"In the long run, Putin will lose. The people who will suffer most from his folly will be the Russians, not least those in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But the long run for skilful, ruthless dictators in large, well-armed, resource-rich and psychologically bruised nations can be quite long. Before he goes, more blood and tears will flow unquietly down the river Donets." - The Guardian
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In the long run, Putin will lose. The people who will suffer most from his folly will be the Russians, not least those in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But the long run for skilful, ruthless dictators in large, well-armed, resource-rich and psychologically bruised nations can be quite long. Before he goes, more blood and tears will flow unquietly down the river Donets.
Network Front | The Guardian
For links to individual updates click on the timestamps.
Caught on a hidden camera: Ihor Mazur (aka “Topolya”), a leader of the Ukrainian National Assembly, is trying to “sell” an anti-government protest to a representative of the authorities. A Ukrainian investigative journalist pretended to be one. July 2013, Kyiv
This article was originally published in the German language in Ukraine-Analysen, No. 144 (2015).
Network Front | The Guardian
Today, February 1st 12:58pm
· Timothy Garton Ash
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ukraine
vladimir putin
russia
europe
world news
us foreign policy
us news
european union
foreign policy
politics
bbc world service
Vladimir Putin is the Slobodan Milošević of the former Soviet Union: as bad, but bigger. Behind a smokescreen of lies he has renewed his drive to carve out a puppet para-state in eastern Ukraine.
Innocent bystanders are killed in the Black Sea port of Mariupol. In besieged Debaltseve, a woman scoops water from a giant puddle in the road. The rubble that was once Donetsk airport recalls a scene from martyred Syria. About 5,000 people have already been killed in this armed conflict, and more than 500,000 uprooted. Preoccupied by Greece and the eurozone, Europe is letting another Bosnia happen in its own front yard. Wake up, Europe. If we have learned anything from our own history, Putin must be stopped. But how?
In the end, there will have to be a negotiated solution. German chancellor Angela Merkel and foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier have been right to keep trying diplomacy, but even they concluded in mid-January that it wasn’t worth going to meet Putin in Kazakhstan. On Saturday another attempt to agree a ceasefire failed in Minsk. Diplomacy’s time will come again, but it is not now.
We should ratchet up the economic sanctions against Russia. Combined with the impact of the fallen oil price, these are already having a significant effect. Despite a small wobble from the new Greek government, the EU last week kept its unity on extending sanctions. Won’t that feed a siege mentality in Russia? Yes, but then the Putin regime is stoking that mentality with its nationalist, anti-western propaganda. If the threat did not exist, Russian television would invent it.
Like Milošević, Putin is prepared to use every instrument at his disposal, with no holds barred. In his war against the west he has deployed heavy military equipment, energy-supply blackmail, cyber-attack, propaganda by sophisticated, well-funded broadcasters, covert operations and agents of influence in EU capitals – oh yes, andRussian bombers nosing up the English Channel with their transponders off, potentially endangering civilian flights.
There is a Polish saying which translates roughly as “we play chess with them, they play kick-arse with us”. (Dupniak, or kick-arse, is a Polish game in which people try to identify who kicked them from behind.) This is the problem of the democratic west in general and the slow-moving, multi-nation EU in particular. It was recently exemplified in a woefully unrealistic chess paper on strategy towards Russia prepared for Federica Mogherini, the EU’s new high representative for foreign and security policy.
In the long run, Putin will lose. The people who will suffer most from his folly will be the Russians, not least those in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But the long run for skilful, ruthless dictators in large, well-armed, resource-rich and psychologically bruised nations can be quite long. Before he goes, more blood and tears will flow unquietly down the river Donets.
So the challenge is to shorten that period and stop the mayhem. To do this Ukraine needs modern defensive weapons to counter Russia’s modern offensive ones. Spurred on by John McCain, the US Congress has passed aUkraine Freedom Support Act which allocates funds for the supply of military equipment to Ukraine. It is now up to President Obama to determine the timing and composition of those supplies.
A report by a group including Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to Nato, and Strobe Talbott, the veteran Russia expert, identifies the equipment needed: “counter-battery radars to locate long-range rockets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic countermeasures for use against opposing UAVs, secure communications capabilities, armoured Humvees and medical support equipment”.
Only when Ukrainian military defence can plausibly hold Russian offence to a stalemate will a negotiated settlement become possible. Sometimes it takes guns to stop the guns.
Won’t such arms supplies further nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement? Yes, but Putin is feeding the paranoia already, untroubled by the facts. He recently told students in St Petersburg that the Ukrainian army “is not an army, it is a foreign legion, in this case a Nato foreign legion”.
The EU could never secure unanimity on such military supplies. If at all, it would have to be done by individual countries. Although this may bring back the old jibe that “America does the cooking and Europe the washing up”, there is a case for the US doing most of the heavy military supply.
The US has the best kit, it is probably in the best position to control its use, and is less vulnerable to bilateral economic or energy-supply pressures.
