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I was not talking about Russian Nazis. I was talking about Russians without any insignia selling themselves as Ukrainian Nazis in the territory of Ukraine.
That still sounds too farfetched, sorry.
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And why (could it) not (be the case)? Putin said many times that ist's not Russian forces in Crimea, but Ukrainian self-defence groups who occupaid the territory.
We all know what Putin is all about, don't we? He is shrewd and calculative and the West with all its hyppocrisy gave him plenty of tools to work with.
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If this belief is your starting point, then I understand the motivation behind all your posts.
My motivation always has been ( and still is) to point how decent people of Russia, hoping for democratic changes in their country have been sold out by the West back in the 90ies for *modest financial gains* - those thirty pieces of silver. I never made a secret of it, you can see my posts three-four years ago, it's just now everything I was talking about back then, seems to be knocking at the door.
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All I know is that Crimea is a part of Ukraine.
Hypothetically, according to all the laws that's been signed back in the nineties, with "Western advisers" guiding the hand of those who signed those agreements.
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Meanwhile, Russian forces in Crimea bull and harrass minorities and foreign journalists.
"In addition to the Russian troops, the province is prowled by roving bands of "self defence" forces and Cossacks in fur hats armed with whips who were bused in from southern Russia."
As I've said - I am not paying too much attention to CBC et al, but yesterday I saw yet another video on Youtube (can't find it any longer) where a Russian woman ( originally from Perm) was bringing food to besieged Ukrainian soldiers and she says to the interviewer "I don't like occupational forces ( referring to the Russian Army.) You can see that the guy who is recording all that is questioned by Russian soldiers, but they let him go. )
On another hand - I totally understand why Russians in Crimea feel threatened, I understand the mood there, why they invited Russian troops and why they are singing "The sacred war."
You should know Russians by now - their like/dislike of authorities is for internal consumption only, but once they feel threatened, they stick around those authorities in order to be unified, and when it brings along the byproducts of shauvinism, patriotism/natinalism - it becomes unavoidable.
P.S. And as you can understand here, it's not like it's exclusively "Putin's troops" that operate in Crimea - here they are clearly organizing people for the army of the "national defense" of Crimea.
Erasure, you seem to be a smart girl (even if you're like 50). Those 100 people killed on Maidan weren't Right Sector activists, but regular Ukrainians demanding more democracy, free elections and less corruption. And people died for these ideals. They weren't led by fascists, but did it for themselves.
Freedom fighters they are and so they will be.
SLAVA UKRAINI! FU** PUTIN!
The problem is
Who is responsible for the 100 deaths . We have the Estonian Foreign Minister expressing doubt concerning whether Yanukovich was responsible for these deaths that led to his ouster as President of Ukraine to the EU Foreign Minister
I doubt you're going to get less corruption if you're putting the same oligarchs who benefited from past corruption in power in Government positions across Ukraine.
The tragedy is that most likely they died in vain for these ideals as similar to other recent movements and conflicts such as Egypt and Syria. They're already getting the same overlords from the failed past with the blessings from the West
The worst and most immature idiotic commentary on the net flows from Utube...It is absolutely the worst! The visuals on Utube are highly informative...the rest can go in the garbage. There is still a strong ignorance in the west regarding Ukraine...and Russia.. The culture and language is almost indistinguishable. The worst perspective and attitude that watchers of this situation can have is that Russia is some stranger entering with force in the the Ukrainian national household...It's more like a big brother dominating the younger sibling.
That's more like it, except for if we are talking about the most western parts of Ukraine.
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What most do not realize about Russia and the Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Empire ....is that like before there is an institutional poverty that exists and has always existed. The primary gripe Ukraine has as does the rest of the Russian population - is that their lot in life is boarder line poverty or full blown dire straights...This is about having a real un-corrupted government...and it is about money and simple creature comforts...The drab shadow of old communism is like a scar that will not fade. It is going to take a decade or so for Russia and the Ukraine to over come the curse of godless communism...
I am not sure what you mean by the "institutional poverty," because the kind of poverty I saw in the US among Blacks in the US was shocking for me as for former Soviet citizen ( whether it's "institutional" or not I have no idea,) but from everything I understand is that Ukrainians ( as a whole) are not better off after the collapse of the Soviet Union in material sense of it.
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Look at the visuals and the infrastructure...everything is still substandard..The Ukraine like Russia is developmentally decades behind...I noticed this with Russian immigrants and their kids trying to be cool....We as a pop culture were role modeling after Madonna at that time...and their teenagers were dressing like Alice Cooper....What ever goes on in the west...remember that Russia and the Ukraine are twenty years in the past..
