Lost to Putin” and falsely attribute them to western authors.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/10/russian-moscow-publishing-bootleg-luke-harding
Polish Operation of the NKVD (1937–38)
The Polish Operation of the Soviet NKVD security service in 1937–1938 was a mass operation of the NKVD carried out against purported Polish agents in the Soviet Union during the period of the Great Purge. It was ordered by the Politburo against the so-called “Polish spies” and customarily interpreted by the NKVD officials as relating to “absolutely all Poles”. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 ethnic Poles, as well as those accused of working for Poland. The operation was implemented according to NKVD Order № 00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov. The majority of the victims were ethnically Polish but not all, according to Timothy Snyder, who gives a conservative estimate of 85,000 confirmed Poles executed simultaneously across the country. The remainder were ‘suspected’ of being Polish, without further inquiry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_%281937%E2%80%9338%29
A house in Horodok, Ukraine owned by rival relatives
European leaders are putting Ukraine in an untenable position.
The political formula was imposed by Russia as part of what is known as the “Minsk 2” agreement in February. Germany, France and Ukraine agreed to the deal in a desperate effort to stop an escalating military conflict. The shooting diminished, but never stopped; Russia and its proxies have never respected the cease-fire. Yet now the German and French governments have enlisted the help of the Obama administration in seeking unilateral Ukrainian compliance with Minsk 2’s onerous political terms, which if fully implemented would implant a Russian-controlled entity inside Ukraine’s political system.
U.S. officials say Ukrainian steps toward compliance put pressure on Russia and deprive it of a pretext for launching another full-scale military offensive. But Moscow’s aggressive propaganda apparatus relentlessly portrays Ukraine as violating the deal; and Mr. Putin hasn’t needed a legitimate pretext for his previous aggressions. Even if Russia respected the cease-fire, the terms it seeks for reincorporating the areas it holds into Ukraine would cripple the country’s democracy and independence — which is Mr. Putin’s goal.
Rather than legitimize Russia’s puppet entity, Ukraine would be better off leaving it isolated and forcing Moscow to sustain it, as it does similar enclaves in Georgia and Moldova.
Interview about Russia / International Terror / Organized Crime / Western Reluctance to take it seriously
FP: Remind us a bit about what we learned from defectors like Anatoliy Golitsyn, Jan Sejna, Ion Pacepa, Vasili Mitrokhin, and most recently Sergei Tretyakov.
Buchar: When Anatoliy Golitsyn defected in 1961he brought a lot of valuable information about KGB penetrations that made many Western governments embarrassed. However, the most important information he brought, in his mind, was the revelation that the Soviet Union was involved in a massive deception and they had the means of succeeding in this deception, that they had established feedback within the American intelligence community and that they could monitor what was happening, and that they had put agents in place and were spreading disinformation.
That was something nobody was able or wiling to comprehend and he was quickly labelled as an unreliable conspiracy theorist. In addition to that he insisted that the CIA was penetrated by the KGB and that this created conflict within the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. We should add that the Soviets spent a lot of energy on discrediting Golitsyn in the media and in 1962 approved a plan for his assasination. To make a long story short, in his book titled New Lies for Old in 1984, Golitsyn included 148 predictions about the “collapse of communism in Europe.“ According to researcher Mark Riebling “139 out of 148” of Golitsyn’s predictions “were fulfilled by the end of 1993. When Golitsyn slowly faded out of the spotlight in 1968, a new defector, Gen. Jan Sejna, emerged, repeating pretty much the same thing. The CIA didn’t bother to debrief him. In his 1982 book We Will Burry You, he wrote “One of the basic problems of the West is its frequent failure to recognize the existence of any Soviet ‘grand design’ at all.” And no surprise, the Czech BIS till today is still obsessed with Sejna, devoting an enormous space on its website to discredit him as a liar and crook.
Vasili Mitrokhin defected to Great Britain in 1992. Documents he brought with him helped complete the picture of the Soviets’ deception and KGB operations all around the world. It clearly revealed that the KGB saw the third world countries as the key to winning the Cold War. It should be pointed out that Mitrokhin offered his files to Americans first and they turned him down. Then he went to the British, who arranged his defection and transportation of documents from Russia. One former high-ranking CIA official told me how embarrassing it was to beg British later to see the documents. The so called “Mitrokhin’s files” also shows that KGB influence on Soviet foreign policy has been greatly underrated in the West and most of the advances in the Soviet military was achieved by covert acquisition of Western technology.
The most recent defector, Sergei Tretyakov, who defected in 2000, in the book Comrade J, is warning us: “I want to warn Americans. As people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the US even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.”
. . . .