The overall burden-sharing would be fair. European economies take most of the pain of sanctions, since they have more invested with Russia; they will provide a lot of the economic support Ukraine needs if it is to survive; and they are doing most of the diplomacy. In fact, McCain and Merkel make a perfect hard cop, soft cop combination.
There is one other area in which Europe in general, and Britain in particular, can do more. Broadcast media are usually classed as soft power, but they are as important to Putin as his T-80 tanks. He has invested in them heavily. Among Russian speakers – including in eastern Ukraine and the Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states – he has used television to impose his own narrative of a socially conservative, proud Russia threatened by fascists in Kiev, an expansionist Nato and a decadent EU.
Last year a Russianist of my acquaintance was sitting naked and at ease in the hot tub with a friend of his in Moscow after several vodkas, as is the Russian custom, when this highly educated Russian asked: “So tell me, honestly, why do you support the fascists in Kiev?”
We need to counter this propaganda not with lies of our own but with reliable information and a scrupulously presented array of different views. No one is better placed to do this than the BBC. The US may have the best drones in the world, and Germany the best machine tools, but Britain has the best international broadcaster.
And there is an appetite for it: the BBC’s sadly diminished online Russian-language service still has an audience of nearly seven million, and during the crisis its Ukrainian-language audience has tripled to more than 600,000.
In his excellent report on the future of news, James Harding, the head of BBC News, makes a strong commitment to growing the World Service. Immediately stepping up its Russian and Ukrainian offerings would be a good way for the BBC to show that it will put its money where its mouth is. Without compromising the BBC’s independence, the British government could also chip in some extra funding.
If ever there were people in need of accurate, fair, balanced information, it is Russians and Ukrainians today. None of these things will stop Putin tomorrow, but in combination they will work in the end. Dictators win in the short run, democracies in the long.
Gastarbeiters’ Departure Beginning to Hit Russians Where They Live by paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, February 1 – Many Russians have long been accustomed to thinking of immigrant workers as undesirable alines, but the departure of so many of them as a result of the economic crisis and new government restrictions on immigration is beginning to affect Russians where they live – and some of them may soon be changing their tune.
On the one hand, the outflow of immigrant workers is pushing the price of housing and services up as employers are forced to pay higher wages to get work done. And on the other, when employers cannot find anyone to do the work that the gastarbeiters had been doing, that work, including sweeping the streets of snow, simply isn’t getting done at all.
That has led Igor Albin, the vice governor of St. Petersburg, to suggest that residents of his city should stop complaining about snow removal, pick up shovels, and get to work, a proposal that recalls Marie Antoinette’s advice almost as much as the suggestion by another Russian official that Russians should respond to rising food prices by eating less.
As Mariya Portnyagina points out in the current issue of “Ogonyok,” Russian officials have tried to downplay the size of the outflow of migrants, suggesting alternatively that it is seasonal or that the gastabeiters who have left Russia now will return when they find that no other country is ready to take them in (kommersant.ru/doc/2643912).
But the size of the outflow is now so large and its impact on particular sectors of the Russian economy so obvious that officials and experts are now devoting more of their time to explaining what the impact of immigrant workers on the Russian economy really is and why Russia will have little choice but to work to attract them back.
Nikita Mkrtchyan, a sociologist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, says that it is not the case that gastarbeiters have been working for less income and thus depressing wages for Russians. They simply work at lower-paying jobs. But they often work longer hours and without taking sick days than Russians do and thus cost employers less.
But the days when such people were arriving in virtually unlimited numbers are over, and in fact at the present time, the gastarbeiters who have been in Russia are going home and not coming back at least anytime soon.
Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz diaspora leaders say that as a result of the declining exchange rate for the ruble and new requirements for those working in Russia, many of their co-nationals have concluded that working in Russia is not only unprofitable but increasingly unpleasant and are looking elsewhere.
Trains and planes are leaving Russia for Central Asia full and coming back half empty, clear evidence that what these diaspora leaders are saying is true, Portnyagina says.
According to Sergey Abashin, a professor at St. Petersburg’s European University, the impact of the declining value of the ruble is less significant in the decisions of the gastarbeiters than are the new requirements the Russian government has imposed concerning Russian language knowledge and the payment for patents to work in Russia.
In any case, the gastarbeiters are leaving, and Moscow does not know where to find more. Vyacheslav Postavnin, the head of the Migration for the 21st Century Foundation, says that migrant workers currently form 8 to 15 percent of the Russian workforce and are responsible for six to 20 percent of its GDP.
“Demographic predictions,” he points out, “show that dependence on gastarbeiters will only increase.” Postavnin says that the best hope for Russia is that those who are leaving now will discover that no other country wants to take them in and so will conclude that they have no choice but to return to Russia, whatever the new official requirements are.
But it is far from clear, the “Ogonyok” journalist suggests, whether ordinary Russians are going to be very happy with the situation the departure of the migrants workers is already creating. They are already being missed in construction, trade, and housing services, and officials and businesses are finding it hard to fill the jobs they have left.