Did you ever consider that the reason why Russian/Ukrainian kids were dressing like Alice Cooper and ignored Madonna was NOT because they were not aware of her existence, but because she was simply not cool in their eyes, while she was an icon in the eyes of Americans?
I know it's the case, because I am more or less from the same generation, and while Soviet people behind the Iron curtain were listening plenty of Western music, their perceptions of what was cool or not was quite different from American perception. Cultural difference, you know.
Would you change your opinion if a member of FEMEN gets jailed by Russian authorities?
No. Because they could have been sentenced for "indecent exposure" and it would have been difficult to argue the case.
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I don't even know if there any Russian citizens who are members in their organization and if they also operate in Russia.
What "their organization?"
Femen? They are "organization"?
In this case I don't believe so, knowing the current stance on "homosexuality" (and all other damned sins) by Russian authorities; the FEMEN participants would have been put on the same shelf of "Sodom and Gomorrah" I'd think.
Well you know the Poles got away and the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Slovaks, the Hungarians too from Russian 'influence'. Those countries are on their own now. This time it looks like it has come for the Ukrainians. I don't know but I'd say as the world moves on events will move to directions away from a country believing it must be under a 'yoke' of some sort. Ukraine looks like it has crossed that line for good. And it is not the state like Krushchev worked with back in his time when he held all the cards in 'brotherhood'.
Again - you are confusing two different concepts. Poland, Czekoslovakia, Bukgaria, - those were all spoils of the WWII, but Ukraine is the country where Russia was born and which was inseparable part of Russia from the 1600ies until the beginning of the 90ies.
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And been watching Al Jazeera. Interesting. I was happy to see some incisive commentary on the 'Eurasian' troubles. And really I wish I could sign up to get a Rossiya feed or even a Russian 'independent' channel (how many exist?) for that matter around here just to see how they report the news. But it' would be as rare as a Lenin statue in downtown Washington. Such is our discourse for 'understanding'.
In all honestly I was shocked to see how many statues of Lenin Ukraine still had. That was very telling to me. I see a lot of "hammer and sickle" flags flying now above the crowds in Ukraine; something you won't see much in Russia "proper." Again - that's something very telling for me and in a very good way.
There are many varieties of Russian nationalism, but, amazingly, Russians and Russian speakers don't consider themselves to be nationalistic or bonafide fascists (even though modern Russia fits classical definition of a fascist state quite well, even without this Sudetenland remake). This remarkable blindness to their own nationalism if not Nazism is a permanent feature of the Russian character, they would insult your culture and they don't even realize that they insulted you, it's just a friendly joke for them showing how friendly they are, but if you return exactly the same joke/name turned upside down they would definitely consider you a virulent Ukrainian etc. nationalist, Banderovets, Nazi, etc.. 300 years of imperial conditioning fertilized the grounds for this peculiar ambivalence. Russians are (virulently) nationalistic and fairly racist people, anything from bonafide neo Nazis to the cultural nationalists who deems others languages and cultures within former USSR border inferior and/or harmful for human IQ.
Actually, back in the days of "internationalist" USSR it was fairly common for a Russian speaker to ask a Ukrainian speaking in Ukrainian to his kids something like this: "Why are you crippling mental development of your child by speaking to him in that hick language?". If you think Eastern Ukraine became Russian speaking 100% voluntarily, think again. Crazy attitudes like that are alive and well in Crimea and to lesser extent in Eastern Ukraine. Russians tolerate (barely) other cultures only if they don't demand any public space in education, administration, science, or anything of importance that might inconvenience a Russian. It's OK to keep your ethnic language to yourself within comfort of your house, but if you display that in open, gosh forbid if you demand some some public space for your culture, it tends to annoy cultural nationalism of the Russians who rarely learn languages and customs of the people they live with. Had you've made a trip to Crimea 5 years back you would have been explained that it's impossible to learn Mathematics in Ukrainian and such, only superior Russian language is capable of such enormous undertaking which is total BS, but for those Russians it's real fact. You can imagine what's going on with those people now, it's rabid Russian Nazi fest, there is no lesser word. Personally, I wouldn't want to live with those people under the same roof, but pacifying those people with Crimea independence is not a solution. Ukraine, its language has no right to exist in the mind of those people.
Those are Russian "anti-fascists", I've never met a real Russian neo Nazi, but I really doubt they could be any more rabid than Sevastopol "anit-fascists". Russia is sick, and feeding the disease will make things only worse.
