Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 19, 2018 10:57 am

.

Imagine for a moment that Turkey suddenly produces a living Khasshoggi and claims they had faked his death so as to prevent a Saudi plot to kill him. The most important effect would be to declare anything-goes and open season on journalists and dissidents worldwide.

In a miniature way, this is what the Kiev regime security forces did in the case of Babchenko, not only discrediting both Kiev and Babchenko (no biggie), but endangering all journalists and further toxifying the post-truth/post-fact ecology.
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby Karmamatterz » Fri Oct 19, 2018 1:12 pm

Watch and see if a journalist is setup similar to how Mary Mapes and Dan Rather was so easily duped. Not necessarily saying they were clumsy (lazy perhaps?) taking the bait, but now with tech being what it is things can happen in so many different ways the public will never discern fact from fiction. Muddy the waters (ecology) enough and doubt begins to seep into the general mindset. It would fit perfectly with the whole fake news tropes. It likely would not happen with a NYT or Wapo reporter as they need to keep those brands ensconced as the real leaders in truth.

A conspiracy minded person would think Greenwald would be a suitable target.
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 19, 2018 3:06 pm

Greenwald is a hard target for that.

The Intercept, on the other hand... well look what happened with Reality Winner. And were those who fucked up fired?
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Nov 06, 2018 12:12 am

.

Another tragedy.

NYT doesn't quite want to say it, and they strain to insinuate some Russian angle (there is none in this case), but the lede here is that the Ukrainian extreme right continues to attack and murder anti-corruption activists and journalists with obvious police cover and little more than regretful statements from the chocolate king.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/worl ... raine.html

Kateryna Handziuk, Ukrainian Activist, Dies From Acid Attack

A protest in front of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kiev, Ukraine, on Sunday in remembrance of the anticorruption campaigner Kateryna Handziuk.CreditCreditGenya Savilov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KIEV, Ukraine — Three months ago, an attacker splashed a liter of sulfuric acid over Kateryna Handziuk’s head, burning 30 percent of her body. But Ms. Handziuk, an anticorruption activist, continued to speak out from her hospital bed about unsolved attacks on dozens of civic activists in Ukraine this year.

On Sunday, after 11 surgeries and numerous skin grafts, she died from complications from her wounds.

Her scarred face had already become a rebuke of the foot-dragging of the government of President Petro O. Poroshenko on anti-corruption measures — a key demand of the protesters who ushered him to power in 2014.

“Yes, I know that I look bad, but at least I am being treated,” Ms. Handziuk told Hromadske Television from her hospital bed in September, two months after the attack. “And I’m sure that I look better than fairness and justice in Ukraine, because they are not being treated by anybody today.”

The attack on Ms. Handziuk has drawn attention to a recent rise in the number of assaults on anticorruption activists in Ukraine, something that she was working to publicize. Rights groups say that at least 50 activists have been attacked this year in Ukraine, most while tangling with corrupt officials.

The Western-backed government has pushed through overhauls of the police and military, but critics say that corruption in state-owned companies, the courts and local government remains rampant. The International Monetary Fund has delayed some aid disbursement, in part because Ukraine has failed to establish a specialized anticorruption court.

Supporters of Mr. Poroshenko say that progress has been made, but that not all of Ukraine’s problems can be solved quickly. Criticism of his administration’s shortcomings, they say, distracts from Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

Ms. Handziuk was known as a vocal critic of corruption in law enforcement agencies, particularly the police in her city, Kherson, near the border with Russian-occupied Crimea. She had campaigned against pro-Russia separatism but had recently shifted her focus to corruption and attacks on civic activists, accusing the police of passiveness in investigations of the attacks.

Mr. Poroshenko expressed condolences on Sunday to Ms. Handziuk’s family and called for a thorough investigation. “I appeal to law enforcement to do everything to find the murderers, to punish the murderers, and to put them on trial,” he said.

After the attack, the police detained five suspects and claimed to have detained the person who organized the assault. But local courts reportedly released two suspects to house arrest pending trial, despite the gravity of the assault.

Despite routine promises of robust investigations, high-profile killings have languished in Ukraine’s courts. No suspects have been detained in the 2016 bombing that killed Pavel G. Sheremet, a journalist who had been critical of far-right paramilitary groups.

Sunday evening, after news emerged of Ms. Handziuk’s death, protesters gathered in five cities to demand a transparent investigation and justice. About 200 held a candlelight vigil at the main police department in Kiev, the capital.

“Those who ordered the murder of Handziuk now watch how society reacts,” Mustafa Nayyem, a member of Parliament, said in a telephone interview. “Will we accept this murder, or will we fight?”

In her interview with the Ukrainian television station, Ms. Handziuk had also demanded answers about the attacks on activists. “Why do we encourage people to be socially active but we cannot protect them?” she said.

But Ukraine could change, she said, adding, “Each of us will be free, and there will be no fear in our hearts.”

Correction: November 5, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the television station to which Ms. Handziuk spoke in September. It is Hromadske Television, not Hormadske.

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow.

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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Dec 09, 2018 9:19 pm


https://www.rt.com/news/445896-ukraine- ... -veterans/

www.rt.com

‘Like denying the Holocaust’: Ukraine makes post-WWII nationalist fighters as privileged as war vets

Ukrainian parliament has passed a law, which gives Nazi-collaborating nationalist fighters, who fought against the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, the same status as the people who fought against Nazis during the war.

Ukraine’s current nation-building effort puts it at odds with other nations because Kiev seeks to glorify different forces that wanted an independent Ukrainian state, regardless of what crimes they may have committed. The most awkward legacy comes with the radical Ukrainian nationalists, who were active in the first half of 20th century.

They started by targeting Polish officials in what is now western Ukraine with a campaign of terrorism. Later they sided with Nazi Germany during World War II hoping that Adolf Hitler would make Ukraine independent, but then turned against him after their expectations proved wrong.

Both in collaboration with the Nazis and as an independent force the nationalists conducted mass killings of Poles and Jews. After the war they found support from the CIA and waged a guerrilla war against the Soviet authorities until they were quashed in the mid-1950s.

This week the Ukrainian parliament passed a law, which extends the honorable status of a war veteran, to additional members of OUN-UPA – the nationalist organization and its military wing. Previously only those who fought against the Nazis were granted the privilege on par with soldiers and officers of the Red Army. But under the new legislation the anti-Soviet guerillas will be considered war veterans too.

“This law is denial of the Holocaust, a falsification of history, a gesture of contempt to their country, its people and European [values],” Eduard Dolinsky, a prominent Ukrainian Jewish activist said, lashing out at the 236 MPs, who voted for the bill.

Dolinsky, the firebrand critic of Ukraine’s glorification of OUN-UPA, leads the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, a Kiev-based Jewish advocacy group with international recognition. He often blasts the latest move by Ukrainian authorities to elevate the mass murderers on his Facebook page.

With laws like this modern Ukraine takes upon itself responsibility for the war crimes, which those units had committed,” he pointed out. “Those crimes have no statute of limitations, so the victims of those crimes and their heirs may sue Ukraine in international courts for damage.

