ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

I think that's about right, although the geographic split being talked about doesn't seem to be working out so much in reality -- my Ukrainian pals are all Russian-speaking Easterners, and are supporters of the protests. Yanukovich is also widely considered to be the worst of a bunch of idiots -- this is an "enough is enough" moment in many ways. There are neo-fascists in the protest movement, but I have seen no sources that are not Russian-friendly that suggest that they are the majority or growing, and there sure as hell are neo-fascists in Yanukovich's troops as well. There are agents provocateurs at work as well. For the people on the ground this is primarily and simply anti-government protest, but of course there is far more going on than just the people on the ground.

in the context you folks describe the way the west (esp. US) is dealing w/ this is kind of embarrassing.

we all know john mccain is an idiot, but appearing with some of the right-wing protest groups and calling for "freedom" was one of his more embarrassingly credulous photo ops.

what about those folks that briefly came into power after the "orange revolution"? my understanding was that they were both crooks _and_ victims of political show trials.

The elite political class in Ukraine is a disaster -- the lack of a central strong figure leading the protests is both a result of and a reaction to that.

Yes, Yushchenko (who was president) is a minor crook, his son is a fairly major one. Tymoshenko (who was Prime Minister) stole several billion dollars worth of gas from Russia while people on both sides of the border were dying in poverty. Her reinvention as a St Joan figure is laughable.

Yushchenko and Yanukovich were both PM under Leonid Kuchma, the journalist-murdering crim who was Ukraine's first independent President, so the idea of a major political difference between the two is somewhat overstated.

Ukraine is generally though of as more corrupt than Nigeria. All politicians are required to state their income on electoral forms. There was one election in the mid-2000s where every single candidate but one claimed that their only source of income was their government salary of £5,000 - £13,000. All had BMWs, plush Kyiv apartments and massive country dachas. The one candidate who didn't claim to be living off his stipend ran with the campaign tagline "i'm too rich to need to be corrupt!". He didn't win.

Much of Ukraine's economy is carved up between a small number of oligarch factions and they bankroll everything. Some are pro-Tymoshenko, some are pro-Yanukovich. Quite a few are in favour of EU membership as they think it'll stop future governments from trying to reclaim the money they've stolen, some are against it as they think it'll prevent them from stealing more.

The oligarchs tend to be worse than the politicians. Ukraine' richest man, Rinat Akhmetov (who's more famous as Chairman of Shakhtar Donetsk), for example, was a prominent member of the Donbass Mafia and acquired most of his wealth when his boss (and former Chairman of Shakhtar) died in a bomb attack at a football match.

Great posts ShariVari.

As with most protest movements there are elements you wouldn't want to embrace - during Greece's Syntagma Square occupation in 2011 the left occupied one end and the far right (much smaller) the other because they were both opposed to the ruling elite and the EU austerity package - but the neo-fascists don't seem to be the driving force here by any stretch.

I'm still shocked it's come to this. I reported a story in Kiev after the 2004 Maidan protests and was told "Psychologically speaking, the orange revolution was unique. The Ukrainian nation is very peaceful and calm. We don't like ups and downs. A lot of Ukrainians still don't believe that they all went out into the street." So much for that theory.

With Bangkok and Caracas kicking off as well, for different reasons, it's a scary time. Since the Arab Spring turned sour it's really hard to be optimistic.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/21/ukraine-president-says-deal-has-been-reached-opposition-bloodshed

Positive news, though it'll be a tough sell on the streets. Expect Yulia to be freed any day now.

posting w/o comment since I am still just learning here, but I saw this today:

http://boingboing.net/2014/02/21/i-am-a-ukrainian-powerful-vi.html

The Ukraine

to avoid getting depressed, maybe just embed parliamentary brawl clips

one of the more balanced pieces i've read on this: http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2014/02/ukraine-war-were-just-not-admitting-it-yet

Yes, that is much better than most.

There are unconfirmed rumours that Yanukovich has resigned.