Oh, I know -
Americans are greedy capitalists that lynch the Blacks, suck the blood of working people and exploit the developing counties.
Erasure, you seem to be a smart girl (even if you're like 50). Those 100 people killed on Maidan weren't Right Sector activists, but regular Ukrainians demanding more democracy, free elections and less corruption. And people died for these ideals. They weren't led by fascists, but did it for themselves.
Freedom fighters they are and so they will be.
SLAVA UKRAINI! FU** PUTIN!
All I know is that;
1. The majority of people that have been killed in Kiev came not from Kiev but from Western Ukraine.
So how many of them belonged to the "Right sector" or "Svoboda" or were "regular Ukrainians" is not certain.
2. Even the currently organized ( pro- Kiev government) protesters in Donetsk are using the ultra-right groups to "guard" the demonstration - or rather to walk in front of it.
and
3. ALL corruption ( be that in Ukraine OR Russia) that "regular Ukrainians" were fighting against on Maidan became possible with the direct help of Western banking system.
So. While I perfectly understand what many Ukrainians stood for on Maidan, their aspirations are not going to be fulfilled, because of the heavy presence of the nationalists and because of the direct connections of current government to Timoshenko/Yushenko governments which were corrupt as well.
Such is my conclusion.
There are many varieties of Russian nationalism, but, amazingly, Russians and Russian speakers don't consider themselves to be nationalistic or bonafide fascists (even though modern Russia fits classical definition of a fascist state quite well, even without this Sudetenland remake). This remarkable blindness to their own nationalism if not Nazism is a permanent feature of the Russian character, they would insult your culture and they don't even realize that they insulted you, it's just a friendly joke for them showing how friendly they are, but if you return exactly the same joke/name turned upside down they would definitely consider you a virulent Ukrainian etc. nationalist, Banderovets, Nazi, etc.. 300 years of imperial conditioning fertilized the grounds for this peculiar ambivalence. Russians are (virulently) nationalistic and fairly racist people, anything from bonafide neo Nazis to the cultural nationalists who deems others languages and cultures within former USSR border inferior and/or harmful for human IQ.
Actually, back in the days of "internationalist" USSR it was fairly common for a Russian speaker to ask a Ukrainian speaking in Ukrainian to his kids something like this: "Why are you crippling mental development of your child by speaking to him in that hick language?". If you think Eastern Ukraine became Russian speaking 100% voluntarily, think again. Crazy attitudes like that are alive and well in Crimea and to lesser extent in Eastern Ukraine. Russians tolerate (barely) other cultures only if they don't demand any public space in education, administration, science, or anything of importance that might inconvenience a Russian. It's OK to keep your ethnic language to yourself within comfort of your house, but if you display that in open, gosh forbid if you demand some some public space for your culture, it tends to annoy cultural nationalism of the Russians who rarely learn languages and customs of the people they live with. Had you've made a trip to Crimea 5 years back you would have been explained that it's impossible to learn Mathematics in Ukrainian and such, only superior Russian language is capable of such enormous undertaking which is total BS, but for those Russians it's real fact. You can imagine what's going on with those people now, it's rabid Russian Nazi fest, there is no lesser word. Personally, I wouldn't want to live with those people under the same roof, but pacifying those people with Crimea independence is not a solution. Ukraine, its language has no right to exist in the mind of those people.
Those are Russian "anti-fascists", I've never met a real Russian neo Nazi, but I really doubt they could be any more rabid than Sevastopol "anit-fascists". Russia is sick, and feeding the disease will make things only worse.
There have been conflicts between Ukrainians and other groups (including among Ukrainians) for centuries, not just between Ukrainians and Russians. Not implying fault of Ukrainians or there is something wrong with them, it is just that area has never had much peace on any level between the numerous groups there.
I have been to the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia many times since 1994. I did quality control and warranty maintenance on the Metro locomotives 81-470s and the older Soviet stock all over. I learned a lot of the language and got to know a lot of the people. I know the Moscow Metro better than some Muscovites do. Same with Kiev and Kharkov.
I'm no authority in this, I wouldn't claim that status mainly because of what I hear all through the media of both sides. My informed opinion on this subject is that the Ukraine needs to split down the Dneiper river, Kiev will go to the Eastern part. Lvov can be the capital of the west, if it isn't Warsaw.
The 2 halves are too dissimilar in all ways. Simple as that, there's nothing else to say about it. Let the east and west go their own way. That's the solution.
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