Earlier Ukrainian MPs filed a motion to honor Stepan Bandera, the leader of OUN, by bestowing an order of Hero of Ukraine on him. The nationalist leader briefly was given the highest Ukrainian award by President Viktor Yushchenko, but the decision was overturned by a court.
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Dec 18, 2018 1:50 pm

Ukrainian fascism, supported by NATO and the U.S.

That, of course, is all too normal in the postwar era. The West is willing to support fascism all around the world, although one day it's bound to come home.

One way to cover it up is classic: projection. And the favorite object of projection is always Russia. It must be Russian fascism that's to blame.

And guess what, the fascism actually is coming home to the West. And for that reality, too, it's never the actual fascists on the ground and in the state who are to blame.

It's the Russians who are to blame! Always the Russians!
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Dec 31, 2018 4:01 pm

.

Oh look, Newsweek reporting on how the present-day Kiev government has now designated a national holiday for the paramilitary leader who fought alongside the Nazi invaders, collaborating in the mass murder of Soviet citizens regardless of whether they were ethnically designated as Jews, Russians, or Ukrainians, until the Nazis themselves turned on him. In fact, 2019 is now going to be a whole year of celebrating the life of Bandera. And that's only the latest in the ongoing Nazification of the western Ukraine.

Am I allowed to post the Newsweek version? Or are they Putin's people too?

Picked this up via a chap name of Jeff Wells on Facebook.

https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-nazi-c ... ic-1272911

WORLD
UKRAINE MAKES BIRTHDAY OF NAZI COLLABORATOR A NATIONAL HOLIDAY AND BANS BOOK CRITICAL OF ANTI-SEMITIC LEADER

BY JASON LEMON ON 12/27/18 AT 1:43 PM

Ukraine made the birthday of a Nazi collaborator a national holiday and banned a book critical of anti-Semitic leader


Ukraine’s parliament has officially designated the birthday of a prominent Nazi collaborator as a national holiday, while also banning a book that criticized another anti-Semitic national leader.

January 1 has now been set aside in the country to remember Stepan Bandera, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported Thursday. Bandera was a Ukrainian nationalist who joined forces with the German Nazis during World War II because he believed that they would help his country gain independence from the now defunct Soviet Union. However, he was later also targeted and arrested by the Nazis.

The Ukrainian city of Lviv, which was the nationalist’s home city, also announced this month that next year would be “Stepan Bandera Year,” a move criticized by Israel.

A woman holds a portrait of Ukrainian politician Stepan Bandera, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian national movement and leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), during a march in Kiev on January 1. GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier in December, Ukraine’s State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting banned Swedish historian Anders Rydell’s Book of Thieves. The book critically analyzed the actions of Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura, whose forces killed large numbers of Jews in the early 20th century. Petilura was later killed by a Russian-born Jew in Paris in 1929.

On December 17, Ukraine voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution that aimed to combat the “glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” according to Tass news agency. The United States also voted against the measure, although 129 nations supported the move.

The resolution was put forward by Russia. Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council slammed Ukraine and the U.S. for their opposition.

"The decision of the United States and Ukraine to vote against the Russia-initiated resolution is within the frames of these countries’ strategy of using neo-Nazi and ultra-right forces in their own political interests,” Patrushev said, Tass reported.

People hold torches during a march in Kiev on January 1 to mark the 109th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian politician Stepan Bandera, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images

Human rights activists have raised serious concerns about the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine, particularly since Russian-backed separatist rebels took control of sizable portions of the country in 2014. The conflict has led to an increase in anti-Russian sentiments and ultra-nationalist feelings. Some of the nationalists have turned to neo-Nazi ideology as well.

In July, activists even filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice, demanding their country halt arms exports to Ukraine, Haaretz reported. Their petition argued that many of the weapons ended up in the hands of fighters who promoted neo-Nazi views.

“Numerous organized radical right-wing groups exist in Ukraine,” Freedom House’s Ukraine project director Matthew Schaaf said, according to a March report by Reuters. “While the volunteer battalions may have been officially integrated into state structures, some of them have since spun off political and non-profit structures to implement their vision.”

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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 01, 2019 6:40 am

JackRiddler » 31 Dec 2018 20:01 wrote:
Am I allowed to post the Newsweek version? Or are they Putin's people too?



ALLOWED?!

You've got some fucking nerve.

When the hell have YOU ever paid any sort of price for doing the kind of things on this board that regularly nets others (myself included) week-long, even month-long, or (in one botched attempt that has led to the launch of a thousand conspiracy theories) even year-long "time-outs"?

NEVER, that's when. Because your posts and your ideological position have enjoyed Favored Nation status here, thanks in large part to your cohort's bully boy tactics that have succeeded in silencing most of the people who disagree with you.

Pro tip? Don't try to play martyr until you've collected at least a couple of (metaphorical) scars.

Cheers!
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:06 am

(Note: Last response by Jerky has been alerted for derailing thread with personalized off-topic nonsense unrelated to the subject or anything else of substance. Note there's nothing about Ukraine in it, it's all about his persecution complex and his projected image of me. This is also stalking, as he's seeking out every thread I've posted in recently and appending similar off-topic statements. I am asking that he cease and desist. Sorry for the interruption!)

Following is via Doug Henwood who says FB "headnote by Volodymyr Ishchenko offers more answers than the article, which is mainly a catalog of horrors (and they are horrors)."

“Because this denialism is a core element of post-Maidan political mythology. Because radical nationalists are useful for Ukrainian elites. Because they are effective allies of Western elites against Russia. Because most of Ukrainian self-ascribed liberals are simply moderate nationalists and they work hard to delude Western liberals. Because Ukrainian left is almost non-existent. Western left does care but often relies too much on Russian propaganda cliches and preaches to the converted. That's why.”

https://forward.com/opinion/416751/why- ... n-ukraine/


Opinion | Why Does No One Care That Neo-Nazis Are Gaining Power In Ukraine?

Ari Feldman

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told Ukraine doesn’t really have a problem with its far-right. It’s all Kremlin propaganda; you’re personally helping Putin by talking about it; other countries have far-right problems too, so why single out Ukraine? I’ve heard it all.

But I expect hear even more lines like this in the New Year, all because I’m going to point out the obvious: Ukraine really does have a far-right problem, and it’s not a fiction of Kremlin propaganda. And it’s well past time to talk about it.

Ukraine’s far-right is like a hydra, with ugly heads that pop up far too frequently. Just within the last few weeks, an American-born cabinet minister thanked a group of violent neo-Nazi “activists” for their services, a soldier was photographed wearing a Nazi death’s head patch right behind President Petro Poroshenko and almost 1,500 neo-Nazis and friends threw a two-day Hitler-salute-fest.

Violent far-right groups have been around in Ukraine for years, albeit in marginal numbers. But over the last year they’ve grown not just in significance but in aggressiveness.

I know because I’ve been on the receiving end myself.

