Author Archives: RomanInUkraine

Curt on Russia’s Strategy and Ukraine’s Position

TWO OF RUSSIA’S STRATEGIC ECONOMIC FACTOIDS:

1) “Russia supplies about a third of the European Union’s energy but that supply is responsible for 40 percent of the Russian government’s budget,”

2) “50% of Russians live off income provided by the government”

TWO DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS

“Even in Russian speaking areas, a minority want federal ties to Russia. The majority want a unified Ukraine”

“Only old people who remember communism want ties with Russia. The young want ties with Europe. In ten years the 15% who want ties with Russia will disappear.”

MY BIAS IN ALL THIS
I didn’t know all of this because while I live in Kiev, and Keiv is a “Russified” area (meaning everyone speaks Russian), I both associate with and employ young people in their 20’s. All of whom have some sort of extended family ties to Russia.

Ukrainian’s are very reserved, quiet and gentle people. I rail all the time about how I love them so much. And they sort of think of Russians as ‘rude, drunk people who start fights’ – but they’re cousins so to speak. So they’re like ill behaved family members. And when someone is behaving badly in public (or in my case, starting a fight in a club) you here “It’s Ok. (he is/they are) Russian.” (My favorite weapon is the ubiquitous ceramic coffee mug. Much better than brass knuckles, and less visible than bottles, which also break.)

So I don’t have a lot of experience with people who look to Russia. Everyone I know looks to Europe for the future, and to Russia for family. And Until I’ve started to see reliable polls, I simply have been using voting data to tell me what people think. And it turns out to be “vote for people like me” just like everywhere else. But only a weird minority want to be something other than Ukrainian. An those that do, too many are part of the gangster-tribe out of Donetsk that knows if they lose their ‘protection’ from the (russian sponsored) government, then the gangster days are over. The older people who were better taken care of under communism I agree with and sympathize with. But the only moral position that I know how to take on this matter is self determination. and the numbers are pretty clearly, universally in favor of “I’m a Ukrainian”.

Now my personal bias is obvious:
(a) I have invested a good portion of my worth here and I don’t want to risk it because of external aggression.
(b) I watched people I care about fight for freedom from one of the world’s most corrupt governments – a vast criminal enterprise that preys on people that I love.
(c) I believe I must support self determination. In no small part because that is the problem MY PEOPLE face.
(d) I don’t think to much of the Russian government, and I shouldn’t, but I freaking love russians – more so than I americans. I would rather spend my time with russians than with americans. And I love everything about them. I just am not sure this is a people who are terribly good at self government for very complex cultural reasons.

Dugin Calls Odesa “Genocide”

Dugin-Odesa

“”Russians who support junta in Kyiv are murderers without any emollient conditions. Accomplices and apologets of genocide. We should give them time to leave Russia. They can live in any country they want to including territory what will remain after Ukraine minus Kyiv. We should give them 3-4 month to do that. To leave with families, efforts, to learn basic language of new country… Russian patience had been buried in Odesa”.”

***

They will be frustrated by the resilience, heck, even the existence of Ukrainian identity. My sense is that they believe their own propaganda — that Ukrainians don’t really exist. I think they’re already frustrated by the lack of popular support in Donbass.

Now they have to choose between brutality or withdrawal.

The Crimea 15% Story not Quite Accurate

So, this is no “accidental post” of the “real Crimean election results” but an estimation by the members of this working group based on “various sources.”

Now, even if we accept that the authors of the blog are correct in the wide range of percentages they give (a big “if”), we can see, thanks to the original blog not having been pulled down, that Professor Gregory has totally distorted the figures.

To try to make any genuine calculation as to the percentage who voted for reunion, based on what is in the blog, is a slightly pointless task but we would have to make some assumptions. If we assume “vast majority” of Sevastopol voters means a minimum of 80% and a maximum of 99% and the electorate proportions of Sevastopol to Crimea are 15:85, then the blog figures would translate into a minimum of 18.65% and a maximum of 36.96% of the electorate voting for reunion. More importantly, in terms of actual voters (the way elections usually work), the figures would be a minimum of 54.39%; and a maximum of 65.41%.