In Kazan, for example, some 15 to 20 percent of janitorial positions are now empty. In Sverdlovsk oblast, the shortage of workers has become so severe that officials are deploying prisoners from local camps to work in the cities. And in Moscow, people are increasingly angry that the streets aren’t being kept clean.
Some may take to heart the proposal of the St. Petersburg vice governor that they should clean the streets themselves. But others are likely to respond in other ways, increasingly infuriated by what some of them are certain to view as the incompetence of officials in dealing with migrants.
Read the whole story
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Russia’s Muslims, Ready to Protest, Seek Shariat Guidance on Demonstrations by paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, February 1 – It is unclear which should disturb the Kremlin more -- that Muslims in the Russian Federation are now sufficiently angry that they are thinking about taking part in public protests or that these same Muslims feel that they should ask not what Russian law says about such meetings but rather what Islamic Shariat law does.
In this week’s “Chernovik,” a Daghestani publication, Umar Gadzhiyaliyev surveys the opinions and fetwas of leading Muslim thinkers concerning meetings, when they are permissible and when they are not according to Islam, and even whether a Muslim can take part in such things at all (chernovik.net/content/religiya/mitingi-i-demonstracii-soglasno-shariatu).
Not surprising to Muslims but perhaps to others, these “contemporary Islamic legal specialists have expressed various points of view on this subject. But if one summarizes them,” Gadzhiyaliyev says, “one can say that the scholars permit meetings and demonstrations … if they do not contain prohibited elements connected with external factors.”
The Daghestani writer considers the views of several of them in detail and observes that many are concerned that men and women do not take part in such measures together, that those considering protests need to recognize the difference between living in a Muslim society where such things should not be the first choice and elsewhere where they may have no choice, and that those who participate must behave as good Muslims and not insult the dignity of others.
“Thus,” Gadzhiyaliyev says, one can conclude that “if meetings and demonstrations do not entail obvious harm, lead to a positive result and do not contain prohibited elements, then at bottom they are permitted according to Shariat law.”
But he, being a citizen of the Russian Federation, adds the expected “postscript.” “This article,” he writes, “is not backing for or denigration of any specific measure and concerns only general propositions about meetings and demonstrations.”
Read the whole story
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 U.S. News & World Report |
Ukraine: 13 troops killed in fight with Russia-backed rebels
U.S. News & World Report KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian-backed separatists kept up their assault Sunday on a railway hub in eastern Ukraine, the fiercest battle in fighting that the government said has killed 13 of its troops and wounded 20 others over the last day. The ... Ukraine appeals for military help in fight with pro-Russian rebelsFinancial Times Ukrainian Government: “No Russian Troops Are Fighting Against Us”. Sanctions ...Center for Research on Globalization all 992 Pro-Russia separatists say they've trapped thousands of Ukraine troopsLos Angeles Times all 928 news articles » |
A mother of seven facing high treason charges for making a phone call to the Ukrainian Embassy replaced her court-appointed defense attorney after he voiced support for the investigators' version of events.
Greece Starts Drive to Sell New Debt Deal to EUby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
Greece's leftist government on Sunday began its drive to persuade a skeptical Europe to accept a new debt agreement while it starts to roll back on austerity measures imposed under its existing bailout agreement. After a turbulent first week in office, the new government has made clear it wants to end the existing arrangement with the European Union, the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund “troika” when its aid deadline expires on Feb. 28. Instead, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras wants to agree a bridging deal with the troika while a new agreement is negotiated to reduce Greece's unmanageable public debt burden of more than 175 percent of its economic output is worked out. Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who spoke to U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Friday, is due to kick off a diplomatic offensive in Paris on Sunday, where he meets French counterpart Michel Sapin and Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron. He goes to London to see British Finance Minister George Osborne on Monday and travels to Rome on Tuesday. Before the meeting Sapin repeated that Greece could not expect its partners to accept a straight debt write off. But he left the door open to other options that could include giving Athens more time for repayment. “No we will not annul, we can discuss, we can delay, we can reduce its weight, but not annul,” he told Canal Plus television. He meets Varoufakis at 5 p.m. local time (1600 GMT) before a joint statement to media at 6.30 p.m. Tsipras himself is due this week in Rome and Paris, the two major capitals where his hopes for a sympathetic hearing are highest given French and Italian calls for an easing in rigid eurozone budget austerity. He is also due to meet European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker but has yet to say if and when he might meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble who refuse to consider any writedown of Greek debt. Minimum wage hike At home, where Greeks have seen poverty and hardship reach levels unmatched anywhere else in western Europe, the government has wasted little time in making clear it intends to respect its election promises to end years of harsh austerity. It has halted a series of privatizations it says amount to a disposal of strategic national assets at fire-sale prices and has announced plans to reinstate thousands of public sector workers laid off by the last government. On Sunday, Labor Minister Panos Skourletis said the government would restore collective bargaining and raise the minimum wage - cut to 586 euros ($660) from 751 euros a month under the 2012 bailout agreement. Tsipras is expected to give more detail when he lays out his program in parliament in the next few days. Skourletis said the government would discuss the minimum wage plans with unions and employers before moving ahead. European partners, including the head of the euro zone finance ministers' group Jeroen Dijsselbloem, have already made clear they doubt the Tsipras government can meet its election pledges while keeping public finances on track. Varoufakis caused consternation on Friday when he said that Greece would no longer cooperate with troika monitors in Athens overseeing the bailout accord. Nikos Chountis, the deputy foreign minister responsible for European affairs said Athens wanted to talk to European leaders and the IMF directly. “Therefore we will not have discussions with the technocrats,” he told Greek radio, noting that it was “insulting” to be dealing with lower-ranking officials. Pressure on the government to reach a deal stepped up on Saturday when Erkki Liikanen, a member of the ECB's policymaking Governing Council, said that funding for Greece's banks could dry up if Athens does not remain in a program. The banking sector, which has seen heavy outflows of deposits during the political turbulence of the past few weeks and a plunge in banking stocks since last Sunday's election, is one of the most vulnerable points of the system. On Sunday, the junior partner in Tsipras' coalition said he would propose a tax amnesty on undeclared funds brought back into the Greek banking system in a bid to reverse the rising tide of funds fleeing the country.