At a march in November to commemorate people who’ve fallen victim to transphobic violence, I watched as a march of barely 50 participants was shut down by some 200 far-right extremists. I felt their wrath myself as two of them assaulted me in separate incidents afterwards.

I’m far from the first person who’s fallen victim to Ukrainian far-right groups, nor anywhere near the most serious. Their members have attacked Roma camps multiple times, even killing a Roma man earlier this year. They’ve stormed local city council meetings to intimidate elected officials. They’ve marched by the thousands through the streets to commemorate WWII-era nationalist formations who took part in ethnic cleansing. They’ve acted as vigilantes with little to no negative reaction from state authorities.

[Follow link to see images of a well-attended concert of a heavy metal band - at the Asgardian festival - with a shirtless guitarist displaying a giant swastika tattoo on his chest and fans doing the sieg heil.]

Members of Ukraine’s far-right also offer themselves up as thugs for hire – sometimes with deadly consequences. This summer, anti-corruption activist Kateryna Handziuk was the victim of a horrifying acid attack. In July, several extremists – who apparently were paid by corrupt local police to carry out the attack – doused her with sulfuric acid, burning her over 40 percent of her body. She died from her injuries in November.

Ukraine’s notorious Azov movement keeps growing. Since it was created in 2014 to fight Russian-led forces in the east, it made news by accepting openly neo-Nazi members into its rank. Now the Azov Battalion has become an official Ukrainian National Guard regiment. In 2016 the group formed a political party, which, they claim, now has tens of thousands of members. Earlier this year they unveiled a paramilitary force that doubles as a street gang.

Even as their party polls barely a percent, Azov is trying – as one of their higher-ups has told me personally – to build a far-right “state within the state,” running everything from nationalist study groups and mixed martial arts training to free gyms for youth and programs for the elderly. They’re also trying to turn Kiev into a capital of the global far-right, inviting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world to visit.

Whatever group they’re part of, Ukraine’s far-right is increasingly nonchalant about the use of violence. When I was covering the march in Kiev on November 18, one of them walked up to me and sprayed me with a quart-sized bottle of pepper spray. Another then sucker-punched me in the face just yards away from onlooking police – hard enough to smash my glasses and cut me up.

Yes, I’m still mad about what happened to me. But I’m even more mad about a peaceful assembly of barely fifty people being cancelled because some violent hooligans decided it should be.

And what makes me angriest of all is that many prominent people in Ukraine and beyond[*] that keep wanting to tell you that the far-right isn’t that big a problem.

But it’s time to talk about why extremists in this country are able to attack people in broad daylight as police stand by. It’s time to talk about why some of them are receiving state funds and taking part in official police patrols in some cities. It’s time to talk about why a group that denies it has neo-Nazi leanings can help host a two-day neo-Nazi music festival with barely a peep from anyone. It’s time to talk about why Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, up for re-election in March, is happy to flirt with hardline nationalist rhetoric and hasn’t bothered to condemn incidents like last month’s attack on a peaceful protest.

It’s time to talk about why so many mainstream figures in Ukraine and abroad don’t seem too bothered by any of this. Yes, every country has its extremists, but not every country has public figures that (repeatedly) defend the actions of violent vigilante groups like the notorious C14 – or, like Ukraine’s American-born health minister Ulana Suprun, sully a (deserved) positive reputation by hobnobbing for photos with the group’s leaders on social media).

And no, I haven’t forgotten that Ukraine is still mired in a Russian-orchestrated war on part of its territory, and that Moscow likes to use Ukrainian nationalists in its propaganda – part of its longstanding practice of painting all Ukrainians, nationalists or not, as “Nazis” (not true), or as supporters of Nazi-era collaborationist movements that were active in some parts of Ukraine (also not true). I also don’t doubt that the Kremlin itself funds or supports some of the far-right agitation here so that it can use them for its own purposes.

That’s why I know what I’m going to hear next. I’ll probably be told that I’m part of Putin’s hybrid war (really?), that I work for the Kremlin (um, no), or that I’m doing the Kremlin’s work (also no). But I didn’t invent Ukraine’s far-right, and I certainly haven’t helped them gain the prominence they’ve got heading in 2019.

The problem is real. It’s time for Ukraine to talk about it and take it on.

Michael Colborne is a Canadian journalist who covers central and eastern Europe and is writing a series of articles about Ukraine’s far-right. He tweets at @ColborneMichael.


* - This has been the common theme sounded by online Western supporters and apologists of the Kiev regime since the 2014 coup. Even as Nazi gangs with police protection patrol the streets terrorizing and murdering journalists and activists, or fight as shock troops and death squads on the Donestsk front -- and even now as the government has declared this to be the year of the OUN mass murderer Stepan Bandera -- online liberals and revolutionaries never cease to claim the Nazis and extreme right and anti-Semites holding power in the Ukrainian west are minuscule and irrelevant, and of course project the blame on to the all-purpose Russian bogeyman.

.

It is of course related to the long-term sponsorship of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism as a weapon against the Soviet Union and Russia since the immediate post-WWII situation. Bandera had already been released by the Nazis and set up work out of Berlin. The CIA and MI6 helped set him up in Munich as the leader of a hidden post-OUN network (OUN-B) that continued terrorist activities in Ukraine after 1945. Eventually he would be assassinated in Munich by the KGB in 1954.

[wikipedia] According to Stephen Dorril, author of MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, OUN-B was re-formed in 1946 under the sponsorship of MI6. The organization had been receiving some support from MI6 since the 1930s.[53] One faction of Bandera's organization, associated with Mykola Lebed, became more closely associated with the CIA.[54] Bandera himself was the target of an extensive and aggressive search carried out by CIC.[55] It failed having described the objective as "extremely dangerous" and "constantly en route, frequently in disguise".[56] Some American intelligence reported that he even was guarded by former SS men.[57] His organization perpetrated many crimes, including [[hundred of thousands of - PRE-1945]] murders,[47] counterfeiting, and kidnapping. After the Bavarian state government initiated a crackdown on it, Bandera agreed with the BND offering them his service, despite CIA warning the West Germans against cooperating with him.[58]


Released CIA files on Bandera:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom ... te/bandera

20 November 1946, declassified 2004 under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom ... 098d5119de

It is evident that the group with which We are in contact is the group of BANDERA. 2) Most of the leading ... of Interior PIERACKI. 5) LEBED,.one of the overt leaders of this group, is the madIesest to BANDERA. 4) ... Although BANDERA is•not as active as before and during the war, his authority certainly exists..


.
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:26 am

Respectfully I disagree
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 07, 2019 10:01 pm

.

Mostly I missed the "controversy" around the Oliver Stone production Ukraine on Fire but I did watch it and it is now free online.


https://vimeo.com/252426896

It's pretty strong, but there are problems. I'm lazy and looked for negative reviews, but the very low number of these is indicative of how treatments that run counter to the Western propaganda on Ukraine currently mostly get the treatment of being ignored or disappeared. I found one here, and attempted to reply but apparently comments there get moderated in advance, so if you are interested, watch the movie, then go there and read that, and then read my comment too. (Ha ha ha)

Here it is:

To an extent the film constructs a simplified view of (Western) Ukrainian mass consciousness, or at any rate Ukrainian nationalism, but not as unfairly as Pavel Shekhtman's comment presents "Russian mass consciousness." The historical examples are not nearly as clear-cut as Shekhtman would have it, but the film is also simplistic or false at several points (as with the false identification of Khruschev as Ukrainian). See it as a counter-history to the unapologetically anti-Russian propaganda we receive in the West, and then do some reading: the truth is not necessarily always in between.