Professor Gregory has, dishonestly, arrived at his 15% figure by taking the minimum figure for Crimea for both turnout and for voters for union, calling them the maximum, and then ignoring Sevastopol.

http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2014/05/06/the-crimea-referendum-15-percent-for-myth/

Who is to Blame for the Tragic Deaths in Odessa?

Great analysis:

The versions of what happened in Odessa seem to break down to three perspectives:

1. The pro-Russian separatists and their “Colorado Beetle” friends bused in from other cities, with Moscow’s backing, barricaded and locked themselves into the Trade Unions Building, shot at people as they’d been doing all day, killed five people right at the scene in front of the building, then lit fires inside the building, and then mainly escaped (about 250), although some of their own were not so lucky (38). Conclusion: the armed professionals knew how to set fires and escape from buildings, but they didn’t bother to collect their amateur followers to get them to safety, the cynicism for which these forces are notorious.

2. The pro-Kiev Maidan activists who had suffered several deaths and beatings of their own at the hands of the pro-Russians, were enraged and sought revenge and took a long 30-minute walk or 10-minute drive to the Trade Unions Building to “clean out” the separatists’ tent camp in nearby Kolekovo Field Square. They torched the tents, then hounded the pro-Russian separatists into the building, throwing in Molotov cocktails through the door to set fire, then stood back and chanted nationalist slogans and sang the national anthem while the Russians asphyxiated to death inside. To be sure, a few people tried to save them, but mainly the nationalists beat the survivors as they emerged. Conclusion: Ukrainian nationalists staged a successful pogrom, something that they are all too good at historically and this was to be expected.

3. Some cross between the two, where both sides are to blame in differing measure. The Russians shot at people in the crowd below and injured and killed some; Russians on the roof threw Molotov cocktails and other debris; the Ukrainians hounded separatists whom they outnumbered into the building, and threw Molotov cocktails from below and some got in the windows The tent fire and Molotov fires spread to the first few floors of the building. Because the Russians had built a barricade out of furniture right in front of the door, they blocked their own exit. Some Ukrainians took delight in their enemies’ misfortune, but others helped rescue the very people who had been shooting at them and throwing dishes at them moments before. Stories of the beatings of survivors are exaggerated.

The fire department did not get there for 20 minutes according to some accounts, or more than 60 minutes according to others, although civilians did set up make-shift ladders and a hose brigade and rescued at least some people (10? 20?). Others blocked ambulances, we are told, slowing rescue of another 120 and leaving the 38 to perish.

It’s clear what Moscow thinks of the Trade Unions fire — it is an outrageous crime. It’s clear what Surkov or his facsimile thinks — it is the sort of crime for which war should be started and equal treatment dished out.

It’s clear what the Ukrainian Interior Ministry is doing — trying to explain away things about this tragedy or at least deny its premeditated features, and pin it on the disobedient or inactive police — or darker oligarchic mafia forces that “really control” things.

So before falling alongside either of these versions — or even accepting that Moscow is right about the pogrom part — I want to do due diligence about the incidents leading up to the numerous deaths.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/minding_russia/2014/05/odessatragedy.html

Why Germans Love Russia

But there is also a disturbing undercurrent among ordinary Germans that harks back to old and unfortunate German traditions. We have come to think of Germany as a Western European country, but that is largely a product of Cold War alliances. Before then it occupied a precarious middle between east and west.

Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, German society may well be drifting away from the West again. In a poll last month by Infratest/dimap, 49 percent of Germans said they wanted their country to take a middle position between the West and Russia in the Ukraine crisis, and only 45 percent wanted to be firmly in the Western camp.

This anti-Westernism is coming from both sides of the political spectrum. There is the part of the left that is instinctively anti-American and takes the side of whatever international actor happens to challenge the status quo and the leading Western power.

Then there is Europe’s populist right, which agrees with Russia’s propaganda that Europe has become too gay, too tolerant, too permissive in its morals and too un-Christian, and which welcomes an authoritarian leader challenging Europe’s fuzzy multilateralism.

In Germany, you can find this current best represented by the new anti-euro Alternative für Deutschland Party. They take up a conservative strain of German thinking dating back to the 19th century, which harbors a resentment toward Western civilization and romanticizes a Russia seemingly uncorrupted by Western values and free-market capitalism.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/opinion/why-germans-love-russia.html?smid=tw-share&smv2&_r=0&referrer