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О Майдане, войне и демократии by Радио Свобода
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Философско-теоретический журнал "Синий Диван", номер о Майдане. В программе участвуют философы Елена Петров...
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Andrei Lugovoi to advise pro-Kremlin channel on series that tells Russian version of the crime
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 Reuters |
Ford CFO says sees ongoing problems in Russia: Handelsblatt
Reuters Russia's currency and economic woes were cited last week by Ford as major reasons the company lowered expectations for its European business in 2015. Other carmakers have incurred losses and closed production plants in Russia for the same reason. Ford to Cut Vehicle Prices in RussiaNasdaq all 4 news articles » |
Hopes of a ceasefire evaporate after peace negotiations in Belarus collapse again
Thirteen government soldiers and at least as many civilians have been killed in 24 hours in eastern Ukraine’s separatist conflict after the collapse of peace talks, a spokesman for the Kiev authorities said.
Hopes of easing the situation evaporated on Saturday with Ukraine’s representative and separatist envoys accusing the other of sabotaging negotiations.
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 Аргументы и факты |
Обама: для США и остального мира нежелателен военный конфликт с Москвой
Коммерсантъ Президент США Барак Обама считает, что для США нежелателен прямой военный конфликт с Россией. «Я не думаю, что для США и для мира желательно видеть реальный военный конфликт между Соединенными Штатами и Россией», — сказал господин Обама. Он выразил ... Обама: реальный военный конфликт между США и Россией - не самое мудрое решениеМосковский комсомолец Обама считает, что во времена "перезагрузки" экономика РФ пошла вверхРИА Новости Обама рассказал о роли США при смене власти на УкраинеLenta.ru Взгляд -Вести.Ru -BFM.Ru Все похожие статьи: 72 » |
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For links to individual updates click on the timestamps.
For the latest summary of evidence surrounding the shooting down of flight MH17 see our separate article: Evidence Review: Who Shot Down MH17?
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 Диалог.UA - Всегда два мнения |
Аваков обвинил в покушении на Парубия экс-командующего ВВ МВД Шуляка
РБК Министр внутренних дел Украины Арсен Аваков обвинил в покушении на убийство вице-спикера Верховной рады, бывшего коменданта Майдана Андрея Порубия бывшего командующего внутренними войсками МВД Украины Станислава Шуляка, написал в «фейсбуке» глава украинский ... Покушение на Парубия заказал экс-чиновник МВД Украины, заявил АваковРИА Новости Глава МВД Украины объявил о задержании причастных к покушению на ПарубияКоммерсантъ Аваков назвал предполагаемого заказчика покушения на ПарубияLenta.ru Вести.Ru -Аргументы и факты -Интерфакс Все похожие статьи: 64 » |
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Whither the Ukrainian Far Right? by Anton Shekhovtsov
Introduction
The early presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine that took place in May and October 2014, respectively proved to be disastrous for the Ukrainian parties of the political far right.
Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of Svoboda, the All-Ukrainian Union Freedom party, obtained 1.16% of the vote in the presidential election, while his party secured only 4.71% of the vote in the parliamentary election thus failing to pass the 5% electoral threshold and enter the parliament. By contrast, Svoboda managed to obtain 10.44% of the votes in 2012 and form the first ever far-right parliamentary group in the history of Ukraine.
Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector, obtained 0.70% of the vote in the presidential election, and 1.80% of the voters supported his party in the parliamentary election. Meanwhile, the Right Sector can only provisionally be considered a far-right party, and “national conservative” would perhaps be a more relevant and cautious term. In contrast to Svoboda, the Right Sector interprets the Ukrainian nation in civic, rather than ethnic, terms, while Yarosh’s election program even insisted that the values of human dignity and human rights should become a fundamental ideology of a new constitution of Ukraine.