By sticking to a debate on matters of historical context (which the film to its credit at least attempts!), the review avoids taking on the film's main theses. It is highly relevant whether or not the CIA shielded Ukrainian perpetrators of the holocaust, and for the present subject equally relevant to what extent there were U.S. government efforts to destabilize and overthrow the Yanukovych government. Svoboda, Right Sector or the Azov Battallion may not represent overwhelming mass opinion in the Ukraine (either "western"/Ukrainian-speaking or "eastern"/Russian-speaking) but it absolutely matters who initiated violence on the Maidan, who shot the sniper shots, who conducted the massacre in Odessa, whether the Crimea vote was clean and reflected the desires of the overwhelming majority there, whether it was legitimate self-defense, and so on. There are right answers to each of these questions but they are not automatically known (and are not settled) simply because they come from one side or another.

Without a doubt the film is one-sided insofar as other than Robert Parry the interview partners are Putin and Yanukovich. What is interesting is that neither of these historical figures ever gets to explain what they think happened starting in 2013 in any Western accounts; they are always simply demonized. It's not clear the filmmakers made any effort to get views from either the Maidan or the State Department side. That is the state of discourse: competing propaganda narratives.

Again, this is not meant to suggest everything's equally untrue or "the truth is somewhere in between." I think regarding the 2013-present events this film is much closer to the reality, despite the occasional excessive enthusiasm for applying its grand narrative to every case, especially when it ranges beyond the immediate Ukraine question.

As an American, I find that the U.S. government had no business conducting itself as it did in Ukrainian and post-Soviet politics generally, regardless of the extent to which its actions were decisive in given cases; and I believe they were decisive in the Ukraine after 2013. It is time to get past the geopolitical festish-view of life and the world, and acting like an empire that must determine every outcome in the world as a zero-sum game in a perpetual run of hot and cold wars. (Or to allow U.S. power to be invited into taking a side in conflicts Americans actually have no interest in and generally do not understand, which is almost as often the case.) We can work instead for peace and disarmament and the necessary global level of cooperation to end the potential for nuclear war and confront the ecological catastrophe.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 07, 2019 10:27 pm

I liked this comment on Amazon:

Good Stone-style documentary with the usual gratuitous sex thrown in, per the CGI stripper in the opening credits. A bit heavy at times, it's nonetheless an accurate portrayal of the 2013-14 events in Ukraine from Maidan to Crimea, with good background on the ultra-nationalist wing of West Ukraine and its hijacking of the protest/"reform" movement. To be more balanced it might have included voices from the other side, speaking for themselves; in doing so we'd have seen that not all protesters were initially neo-fascists with genetic roots to wartime collaborators.

But Stone essentially got it right. The xenophobes that dominate West Ukraine and the Ukrainian Diaspora seized control with much covert aid from the West, essentially replaying the same script from both world wars. In both priors these people and their Western backers - Imperial and Nazi Germany - led Ukraine and the region to disaster. Now NATO fills the role, allied with the same power-hungry locals, encouraging their worst tendencies. Whatever one thinks of Lenin, Stalin, and now Putin on the opposing side, it's hard to conceive how they or any other statesman could handle a hostile power grab at their own doorstep in any other manner.

The ironic analogies abound, from US reactions to the "Cuban" missile crisis, to Union loyalists in the seceding American South in the civil war, to German subsidy of the Irish Easter rising. But these are ignored by the film's critics, committed to a ruinous NATO expansion and a fanatic ethno-centrism. These are the same folks crafting the Holodomor mythology as "genocide" while erecting statues to accomplices in real holocausts as national saints. As stated, the production may come across as a polemic counterpoint to the "Washington consensus" - Stone is not shy of his own strong opinions - but it's nailed the issue to the wall.


Polemic it is, but basically true. The bolded comment highlights the biggest weakness: "not all protesters were initially neo-fascists with genetic roots to wartime collaborators." Without a doubt, very few initially were! Any more than, say, the couple of hundred thousand Greeks bizarrely protesting in favor of the EU memoranda in 2015 were the successors to the World War II collaborators. (A much larger majority protested and voted against the memoranda, for all the good it did them.) The problem is that politicians who were in tight with the long-running CIA-State Department operation staged a fucking coup d'etat rather than not getting an EU deal and waiting another year for an election they might have lost; and they immediately went to war against Russian speakers generally as well as dissenters of any kind so as to consolidate their power through fear and violence. A core minority who had these "genetic roots" in Nazism and extreme ethnocentric nationalism have been the spearpoint on the killing fronts, regardless of their general popularity, and have successfully pushed politics to an extreme right. Now Stepan Bandera Day is a national holiday. Ukrainian nationalists who had a legitimate struggle against Russia and who did not side with the Nazis don't have a national holiday. When it defines itself and its vision of the nation in this way, we should take the Kiev government at its fucking word!

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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 28, 2019 1:13 pm

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Okay, here's a long interview transcript with sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, who is also of the endangered left in Ukraine, with a lot of straight talk about the present nature of the Kiev state. If the right-wing extremists are a small minority, then only in a context where extreme nationalist ideology and xenophobia as well as oligarchic control and harsh neoliberal policy have long been normalized among the major parties, and where everyone remotely leftist-seeming has been labeled as treasonous and pro-Russian. The Communist Party is banned. Worse, the right-wing extremists and straight-up Nazi battalions are the only organized and readily violent force on the street, largely deputized within the police and military. They act with impunity to enforce their ideas of purity and social conformity through terror, assault and murder. Things are very bad for LGBT, independent journalists and anyone who can be associated as insufficiently nationalist, vaguely Jewish, and above all "pro-Russian" whether that is true or not. This small minority are the spearpoint of the events and the poison in a long-ago poisoned system, and have been since they took over as the vanguard of the Maidan protests in 2013, which were initially popular but dominated by right-wing parties. Right-wing, avowedly nationalist parties, all of them at least rhetorically anti-Russian, comprise almost the entirety of electoral politics in the Ukraine. Each is sponsored or competes more or less opportunistically for the favor of given oligarchs. Unless Poroshenko can come up with some favorable manufactured crisis, it looks like 2019 will finally bring Yulia Timoschenko's turn at the throne.

www.jacobinmag.com

Ukraine on the Brink
AN INTERVIEW WITH
VOLODYMYR ISHCHENKO


Ukraine's politics are dominated by oligarchs. Its streets are more and more run by the far right.


