Author Archives: RomanInUkraine

Slava Donbas! The Birth of Civil Society in Eastern Ukraine

Slava Donbas! The birth of civil society in Eastern Ukraine:

Here’s a scene from Slaviansk. People arguing. The future unclear.

I was asked whether Ukraine is headed toward civil war. I don’t think so.
The people in the east whose grandparents went to sleep every night fearing knocks on the door, who have been silent, afraid, indifferent for generations, are finally waking, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Good for them. Slava Donbas!

Whatever their future — with Russia or Ukraine — these people are having a conversation for the first time in several generations. Why? Because they must.

I feel very, very positive about the future here.

This conflict is necessary. These tensions need to be resolved. I consider it a long over-due divorce. After this it will be impossible for the Russian to continue denying that a Ukrainian people exist. (Yes, many of them still consider Ukrainians not a real people, but a branch of Russians.)

Assuming there’s no big war, this conflict is a win win. If Donetsk leaves, Ukraine will be better off — fewer oligarchs, fewer Russians. A smaller but stronger Ukraine would remain. If Donetsk stays, the Kremlin will be humiliated as Ukraine will have proved itself not just a separate nation, but an attractive alternative for Russians as well. This freer alternative would be a return the historic role of Ukraine’s Kozak culture.

There are still some dangerous days ahead. Early May is full of symbolically important days for the Soviet Union and its modern day imitator, but I’m very, very optimistic.

Huge Pro-Ukrainian Rallies in Donbas

Donetsk:

Praying-in-Donbas

Donbas-Rally

Donbas-Security

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Donetsk-Rally4

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About 1000 people, including many students in Luhansk.

Luhansk-rally-1000

The difference between the protests is obvious to anyone who looks. Ukrainian protests – students, old people, professionals. They are vigils, prayers, and non-confrontational. Russian protests – violent, confrontational, military aged men, and pensioners who conflate nostalgia for their youth with nostalgia for the Soviet Union.

Dnipropetrovsk Oligarch-Turned Governor Ready for a Fight

Igor kolomoisky: “I want to warn all of green men, unlike the others, we are not timid and when trying to capture buildings of the SBU and the Interior Ministry will immediately shoot to kill. All those who want to have a war in the region, should know that Dnepropetrovsk will be on their second Stalingrad, only in this battle to win the Ukrainian people! ”

Today in Dnipropetrovsk begins forming special purpose battalion “Dnepr” (Translated by Bing)

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Protecting his interests as he should. More complex of Akhmetov of Donbass who must play both sides until the outcome is clear.

The Idea of a Russian People

The ideas of a “Russian” people is a fairly new (18th century) idea. Ever since the Grand Duchy of Muscovy conquered the Kingdom of Novgorod, the Russian idea has been the annihilation of local cultures and identity for the purpose of uniting disparate peoples.

It is also fundamentally contradictory to the idea of a Ukrainian people.

Ukrainians see themselves as the unlucky but noble inheritors of Kyiv-Rus, who, since the kingdom’s destruction by the Mongols in 1241, have defined themselves with efforts to resist slavery (feudalism) from Moscow, Poland or the Ottoman empire, and cultural invasion from Muscovites. A lot of Ukrainian poetry deals with the idea of a hi-jacked identity. (“What are these Muscovites searching for in our torn-open graves? An ancient parent?”)

Russians see themselves at the cultural descendents of Kyiv-Rus whose political center shifted to Moscow and St Petersburg. They see themselves as the great uniters of slavic (and non-slavic) people.

The Ukrainian ideas can exist without Russia. The Russian idea can’t exist without Ukraine.

China and Russia

Reposting this article about Chinese vs Russian competition for central Asian Gas. It also includes this passage:

the Chinese have never forgiven Russia for seizing East Siberia under the Tsars, the “lost territories”. They want their property back, and they are getting it back by ethnic resettlement across the Amur and the frontier regions, much as Mexico is retaking California and Texas by the Reconquista of migration.

The population of far Eastern Siberia has collapsed to 6.3m from over 8 million twenty years ago, leaving ghost towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia has failed to make a go of its Eastern venture. With a national fertility rate of 1.4, chronic alcoholism, and a population expected to shrink by 30m to barely more than 110m by 2050 — according to UN demographers, not Mr Putin’s officials — the nation must inexorably recede towards its European bastion of Old Muscovy. The question is how fast, and how peacefully.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/lack-of-chinese-support-for-crimea-is-a-big-problem-for-putin-2014-3#ixzz2z7lT4znq