Weakness of the Party-Political Far Right
The failure of Tyahnybok and Yarosh in the presidential election, however, had little to do with their own political popularity. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the invasion in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians voted in the presidential election in a largely tactical manner. They supported the most popular candidate at that time, Petro Poroshenko, as they were eager to elect a new president already in the first round of the election, in order to focus on the anti-terrorist campaign in the east of the country. These attitudes affected all the other presidential candidates, including Tyahnybok and Yarosh.
The unsuccessful performance of Svoboda and the Right Sector in the parliamentary election requires a more elaborate explanation. Naturally, an element of tactical voting was present during the parliamentary election too. According to public opinion polls conducted before the election, Svoboda was on the verge of passing the electoral threshold and many voters decided not to risk supporting this party. At the same time, the popularity of the Right Sector was very low, to the extent that some polling companies often did not mention it. However, the tactical voting cannot fully explain the far right’s failure.
Why did the far right, in particular Svoboda, fail in the parliamentary election? First, Svoboda’s popularity started to decrease already in 2013, as their former supporters became disappointed with its work in the parliament. Second, Svoboda and the Right Sector split the nationalist vote; Svoboda was affected the most, as some of its former supporters presumably swung to the Right Sector. Third, Svoboda’s success in 2012 was a success of a political force that was considered the most radical in its opposition to former president Viktor Yanukovych. Svoboda was largely an “anti-Yanukovych party”, but with Yanukovych gone, Svoboda lost the major source of negative mobilization. Fourth, in 2012, Svoboda was also considered almost the only patriotic party, but since the Russian invasion forced all the democratic Ukrainian parties to turn to patriotic rhetoric, Svoboda lost its “monopoly” on patriotism. Last, but not the least, the questionable conduct and dubious activities of Svoboda’s top members (including those who were ministers in the provisional cabinet of Arseniy Yatsenyuk) in spring-summer 2014 drove off many of their former supporters.
However, the electoral failure of Svoboda and the Right Sector did not mark “the end of history” of the Ukrainian far right, and some other developments proved to be much more problematic. Before discussing some of these developments, it is useful to understand how some far right groups have been making a living in Ukraine.
Shady Dealings
Since the 1990s, Ukrainian far-right activists – as well as activists of other political movements – always fell in two broadly generalized, yet sometimes overlapping, categories: “romantics” and “pragmatists”. “Romantics” take their political beliefs seriously, are ready to sacrifice their time and energy for the cause, and work full-time for their political organizations on a voluntary basis. “Pragmatists” may be driven by genuine beliefs in the political cause too, but earning a living is always their number-one concern.
This dual, “romantic-pragmatist” character of the far right movement in general often determines its hidden agenda: promoting and fighting for a political cause goes along with making money through activities that are not necessarily relevant to their politics. More often than not, “pragmatists” head far-right organizations and parties and, therefore, turn them into enterprises with “romantic” rank-and-file being either low-paid or non-paid employees or interns. In this capacity, far right organizations are business machines able to offer various types of services.
As political parties, far-right organizations can provide three major services. First, they can be employed by more powerful (and usually incumbent) political subjects, to pose as “scarecrow” or “bigger evil” actors to mobilize popular support for the incumbents presented as “lesser evil”. Second, during elections at any level, far-right parties, which have very limited chances of success, yet are entitled to have representatives in electoral commissions, may financially gain by either exchanging their own representatives for those who represent other parties or participating in electoral fraud themselves to the benefit of more popular candidates. Third, more powerful political actors may promote far right parties, for example by covertly investing in their campaigns, in order to weaken or undermine major competing players, in particular of the mainstream right.
Naturally, far-right politicians elected into the parliament or appointed to the government as ministers can engage in a large number of corrupt schemes available to representatives of other political forces too.
The spectrum of the services that the far right can offer as social organizations or groupuscules is even wider than those of the far right political parties, although the level of reward is lower than in the second case. Most of the services provided by the far right can be grouped into four major categories – again, often overlapping – concisely named “illegal economic developments,” “protection and security,” “fake protests” and “violence”.
First, far-right activists are sometimes hired as strong-arm men to provide support during illegal takeovers. In Ukraine, redistribution of assets, property, businesses and wealth sometimes take place outside the legal space, and the rule of law is replaced by the rule of force. Far-right activists who often practice martial arts and/or bodybuilding are, thus, useful in these situations, especially when an interested party needs to physically break through and occupy particular enterprises and/or offices. While activities such as these are predominantly non-ideological, ideology may play a mobilizing role when a far right group is hired to drive out a business run by people of non-Slavic origin from a market. To mobilize their rank-and-file for such an operation, “pragmatists” leading a far-right group may interpret it as a part of the “racial holy war”, while in reality the original “need” to force out a business from a market has nothing to do with ethnicity.