(photo)
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko attends the the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting on September 27, 2015 in New York City. Spencer Platt / Getty

Interview by
Joe Plommer

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, its former republics’ economies went into free fall. Ukraine — the most populous of the new states, after Russia — was no exception: average incomes and life expectancy declined as violent crime soared. It had been a center of heavy industry in the Soviet Union, but during the 1990s its industrial facilities were sold off at bargain prices to figures linked to its political leadership. From 1994 that leadership was dominated by President Leonid Kuchma, a former factory manager who attempted but ultimately failed to keep both Russia and the West on its side.

By the turn of the millennium, Ukraine’s economy had stabilized — but most Ukrainians were still desperately poor, and the conspicuous wealth of a small minority fueled popular conviction that the country’s resources were being stolen. Gradually, Kuchma came to be seen as emblematic of that theft. In neighboring Russia, the chaos and relative openness of the 1990s was giving way to Putin’s new authoritarian order as political freedom was traded for a measure of stability.

It gradually became clear that there would be no such consolidation in Ukraine. In December 2000, a series of recordings was leaked in which President Kuchma discussed abducting the journalist Georgi Gongadze, as well as concealing the proceeds of corruption. The resulting protests were suppressed, and Kuchma remained in place, but the groundwork had been laid for much larger demonstrations — the so-called “Orange Revolution” — that came four years later after vote-rigging by Kuchma’s would-be successor, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2004 presidential election. A rerun of that contest handed power to Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, whose tenure combined some economic growth with rising inequality — and spanned the 2008 financial crisis, which further impoverished ordinary Ukrainians. In the next election, in 2010, Yushchenko lost to the opportunistic Yanukovych. Having indicated that he would sign an association agreement with the European Union, in the autumn of 2013 Yanukovych bent to pressure (and incentives) from Putin and changed his mind. Demonstrators once again gathered in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), leading to the president’s removal from power.

Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko was present throughout the protest movements of the 2000s and became a prominent analyst of the 2013–14 Maidan protests. In this interview, Ishchenko reflects on the legacy of Maidan and the events of the five years that have elapsed since, as well as looking ahead to the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled to take place in 2019.

JP

In late February 2014, as a post-Maidan interim administration took power in Kiev, you wrote that the new government “is likely only to aggravate” the poverty and inequality that forms “the root of pervasive corruption in Ukraine.” You said that “the socioeconomic demands of the Maidan movement have been replaced with the neoliberal agenda of the new government.” What were those demands, and has any progress been made in reasserting them since?

VI

“Demands” was not really the best wording; we would more accurately speak of grievances. Some of the grievances that pushed masses of Ukrainians into the streets in 2013 were socioeconomic in nature. Polls among the Maidan protestors said the most popular concern was fighting corruption. Many also connected the European Union with their own aspirations for higher living standards, for jobs, for a “normal” life. But the problem was that such grievances were not articulated into any clear progressive agenda. The political representation of the movement ranged from right wing to far right.

Of course, the Maidan protests did involve a mass mobilization of regular citizens. But certain organizations played a particularly important role in sustaining this mobilization and in coordinating a large protest infrastructure spanning multiple regions. The organized part of the Maidan coalition included three opposition parties. Two were the Tymoshenko and Klitschko parties. Even the fact that it’s simpler to identify them by the leaders’ names, not by their ideologies, already says a lot about Ukrainian politics. These parties above all represent the interests of specific financial-industrial groups (often they are loosely called “oligarchs”): politically, they can be very opportunistic and can shift between various kinds of populism before adopting neoliberalism once in power. But the third party was more ideological, namely the far-right Svoboda (“Freedom”) Party — the radical Ukrainian nationalists. More extreme but marginal radical nationalist groups united under the Right Sector umbrella. Then there were a number of small but Western-supported NGOs, some focused on human rights, others on neoliberal reforms, others on fighting corruption.


Of course the last and least significant group held a near monopoly as the sources and exemplary activists in reporting on the events by Western corporate media. Meanwhile, the former central banker Yatsenyuk's faction was the one connected to the State Department, favored by Undersecretary Nuland for the succession, and ready to roll with a full neoliberal intensification as well as all the fan service the Ukrainian nationalists could desire.


Neither the NGOs nor the parties could articulate any progressive, egalitarian agenda. It was pretty clear from the outset that even progressive liberals were in the minority, never mind socialists. They were only loosely organized, and had no substantial influence, either on the development of the protests or on their ideological framing. They were probably more important in terms of framing the protests for parts of the Western audience which, in a kind of wishful thinking, focused on the most progressive elements of the movement but not the much stronger reactionary ones. From the outset it was clear that if the Maidan protests succeeded, they would bring right-wing opposition parties to power.

What we’ve seen in the five years since then is that Ukraine has become poorer. The IMF recently updated their global statistics on GDP per capita, and Ukraine’s is now the lowest in Europe. The only countries even lower down the scale are located in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Ukraine is the northernmost of the Global South — and not just in terms of economic statistics. Its economic structure is also more typical of the Third World: it is export-oriented and primarily focused on raw materials. And unlike Southeast Asia, Ukraine is not industrializing but deindustrializing — particularly because the most advanced parts of Ukrainian industry, which were inherited from the Soviet Union and primarily served the markets of the former Soviet republics, have been harmed by the introduction of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union; they are not usually competitive on global markets. A significant part of those industries is located in Donbass, where the war is going on.

Nor do Ukraine’s politics seem to be moving toward the European norm, as we are told. Oligarchs dominate mainstream politics and own all the major TV channels — independent ones remain marginal. Paramilitaries play a role in Ukrainian politics not seen in any other country in Europe: it is a situation more like Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.

JP

As the Maidan protests reached their crescendo, you wrote that “the Maidan movement must decisively break away from the far-right,” warning that although “the far right are not numerically dominant in Maidan … neofascists have become normalised as a legitimate part of the movement.” To what extent have ultranationalists managed to maintain this foothold?

VI

The far right was unable to capitalize on the protests in parliamentary terms: Svoboda lost seats in 2014 and the Right Sector didn’t get into parliament, although they do have a chance in the parliamentary elections scheduled for autumn 2019. There are already talks among some far-right parties to unite into a joint nationalist bloc, which would have a very good chance of getting into parliament (although they have thus far failed to agree on a candidate for the presidential elections, which are scheduled to take place in the meantime).

Many argue that this lack of parliamentary representation means that all the talk about Ukrainian fascists and the far right is simply Russian propaganda. But this is wrong — at the extra-parliamentary level, the radical nationalists have become much stronger. No party or coalition of liberal NGOs can mobilize so many people on the streets as the Ukrainian nationalists do every year on their key dates. These include the day of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which is now a national holiday in Ukraine (it wasn’t before Maidan), and the birthday of Stepan Bandera (the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II, and of a movement which conducted ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in western Ukraine, as well as collaborating with the Nazis in the Holocaust). The nationalists gather tens of thousands of people for these rallies, and it’s incomparable to anything that the liberals can mobilize.