Pro-Russia Kharkiv and Crimea have effectively said that they are implementing self-governance until constitutional order is restored and are highly unlikely to come back under Kyiv's control if they aren't satisfied with the make-up of the new government. Lviv is doing the same but from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Yanukovich hasn't resigned and has apparently claimed that a coup has taken place in Kyiv. The main square of Sevastopol is full of people demanding the Crimean Autonomous Republic breaks with Ukraine and rejoins the Russian Federation.

Y has fled the palace acc to the NYT

The parliament has apparantly fired Yanukovich, and elections will be held May 25th

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ukraines-president-open-to-early-vote-polish-leader-says-scores-reported-killed-in-clashes/2014/02/21/05d3de46-9a82-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html?hpid=z1

Thousands poured onto the grounds of presidential residence, 12 miles from downtown Kiev, to gawk at the manicured lawns, the golf course and the botanical gardens, while other government offices were shuttered amid reports that workers at the public prosecutor’s office were destroying documents.

Police had abandoned the center of Kiev to protesters who had commandeered water cannon trucks and claimed full control of the city.

that wapo article helps, but i'm still confused. has the country splintered into two soon-to-be-independent states, one in kiev (west)and kharkov (east), and if it's true, what factions would control each such territory?

so much happening so fast. this reporter is a good read on the subject.

Eric Margolis ‏@ericmargolis -- Yulia Tymoshenko jailed Ukraine leader freed. Will make triumphant entry into Kiev, maybe challenge protest leaders.

sorry; meant to say one in kiev (west) and one in kharkov (east).

The big nationalist power bases are Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. The nationalists now dominate the West and North, including defacto control of the capital. The pro Russian groups dominate the East (the economic heart of the country) and the south, including the whole of the Crimean peninsula.

so those controlling western ukraine are, largely, nationalists who are comfortable seeing "Mein Kampf displayed in bookshop windows." normally i'd think pro-russian groups would be especially anti-semetic.

scary times. your posts have been outstanding, sv.

The newly-installed interior minister declared that the police now stood with demonstrators they had fought for days, when central Kiev became a war zone with 77 people killed.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ukraine-protest-20140221,0,1284200.story

x-post to Sharivari-- so if one is not pro-Russian then one is a "nationalist"... ok I guess.

"Nationalist" doesn't mean far-right automatically, though there is some of that and the continued affection for Stepan Bandera even from some of the mainstream is troubling. It's more about prioritising a sense of Ukrainian national identity over a pan-Slavic one and a fairly strong hostility to Russian influence. Most people don't fit neatly into either category (I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Ukrainian independence in Maidan Nezhaleznosti with Ukrainian and Russian speakers) but to the extent that there is a clear split, that's how it breaks down.

i mean, yeah, party is "troubling" to use the word of the times

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_%28political_party%29

*this party

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Yanukovich estate pics are nuts.

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

― goole, Saturday, February 22, 2014 12:08 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

explained by hatred of russia

http://www.thenation.com/article/177421/letter-new-york-times

bears repeating that yulia tymoshenko is a total babe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsZIZKBqSaE

she is!

I have a Russian fb friend who has been going nuts about this for a while now & he calls the opposition Nazis and I'd been thinking he's off his rocker but the more I read about what's going on, the more I can see where he's coming from. friend claims that the opposition tried to assassinate Yanukovich but that the Western press has been suppressing this.

Between this and Venezuela (where I have a good friend in Caracas), I'm getting an impression throughout of 'no black/white sides here, total mess, watch and wait.'

this is a very vague thought, but in discussions of ukraine + venezuela (+ thailand, etc) i keep seeing writers making reference to the arab spring and i wonder if these things do exist in a continuum - that maybe they're all reverberations of the global economic downturn? it does seem like a pretty tumultuous time for a variety of seemingly unlinked governments + nationhoods.