Caught on CCTV: Ihor Moseychuk, then a member of the Patriot of Ukraine and currently an MP, is raiding an office and apparently stealing belongings of office workers. July 2014, Kyiv, Ukraine
Second, some far-right groups can be characterized as criminal gangs running protection and/or extortion rackets. In the case of the protection racket, far right activists would offer to protect a business against a real threat, for example an illegal takeover or aggressive competitors. In the case of the extortion racket, the far right would threaten to attack a business if it refused protection.
Third, and this point is similar to the extortion racket, far-right activists sometimes organize or threaten to organize protests against particular political, social or cultural developments or events in order to extort a reward for stopping them. For example, real estate developers do not always take into account opinions of tenants of neighboring houses who can make a weak protest that will then be hijacked and/or reinforced by a far-right group. A strong legitimate protest can potentially stop a construction project that would lead to significant financial losses, so a building company would offer a payoff to a far right group in exchange for its withdrawal from the protest that would eventually die out without a mass backing of far right activists. In a similar vein, a far-right group can threaten to block a concert of an “unpatriotic” singer or disrupt an event of social or cultural minorities in order to extract a payoff from the promoters or the organizers of the concert or the event.
Caught on a hidden camera: Ihor Mazur (aka “Topolya”), a leader of the Ukrainian National Assembly, is trying to “sell” an anti-government protest to a representative of the authorities. A Ukrainian investigative journalist pretended to be one. July 2013, Kyiv
Fourth, far-right activists can be hired by an interested party to perform acts of violence against its political opponents without giving away the connection between the “customer” and the “contractors”. More often than not, “customers” are incumbents who would be interested in disrupting opposition protests or demonstrations that can potentially pose a serious challenge to the incumbents. The violence may be either direct, i.e. physical attacks, or mediated. In the latter case, far right activists would infiltrate the opposition protests without disclosing either their political affiliation or their “customers” and radicalize them to the degree where police action against the entire protest would be legitimate. In most cases, far right activists will attack the police to provoke them into using violence against the genuine protesters.
It is important to note that all these activities are neither confined to the far-right milieu nor to the Ukrainian context. Moreover, the brief description of these largely illegal activities does not imply that all the Ukrainian far-right parties and groups are engaged in them or that those far-right activists who are indeed engaged in them necessarily represent organizations that are fake in political terms. It is true that some Ukrainian far-right organizations will only care about making money, but normally raising money will still contribute to the struggle for a political cause.
Networking
The recent developments in Ukraine marked by the rise of the previously obscure neo-Nazi organization, The Patriot of Ukraine (PU), led by Andriy Bilets’ky can be seen from a purely political perspective but they cannot be fully understood without taking into account the above-mentioned activities of some of the far right organizations in Ukraine.
The political perspective is as follows. Like some other leaders of the PU, Bilets’ky did not take part in the 2014 revolution, as he had been in jail since the end of 2011: he was charged with attempted murder. Bilets’ky and his associates were released as “political prisoners” only after the ouster of Yanukovych and later the PU formed a core of the Azov Battalion, a volunteer detachment governed by the Ministry of Interior headed by Arsen Avakov. From the very beginning, the Azov battalion employed imagery such as the Wolfsangel and Schwarze Sonne that in post-war Europe is associated with neo-Nazi movements.
As a member of Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party, Interior Minister Avakov promoted the Azov Battalion and granted the rank of police Lieutenant Colonel to its commander Bilets’ky in August 2014. The People’s Front also brought Bilets’ky into the military council of the party and apparently planned to officially support his candidacy in the parliamentary election, but, due to the opposition to such a move from the Ukrainian expert community and representatives of national minorities, the People’s Front was forced to re-think its decision. However, the People’s Front, in particular Avakov and his advisor Anton Gerashchenko, still supported Bilets’ky unofficially, and he was elected into the parliament in a single-member district in Kyiv. After the elections, Avakov appointed Vadym Troyan, deputy commander of the Azov Battalion and a top member of the PU, as head of the Kyiv region police.
The political perspective raises troubling questions: Why did Ukrainians elect a neo-Nazi into the parliament? Why did the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior promote the leaders of this neo-Nazi organization?
One can answer the first question still within the conceptual framework of political science. Bilets’ky’s neo-Nazi views and his leadership in the PU played no role in his victory. He was elected into the parliament for three major reasons: (1) he was a commander of a volunteer battalion that defended Ukraine against (pro-)Russian extremists in Eastern Ukraine, (2) although he was not taking part in the revolution – a little-known fact to the public – he was considered almost the only representative of the victorious Maidan movement in his electoral district, and (3) his nearest competitor was a representative of the ancien regime.
The framework of political science, however, fails to explain why the Interior Ministry supported the leaders of the Patriot of Ukraine, as neither Avakov nor Gerashchenko are neo-Nazis. The explanation seems to lie in the past and has to do with a sinister legacy of cronyism.