The radical nationalists have also acquired arms, and since the start of the war in the Donbass they have formed many of the most prominent volunteer battalions. The most important was Azov, which started as a battalion and is now a regiment. In 2014 these were more like independent, autonomous forces, but gradually the government tried to incorporate them into the official law enforcement structures. Today Azov is officially a regiment within the National Guard. This was “necessary” in order to take at least some control over these units, but also means that we now have ideological nationalists within the official law enforcement structures. This has many dangerous consequences, for example in terms of the police’s treatment of nationalist attacks on minorities — they don’t intervene seriously, and sometimes they even help the nationalists and blame the victims. That’s just one example, and of course this helps cover up the far right’s crimes. Today the deputy chief of the national police is a former neo-Nazi who was Azov’s deputy commander. Having someone in such a high position is obviously an asset for Azov and other radical nationalists.

Some liberals try to argue that the nationalists in Ukraine are not important, that they’re irrelevant, not represented in parliament — compared with the results of forces like the Front National, or Alternative für Deutschland. They say “Just look, Le Pen got over 30 percent in the elections, and Ukrainian nationalists didn’t even manage to get into parliament!” But an obvious question here would be: how many battalions does Le Pen have? None. Here, every more-or-less-important far-right party has an affiliated armed unit, which would be a very important factor in the case of a major political crisis — a resource that they could use, even if not for taking power, then for influencing the composition of the government and the results of elections.

Among liberals there is a strong trend not to recognize the problem, to justify nationalists, to downplay the danger — because otherwise, it would play into the hands of Russian propaganda. This is a very dangerous position which helps to cover nationalist violence. Outrageously, respectable liberal media like BBC Ukraine have given sympathetic reports on a neo-Nazi terror group, C14, whose major activity is harassing and terrorizing opposition journalists, bloggers, and citizens. In 2018 this group initiated a series of attacks on Roma camps. And they long received primarily sympathetic reports, with mainstream journalists trying to justify what they were doing, to find excuses, to say that maybe they are just doing what the state doesn’t — that the state doesn’t repress that “fifth column,” those pro-Russian separatists, so these young “radical patriots” are just doing the job of the state. And of course, this legitimizes even more far-right violence.

This also makes it hard to articulate this problem for a Western audience, because you always get these so-called “friends of Ukraine” who attack you as a Russian propagandist. In fact, when the local opposition to the radical nationalists is so weak in Ukraine, Western NGOs, international organizations, and even Western governments could at least raise the problem of human rights violations. For example, they press Ukraine hard on corruption, and have forced the government to set up a system of anti-corruption institutions. Yet they do not use their leverage to condemn the radical nationalist groups which commit violence against political, gender, and ethnic minorities.

JP

In November that year, you noted that “[the far-right party] Svoboda (as well as the Right Sector) might well criticize the new government not only on nationalist grounds, but also by highlighting a deteriorating economic situation.” Indeed, the far right often combines violent bigotry with a relatively progressive economic stance; it is involved in vicious vigilante attacks on Roma and other minorities but has also managed to gain a reputation for providing practical support to poor communities. Can the Left learn anything here?

VI

First, it’s important to understand that radical nationalists don’t actually have so much popular support. It may seem surprising, but they have more legitimacy within civil society than among Ukrainian society at large — many so-called “Ukrainian liberals” are basically just moderate nationalists. The far-right parties’ electoral support, even if they were to unite, would at best be 5–10 percent. That’s support for the parties — support for some nationalist ideas would be higher. The reason for this low support is that the politics is dominated by much better-resourced oligarchic parties that control the media and have money they can put into electoral campaigns.

In 2014, the oligarchic parties captured their nationalist-patriotic rhetoric; and perhaps it didn’t make so much sense to vote for the radical nationalists if the so-called “centrists” were talking about the same things.
The oligarchic parties are also pretty good at capturing social-populist rhetoric. It looks like neither Svoboda nor other far-right parties can propose anything fundamentally different. The major populist now is Yulia Tymoshenko — the most probable winner of the next elections. She’s pretty strong in social populism, criticizing high prices and even talking about stopping cooperation with the IMF. If you have people like this, of very long standing in Ukrainian politics, with resources and some oligarchic backing, then the far right don’t look like they’re proposing anything much different, even if they also talk about social redistribution.

This is also a lesson for the Left. It is often said that in speaking about identity politics the Western left and has forgotten about material socioeconomic issues, and that’s why the far right is winning, as workers start to vote more for radical nationalists and less for leftist parties. Ukraine actually gives another lesson: that the Left must propose a really radical alternative in terms of socioeconomic policies, and not simply some superficial populist demands. These kinds of demands can easily be taken up by the far right, by the right-wing populist parties, and if they can capitalize on their better recognition and resources, and better attitudes from parts of the media, they can outcompete the populist left. So it is important that the Left develop a future-oriented, consistent, progressive-looking agenda for radical social change.

For the Ukrainian left, the lessons of the Latin American left are probably much more relevant than those of the current Western European left. We can’t simply copy tactics and rhetoric from Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, Podemos or Syriza, because these parties are operating in liberal-democratic regimes. The Ukrainian regime is definitely not liberal-democratic — it’s increasingly authoritarian, nationalist, and anticommunist. In this situation, the experience of the Latin American left — fighting pro-American right-wing dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, not necessarily in armed struggle but primarily by forming broad democratic fronts — could now be much more relevant for us.

JP

Is there anything that the Ukrainian left in should learn from the far right in terms of grassroots engagement with the poorest Ukrainians?

VI

I’m not sure that engagement with the poorest Ukrainians was really such an important part of the far right’s success. Svoboda at least tried to form front groups to penetrate civil society and meet popular needs through its own ideologically affiliated leisure and cultural organizations. But I’m not sure this has really been so important for their success.

More important has been the far right’s readiness for and skills in violence. Generally, Ukrainian politics before Maidan was very nonviolent. Before 2014 we hadn’t seen anything like, for instance, France’s gilets jaunes protests. This means that two generations of Ukrainians, those born since the 1950s, didn’t have direct experience of massive violent protests. The most violent event in Ukraine before Maidan happened in 2001 during the opposition campaign against the then-president Leonid Kuchma. The clashes lasted for an hour or two, mainly between radical nationalists and the police, and involved at most a few hundred people.

But the radical nationalists had the most experience of violence among all protest groups and ideological currents. They used these skills in the Maidan protests, when opportunities for violent escalation were opened up by both the extraordinary government repression and the moderate opposition’s inability to propose any effective nonviolent strategy against the Yanukovych government. At this moment, the radical nationalists intervened, and because of their skills at violence, their political organization, and radical ideology, they could take up the role of a violent vanguard for the movement. Violence is the most important resource on which their limited popularity and success is based. After Maidan they were ready to go to the war, to form battalions, to fight — and that has also aided their legitimacy within Ukrainian civil society; they are “heroes” fighting for Ukraine.

This readiness for violence was probably much more important than their work with the poorest Ukrainians: I can’t say they even had a consistent strategy for this, or really did anything important.

JP

The poet Serhii Zhadan said recently that in Ukraine, “You can call ‘left-wing’ anybody you don’t like; this is a very good way to hurt somebody.” Indeed, in the discussion in which he was speaking, Oleksandr Sushko, the director of a prominent NGO, sought to equate the “far left” with the far right. Are attempts to discredit the very notion of the Left gaining ground in Ukraine?