I think that's probably right. From Iran and Egypt to Bosnia and Ukraine to Thailand, whatever ill feeling existed towards the government has almost certainly been intensified by increased economic hardship. People have more to complain about and less to lose.

http://libya360.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/syria-ukraine-and-venezuela-the-politics-of-protest/

We saw it in Syria and now we are witnessing it again in Ukraine and Venezuela; namely, using the politics of protest to engineer anti-democractic movements which seek to overthrow popular and/or elected governments in the name of democratic freedoms. And we aren’t merely talking about undemocratic groups here, but anti-democractic movements which are opposed in principle to democracy (takfiris and jihadis in Syria; right-wing fascists in Ukraine; reactionary neo-liberals in Venezuela). In all these cases, governments are being rebuked, pressured and sanctioned for exercising their constitutionally prescribed and universally recognized duty to maintain law and order and to protect national security, public safety and national unity. And as we witnessed in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring”, democracy and revolution are now redefined in the public imagination as any popular outpouring of anger irrespective of the nature of its demands, the medium through which it is expressed, or its intersection with the interests of global capital.

If Ukraine actually splits, will Georgia also?

Georgia has already split!

Oh ffs, I'm so out of touch

I mean I dunno, it looks as if whole chunks of post-Soviet states just don't want to be independent, want to be Russian still

(Abkhazia is now not part of georgia? Or was the pro-Russian part of Georgia called Ossettia?)

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.575732

there is a weird postponed momentum in the way that "nationalism", which was one of the key driving forces toward liberal, democratic Europe in the 19th century, is now continuing along its logical trajectory after a pause for the "bad" nationalisms of Nazism and Soviet expansionism, and yet is viewed thru the prism of those regimes whilst the original impetus towards free democratic nation states is being forgotten by western journos

incidentally fuck nationalism in its liberal forms too but the collective amnesia or ignorance of Euro history is piss-poor

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

― goole, Saturday, February 22, 2014 1:08 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

its pretty exclusively an eastern european thing

there is a weird postponed momentum in the way that "nationalism", which was one of the key driving forces toward liberal, democratic Europe in the 19th century

Examples?

Germany, Italy, France were formed as nation states in large part due to pressure from nationalist movements - these movements on the whole were progressive and liberal in 19th century terms

France is somewhat different to the other two in terms of geographic borders and pre-existing central government but still pretty much counts in terms of the country as it exists today

basically nationalism = good when it's liberating the great Platonic nation-state from its mean old oppressor but then it's bad when it turns out the Platonic nation-state is full of smaller thwarted nation-states full of people antagonistic to the country they end up in

well i guess theres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_a_Nation too

the end logic of nationalism is something a wee bit smaller than the city state basically

getting a bit closer to the city might bring it within more reachable tube artillery range, making strikes both more effective and more cost-effective

As speculations go, that's quite plausible. Also, the pipeline of US military aid that just started back up recently hasn't had much time to backfill the shortages caused by the long wrangle in Congress.

Its not all that clear what Russia prefers to do with the population of Kharkiv. Getting closer to it would increase its ability to shell it with lower cost munitions which would presumably pressure inhabitants to start leaving again for safer locations.

But with Mariupol Russia seemed reluctant to let the population leave, though eventually they replaced some of the inhabitants via population transfer (I'm unclear on how large this transfer was but given the reported numbers I presume the majority of these were from Mariupol, maybe Melitopol)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=829nvzjbPPA

Perun's take on the current situation in Kharkiv, listened to on my run this morning, not really any clear answers., though one interesting angle is the idea that bringing Kharkiv within tube artillery range would lead to increased headlines in the West about Russian advances, with possible idea of persuading voters in Europe and the US that a Russian victory is inevitable and therefore its best to stop supplying Ukraine.

Difficult to know if that would have any real effect or not, apparently one poll in Europe from Feb of this year had "A Russian victory is most likely outcome" at 20% (he does cite his sources but I was listening not watching so I don' have source to hand)

If the war comes down to a long stalemate and its attendant attrition then Russia, by dint of its sheer size advantage, has a clear but very costly and bloody path to victory.