Avakov, Bilets’ky and Troyan all come from the Kharkiv Region and have known each other at least since 2009-2010, when Avakov was still the governor of the Kharkiv Region. In Kharkiv, the PU was involved in some of the largely illegal activities described earlier. In 2010, according to the media reports, PU activists headed by Troyan seized four dozen news kiosks in Kharkiv in favor of Andriy Liphans’ky. The latter was a business partner of Avakov and headed the board of media and information of the Kharkiv Region during Avakov’s term in office. Media reports also suggested that Liphans’ky rented a gym for training PU activists. For their part, the PU activists provided manpower for paid protests, as well as protection for the demonstrations of the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT) in Kharkiv – at that time Avakov, after having been dismissed from the post of the Kharkiv Region governor, headed the regional office of the BYuT. Furthermore, a leader of the Kharkiv football hooligans who was close to the PU took part in Avakov’s mayoral campaign in 2010.
Today’s involvement of the PU leaders in Ukrainian police seems to be driven by Avakov’s trust in the organization that he worked with in the past. Avakov also seems to believe in the personal loyalty of the PU-led Azov Battalion and may use them as his “private army” to protect his business and political interests.
The problematic relationship between the Interior Ministry and the neo-Nazis is undermining the credibility of the newly-formed Ukrainian government both internationally and domestically. It was most likely Avakov who suggested to Poroshenko to grant Ukrainian citizenship to Sergey Korotkikh, a Belarusian fighter of the Azov Battalion who has been involved in the neo-Nazi movements in Belarus and Russia since the late 1990s. Furthermore, under Avakov, the police in Kyiv have already proved unable or unwilling to investigate a number of hate crimes. In July, far-right thugs – not necessarily associated with the PU – attacked four black people in the metro as well as a gay club and a Jewish student by a synagogue. The police initiated two criminal cases, but so far nobody has been prosecuted. In September, Vasyl Cherepanyn, head of the Visual Culture Research Centre was beaten apparently by far-right activists, but the police failed to investigate this attack too. The police are also unwilling to address the issue of the torture of political opponents inflicted by the neo-Nazi C14 group during the revolution in winter 2013-2014. There are no grounds to believe that the infiltration of the far right into the police will contribute to the efficiency of its investigations in general and of the hate crimes in particular.
Conclusion
Avakov may consider the PU-led Azov Battalion as his “private army”, but not everybody in the PU and Azov sees the current cooperation with the Interior Ministry as a goal in and of itself. The PU may benefit from this cooperation, but it still has its own political agenda that goes beyond this cooperation. The PU has also started advertising employment in the Security Service of Ukraine on their webpages.
Further infiltration of the far right into Ukrainian law enforcement and other institutions of the state will most likely lead to the following developments. First, the coalescence of the police and the far right who were engaged, inter alia, in the illegal activities will necessarily increase the corruption risks. Second, the growth of the far right within the law enforcement will lead to the gradual liberation of the PU from the personal patronage of Avakov that will likely result in the PU’s independent action.
While Svoboda and the Right Sector have failed in the 2014 parliamentary elections, the infiltration of some other far right organizations in the law enforcement is possibly a more advanced long-term strategy in their fight against not particularly well established liberal democracy in Ukraine.
This article was originally published in the German language in Ukraine-Analysen, No. 144 (2015).
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OAnews В результате конфликта в петербургском кафе произошла перестрелка, в которой погибли директор заведения и один из клиентов. Посетители кафе высказали недовольство качеством обслуживания, а владелец заведения был недоволен поведением посетителей. В Петербурге в ... В Петербурге 2 человека стали жертвами перестрелки в кафеИнтерновости.ру Перестрелка гостей города в кафе в Сосновой Поляне закончилась смертью двух человекГАZЕТА.СПБ В Петербурге при перестрелке в кафе «Гурман» погибли два человекаИменно.ру Общественный контроль -Актуальные новости Санкт-Петербурга и мира - Информационное агентство <<Телеграф>> -Mail.Ru Все похожие статьи: 48 » |
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Staunton, January 30 – The old left-right continuum in Russian politics with its differences between conservatives and reformers ceased to be relevant as the basis for analysis and understanding with Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea and the formation of a populist left-right alliance of support, according to Aleksandr Morozov.
In a commentary in New Times, he argues that “with the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the east of Ukraine, all the political space of the Russian Titanic together with its tables, chairs and orchestra slid to one side” and came together in ways few expected.
“All the old political distinctions lost any meaning before both former reformers and former conservatives and even national Bolsheviks and national organizations like Barkashov’s and socialists like Kagarlitsky found themselves in one multi-voiced crowd shouting ‘Send the tanks to Kyiv! Fascism will not pass!’”
“The so-called ‘peace party’ in such circumstances,” Morozov continues, “cannot possibly be qualified as liberals. What kind of liberalism is in there in wartime? In wartime it can be only ‘a fifth column’ and ‘traitors to the motherland.’”