VI

Generally, yes. This is indeed a quite popular position in civil society, which is usually strongly anticommunist. When the government started its decommunization policies — renaming streets and cities and dismantling remaining Soviet monuments — there was very little public resistance. These policies laid the basis for banning the Communist Party of Ukraine; the irony with this ban was that the party was neither communist nor dangerous in any way, and was just a very easy scapegoat that nobody would defend. The majority of Ukrainian civil society took for granted that the ban was reasonable, although they had banned a major opposition party — something that should not be done in any democratic polity. This was a party that had got 13 percent of the vote as recently as 2012.

The Left is politically nonexistent right now, and so it becomes a scapegoat, an empty signifier onto which some groups project everything bad. Nationalists very often attack the Left, but by “the Left” they mean anyone who is for human rights, for minority rights, who supports LGBT people. But subjectively most of these people are liberals, often distant from Western leftist parties; they would usually even share in popular conspiracy theories that the Left are pro-Russian and paid by the Kremlin to undermine Western governments.

JP

Given how easy it is in Ukraine for any explicitly left politics to be smeared by association with the country’s Soviet past, should emergent left groups abandon tradition left imagery and language and build a new idiom and aesthetics in which to couch radical social demands?

VI

It’s not a problem only with aesthetics, and it’s not even a problem of the Left’s choices, because communist symbols are now banned, and use of those symbols could be grounds for criminal prosecution. There have indeed been some ridiculous cases where people got two years’ probation — so, a criminal sentence — for writing Soviet-era slogans on Facebook. This is not really systematic, but occasionally it happens.

The ban on the Communist Party has minimized its public activity, and the public activity of other left groups is also pretty minimal. It’s even difficult to have a public event without hiding its physical location; usually, we have a preliminary registration where we try to check the people who want to come to our event, and we send the address only to those people we are sure are not radical nationalists and will not leak the location. So, this is a semiunderground mode of activity.

So, I don’t think that the aesthetics are actually a problem, because even those groups that are trying to be as pro-Ukrainian and as anticommunist as possible, while appealing to left ideas, remain largely unsuccessful — they’re as marginal as the rest of the Left. The problem is probably more general: the repressive political regime, strong right-wing paramilitaries, the lack of resources, the weakness of labor or any other progressive grassroots movements. All this encloses the political left in a marginal niche.

JP

On November 26, a thirty-day period of martial law was declared across a large swath of Ukraine after three of its naval vessels came under fire from Russian ships. How do you interpret the origins of this situation, and will it affect the presidential election, scheduled for March 31?

VI

The incident itself owed either to the stupidity of some of those involved, or to an intentional provocation by the Ukrainian ships, possibly connected to the president. Even if we do not accept the Russian annexation of Crimea, and all its consequences, it doesn’t mean we can ignore the reality of Russian control over the Crimean Peninsula and the adjacent waters of the Black and Azov seas. And here the Ukrainian ships tried to ignore this fact.

Yet the problem is not so much what exactly happened, but how it was used by the president. On the same day, he called for a Security Council meeting, which proposed the introduction of martial law. The next day, parliament didn’t accept the original proposal — martial law over the whole territory of Ukraine for two months — because this would have meant postponing the elections scheduled for March 2019. Indeed, it seems the Western leaders whom Poroshenko consulted were also very concerned at this possibility.

In the end, parliament voted for martial law only for the half of Ukraine adjacent to Russia, to the Black and Azov seas, and to Transnistria — mainly regions in which the majority of citizens have an oppositional attitude and do not support the president.

Some politicians have described this as a victory for the Ukrainian parliament — that it didn’t allow a coup d’etat by the president. But the fact is that martial law in any form was unnecessary, because there were no serious grounds to believe that the threat from Russia would grow. There have been many other cases in recent years where there was a real threat to the Ukrainian army: it suffered serious defeats in 2014 and 2015, and in those cases Poroshenko didn’t call for martial law because he was interested in the elections and in stable financing from the IMF. Now, before the elections, he is suddenly calling for martial law after a relatively marginal incident.

Despite this, a quite large majority in parliament supported a more limited version of martial law. I expected that this would give Poroshenko a strong pretext for further such measures, and incentivize him to escalate matters in Donbass or, better, to conspire in some bloody incident in Odessa or Kharkov. That could really have contributed to the atmosphere of fear. This would also have provided good grounds for postponing elections that Poroshenko now has very little chance of winning. He’s very unpopular — polls tell us he is uncertain to reach the second round, where he would in any case lose to any of his main rivals.

However, he has not yet made such moves. This is most likely because of his dependency on or at least vulnerability to the West, where he keeps some of his own valuable assets. The West sent clear messages against a prolonged state of martial law. And this also suggests that the Kremlin is betting not so much on destabilizing Ukraine as on the victory of politicians friendlier (or less averse) to Russia in the parliamentary elections in autumn 2019 or even in the electoral cycle that follows. Even faced with a perfect opportunity to provoke Poroshenko, feeding a wider mistrust in the president and extra-parliamentary opposition on the streets, it looks like Putin is more interested in the elections.

JP

The current front-runner to be elected Ukraine’s next president is Yulia Tymoshenko. Her positions are rather contradictory: she wants Ukraine to move towards the EU and NATO, but also claims to stand against some elements of IMF-mandated austerity. What should we think of her?

VI

She’s just an opportunist populist. She’s not so much ideologically pro-EU and pro-NATO; she just understands that the core electorate would probably not accept any other geopolitical orientation. She needs to take this line because otherwise Poroshenko would attack her as pro-Russian — as he has actively been doing already. He recalls that in 2009 Tymoshenko made a deal with Putin over natural gas that turned out to be disadvantageous for Ukraine, for which she was imprisoned under the Yanukovych government.

As an example of her opportunism, while she understood the political game Poroshenko was playing, she still voted for martial law. Otherwise, pro-Poroshenko trolls and opinion leaders would have attacked her: “Look, she’s not patriotic, she’s pro-Russian, she’s playing into the Kremlin’s hands,” and so on.

Another problem with Tymoshenko is that she is unpredictable, not only at the level of her views on the EU and NATO. The same concerns her social populist rhetoric. This is an easy way to criticize Poroshenko: nobody wants to pay more for utilities and so on, and obviously most people don’t want austerity — they are poor and do not see many prospects in this country. But that doesn’t mean a Tymoshenko administration will really be more redistributive — definitely not consistently.

But it would still be a good sign if the elections were to happen, and she were able to compete on a more or less free and fair basis. Otherwise, it just means that there is no change, no hope at all. For his part, Poroshenko is now running on very nationalist grounds — his major slogan is “Army, Faith, and Language.” The very possibility of changing the president through elections is important for its own sake, even if Tymoshenko doesn’t look more progressive.

JP

You wrote at the end of 2015 that “The left flank of Ukrainian politics is vacant for now but won’t be for long.” Is this space being occupied again? Are there likely to be any presidential candidates, however marginal, who could reasonably be called ‘progressive’?