On March 2, 2010, The Moscow Times published the article Russian Mafia Abroad Now 300,000 Strong. It is now estimated that so-called Russian Mafia controls 95% of organized crime globally. That includes drug trafficking, money laundering, black market, and so on. At the end, the article points out that Moscow has nothing to do with it, because most of these people have no Russian passports anymore, being citizens of other countries. What a convenient conclusion. Oleg Gordievsky means otherwise:
“The KGB started to control different business organizations where the Mafia was strong. Gradually they began replacing the Mafia. So, in a way, today it’s less organized crime and more KGB, which is now called the FSB. Around the whole world, especially in countries like Austria, Spain, and Hungary, there are a lot of organizations and activities that look like the Mafia. But practically all of it is run by the KGB/FSB.”
http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/other/100429buchar_en.html
New Employee Made Cupcakes!
Saint Stalin. Famous icon: Madonna & Stalin
Wikipedia (Russian language): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0_%C2%AB%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B8_%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%C2%BB
Icon depicting St. Matrona Moscow (1885-1952) and Joseph Stalin. [2] In 2008, while from November 26 was in the temple of the Holy Princess Olga in Strelna, Petrodvorets district of St. Petersburg. Author icon icon painter Ivan Pivnik [3].
It “appeared” in 2008.
Russians picked through trash after Authorities destroy imported Western food
Very sad day. 19 yo Daniel Kasyanenko KIA.
This morning I heard that Daniel Kasyanenko was killed in action during a mortar attack outside the Donetsk Airport. He was only 19, and he was a friend. He was a young man who was aware, more aware than most of us, of how the war was affecting him. He was afraid it would ruin his spirit, and that, at 19, he was already running out of time.
I wrote this about Daniel in one of my articles. And in the video below, you can hear Daniel in his own words. We should all listen to what he had to say.
—
“We were sitting around the table one night after dinner when Daniel came by for a visit. It was dark when he arrived, hours past when he was supposed to have left his post. He had been in a battle that evening, he said, a bad one.
There was sniper and machine-gun fire and artillery falling all around. He wasn’t even able to shoot back, he said, because it was so intense. He could only low-crawl through the trenches to find cover and wait it out. Yet, when describing the battle, he said: “It was really awesome. Really awesome.” He gave a thumbs up and smiled broadly.
He looked tired, though, and when he sat down he chugged several glasses of water and then juice. He filled his plate with food and ate well. He glided easily into the conversation as if he were a 19-year-old just getting home from afternoon sports practice rather than a day of combat.
Daniel had a soft, tanned face, small dark eyes, and patchy young man’s beard, which he had let grow around his neckline and upper lip like many other young Ukrainian soldiers. He wore a cross on his wrist.
He spoke English in a staccato, halting way, sometimes staring off when he was stuck on a word, either because of the translation or because he was explaining an idea that is hard to express in any language. Daniel was unique in his ability to put the toll of the war in context. Even at his age, he already understood the unalterable changes occurring in him. He recognized that he was spending the formative years of his manhood in a place where all that life owed him—years, love, family, career—all those things could disappear any second in a white flash and red heat and dark nothing.
Soldiers such as Daniel escape death by seconds and inches every day. Others get it. Yet, time after time, they survive. You are either one of the lucky ones, or a name that you make a toast to before dinner with a sad shake of the head.”
He appears in this video:
Incredible character, courage and poise for such a young man.
Mumford & Sons, Ditmas, “Wilder Mind”
Mumford & Sons draw upon the great tradition of horsemanship among Ukrainian Cossacks in the powerful, remarkable new video for “Ditmas,” shot on location in the countryside outside of Kiev, Ukraine.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/mumford-sons-saddle-up-in-rousing-ditmas-video-20150723
Good editorial — Guns, Decentralization [Ukrainian]
High level account of Russian Official’s comment on Ukraine’s importance
Testimony of Poland’s Professor Bronisław Geremek who was active in forming Poland’s eastern policy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here, he quotes Gorbachev’s envoy:
“Don’t you understand that we will never let you extend support to Ukraine? To hell with Lithuania– and you will soon regret it yourselves. But Ukraine is off-limits to you. It is a country on which Russia’s potential relies. Some 40% of the Russian armaments industry depends on spare parts supplied from Ukraine. It is impossible to think about a Russian economy without ties to the Ukrainian economy. And the latter will perish without Russia, without the Russian markets and raw materials.” Then he added something which at first made me think I misheard him: “It is not only about the economy or the military,” he said. “The thing is, Russia could not exist with its spiritual capital being part of a foreign country.” Kiev was treated as the spiritual capital of Russia….
http://intersectionproject.eu/article/russia-europe/eastern-policy-third-polish-republic-beginnings
Another common meme of Russian propaganda: we are important, we are relevant
Western leaders, the story goes, have realised their mistake and are flocking to make amends with Vladimir Putin, the magnanimous Russian leader who tried to warn them against supporting Ukraine. First it was Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who sought an audience with Mr Putin. Then it was John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, who flew all the way to Sochi to pay his respects. “America has realised that Ukraine is not worth spoiling its relationship with Russia,” proclaimed Channel One, Russia’s main television station. Russia’s military might and its alliance with China, the channel implied, had forced America back to the table.
In this sectionThe images of war which dominated Russian television for the past year have been supplanted by tales of diplomatic victories and Ukraine’s failures. If war resumes, according to Channel One, it will be launched by the desperate Ukrainians.