What has formed instead is “a broad left-right populist consensus,” one that is quite familiar to historians of interwar Europe and especially of Germany and Italy. Left-wing political thought has always characterized fascism as “reactionary and conservative,” but there is more to it than that as recent analysis has shown.
Today, many historians are more inclined to talk about the movements of that time in terms of populism rather than in terms of a left-right continuum. Indeed, it seems, Morozov says, that “each new stage of globalization and the inclusion in communications of new masses generates a reaction in the form of an epidemic spread of populism.”
However that may be, he continues, “one must not say that this was or is an exclusivey conservative reaction.” In the Russian case now, “the populist synthesis includes within itself both former revolutionaries like Eduard Limonov and such died-in-the-wool state types like Ramzan Kadyrov.”
“The fate of this ‘post-Crimean populist consensus,” Morozov says, “is still unclear. It may break apart or it may form the basis of a new state system.” It may lead to “Italian fascism or Hitlerism” or it may go off in another direction altogether. “The next three years,” he suggests, will provide the answer.
One of the reasons for uncertainty is that past analogies are useful only up to a point and “populism mutates” regularly. Putin’s “’post-Crimea consensus’” is in the very early stages, and where it will lead to could vary from judicial pressure on the Sakharov Center to the smashing of its windows by mobs while the police look on.
Russia’s current “post-Soviet ‘rightists’ always were not completely conservative because they called not for the preservation” of a real past in the present but rather for the construction of something “impossible, a kind of conservative utopia” be it “Stalinism, Byzantium or the Russian 19th century.”
“All of them conceive the war in the Donbass not simply as a war for territory but as a struggle for the construction of a new society corresponding to their national socialist idea in a separate gubernia.” As such they are truly “conservative revolutionaries” who join together both left and right ideas.
“Now, this right-left consensus works in the following way.” It draws on popular support from below and uses television from above, and it is seeking to form “a new social fabric based on anti-Americanism, the opposition of Putin to weak Western leaders, support for Russian values against the degenerate West, state sovereignty, and the militarization of public life.
As one can see, Morozov says, “the right, like the left, has dissolved in this post-Crimea consensus.”
“The ‘televised Ukraine’ has been transformed into a field of virtual war with the West and the United States for millions while the Donbass is a real war for several thousand citizens with Russian passports. No one knows what this new populism will become when it matures.” But one thing is clear: “the degeneration of society is proceeding very quickly.”
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 New York Daily News |
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Poll: Most Germans Want Greece in Eurozoneby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
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11 Jun 2008, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia --- Graduating Saudi National Guard officers attend their graduation ceremony. --- Image by © Fahad Shadeed/Reuters/Corbis
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CAIRO — Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste was freed from an Egyptian prison on Sunday after spending 400 days behind bars. By the evening, he was in the air flying back to his native Australia, according to Egyptian officials.
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The Women's Mosque of America, which claims to be the country's first female-only mosque, opens in Los Angeles. . Report by Lauren Hampshire.
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The time for diplomacy will come again, but it is not now: Ukraine urgently needs military support, and a counter to Russian propaganda
Vladimir Putin is the Slobodan Milošević of the former Soviet Union: as bad, but bigger. Behind a smokescreen of lies he has renewed his drive to carve out a puppet para-state in eastern Ukraine.
Innocent bystanders are killed in the Black Sea port of Mariupol. In besieged Debaltseve, a woman scoops water from a giant puddle in the road. The rubble that was once Donetsk airport recalls a scene from martyred Syria. About 5,000 people have already been killed in this armed conflict, and more than 500,000 uprooted. Preoccupied by Greece and the eurozone, Europe is letting another Bosnia happen in its own front yard. Wake up, Europe. If we have learned anything from our own history, Putin must be stopped. But how?
Like Milošević, Putin is prepared to use every instrument at his disposal, with no holds barred
We need to counter this propaganda. No one is better placed to do this than the BBC
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Saudi Arabia frees associate of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawiby Agence France-Presse in Riyadh
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Continue reading...Pegida: Germany’s useful idiots by Ingo Schulze
With its populist anti-Muslim, anti-immigration agenda, the Pegida protests have convulsed Germany. When novelist Ingo Schulze attended one of their weekly demonstrations, he found a movement that barely knows what it’s protesting about, and, conveniently for the ruling parties, is obscuring the real issues
If I didn’t know that Pegida stands for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West, and thought perhaps the acronym was merely a reference to three politically active friends (PEtra, GIsela, DAgmar) who organised a demonstration every Monday evening, I’d go along with interest. I don’t know why the people of Germany don’t take to the streets much more often to demonstrate over their political grievances.
On one recent Monday, on the weekly Pegida march in Dresden, in former East Germany, there were 8,000 demonstrators; the day before, at an anti-Pegida event with the mayor and the prime minister of Saxony in attendance, there were significantly more. There will be another counter-demonstration this Monday, too, although not until after Pegida’s march.
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Continue reading... New York Daily News |
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