VI

No, unfortunately not.

The Communist Party has decided to take part in the elections and will probably try to find some technical way to do this despite the ban. But the same man has been leading the party since 1993 — its unchallengeable leader Petro Symonenko, who has absolutely no chance of winning serious support. Not to mention the question of whether the Communist Party is really progressive — and there are many grounds for believing that they stopped being so many years ago.

Ukrainian politics doesn’t have any left representation. In the current parliament there is not a single left-wing party, however broadly defined. Not even the neoliberal left; not even the opportunist or reformist left. Even more: there is not a single leftist member of parliament.

It looks like this isn’t going to change in the next elections. We’ll see a lot of flirtation with social populism, but this doesn’t imply egalitarian policies. The best outcome would be not a hope for change, but that the country would not collapse in a total state failure after the elections, which is not an impossible outcome — considering the martial law precedent, the probable electoral falsifications, and activity of armed paramilitaries.

This doesn’t give much hope — but I believe that it’s objective. The lack of a hope on the Left means the country is losing a sense of the future. Even if Ukraine and particularly the youth proclaims its pro-Western orientation, it actually stands in contrast to North American and Western European youth who are becoming more and more leftist, while Ukrainian younger generation is more neoliberal and nationalist than the elder people.

JP

You’ve called for the resurgence of an internationalist left in Ukraine. Could such an approach really gain traction in the present political landscape, or should the Left first win back its role as a leading force of Ukrainian nationalism?

VI

The basic problem here is not even the Left’s prospects in Ukraine, but whether the country itself has a future. The state is undermined as social divisions intensify and pull the country apart. This will not likely end up in a Libyan or Syrian-style scenario, but these risks are pretty serious, and this is a potential that must be recognized — something must be done to stop it. Against this background, the question of which kind of left we might have is really rather marginal: there simply isn’t one.

From my personal position, an internationalist left would be better than a nationalist one. But it’s also a problem of the general direction of development of society. Of course, an internationalist left would much more easily connect with the Western European left, with the North American left, speaking to them in the same language and appealing to the same problems. That would obviously be better for the development of Ukraine’s international connections, should progressive parties come to power abroad.

JP

Looking at the global scene, are there any particular social or political movements from which you think a nascent Ukrainian left might draw practical lessons?

VI

As I said, the Latin.American left probably has the most relevant lessons for the Ukrainian left. Of course, we need to consider some very important differences between a post-Soviet country and Latin American ones, but at least some of the problems that they have faced — with pro-American authoritarian regimes, with oligarchs, with large inequality, with right-wing paramilitaries sound pretty relevant to what we’re experiencing now, and this is definitely something to which the Ukrainian left needs to pay much more attention.

Developments in the Western left can also serve as an inspiration, showing that not everywhere is headed in a reactionary direction; there are strong political forces, that bear a progressive agenda, that can seriously fight for power. This is itself an important argument for us — that the Left is something legitimate. And, at least for those who look towards Europe as some kind of model, this argument can have some some traction: that these societies have a left, and so should we.

This may sound like a colonial orientation: that we need a left because the West has one. The major point would be, that we need the left for Ukraine’s own future — not just to copy-paste from Western models. If you would like to have this country together, we need some space for leftist politics — without them, the country would probably just disappear. Progressive developments are very unlikely, but the only alternative to it could be Ukraine’s total collapse.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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JackRiddler
 
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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:03 am

If by "the Left", the people in most of the articles you reproduce here mean to say "the former USSR" (which indeed seems to be the case in the most recent examples at least), then is it really so surprising that UKRAINE of all nations would be "anti-Left" and revere any and all Ukrainians who participated in the liberation movements against it, whether before, during, or after WWII, regardless of how vile some of their temporary partners in said project might have been?

I mean, I realize the USSR were our allies in the war, but they were already on slate to become the Big Baddies before the war even ended, for Pete's sake. And of all nations, Ukraine, I would posit, has more valid cause than most to hate Russia/USSR.

And if most Ukrainians are EU/NATO sympatico... why not help them see their way towards that goal?

Why does this seem to be an issue with such deep personal implications for you? Are Ukrainians sub-human trash in your eyes? Did a Ukrainian run over a beloved family pet at one point?

(just kidding on this last point)

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Re: Kiev Regime Discredits Itself for All Time

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jan 29, 2019 12:00 pm

.

Remember that Ukraine within the present international borders has also been chock full of Russian speakers and people who have identified ethnoculturally as Russian and lived in the same places going back many generations - and who, self-evidently, may have their own often equal histories of suffering under the various regimes and wars of the Czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras. The first Ukrainian citizen I met grew up with both cosmopolitan and conservative ideas in Kiev and classic Russian literature as his life's love. He was anti-Soviet but would have spat on the idea that the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, mass murderer of Jews and Poles, should be revived and honored as anyone's national hero, and get a holiday in his name.

I get why those who identify as Ukrainians today feel antagonism to Russians as such, or the nation-state of Russia, or influences perceived as Russian. I get why Ukrainians in the diaspora may feel that way and seek to influence related policies in faraway governments such as the ones in Washington, London, or Berlin. But I also get why many "Russians" may for their own chosen reasons hold similar feelings toward "Ukrainians." I get why Greeks may feel the same about Turks, or why Greek-Americans may want to affect American policy. I get why Serbians may feel it about Croatians and vice-versa, although 35 years ago such feeling was dormant and most of the younger especially of either latent category had the idea they were just citizens of Yugoslavia, speaking very close dialects of the same language that was either Serbo-Croatian or Croatian-Serbian. What happened next in the latter case is well known, and it had to do more with the immediate crises of late 1980s and 1990s and the divisive moves and rhetoric of opportunistic political leaders. It was not due solely to some cultural programming from the past that was somehow inherent in people from birth reasserting itself as some kind of natural function.

Nationalizing and valorizing such feelings to foster antagonisms not toward particular structures or parties but between peoples, with peoples understood as essential entities, erases regimes and political-economic-social systems and histories, past and present. It's the bad kind of identity politics. When it comes during present crises, it usually means reaction and aggression and regression, rather than creative action toward peaceful and just solutions.

In 2013 the EU-IMF side made an offer that would have left Ukraine just as or even more insolvent in its then already serious financial crisis. Russia objectively made a better offer for that moment, and also wielded the sanctions stick and had a rationale for that, right or wrong. So Yanukovich took the snap decision in favor of the Russian offer, abandoning a long negotiation with the EU. This doesn't make him any less corrupt, but corruption and oligarchy equally infest the parties that opposed him and took power after him. In the run-up to Euro-Maidan, the polling showed the people pretty evenly split on the question of which deal to take. (Adam Tooze has good coverage of this in his excellent new book Crashed.) Citizens of the Ukrainian nation-state, however they identify ethnically, might have voted out Yanukovich in 2014, without having a violent and politically extreme vanguard lead an immediate overthrow and spark a war of the western Ukrainians against the Russian-speaking citizens.

But as the facts of that case may be, I view this as a citizen of the United States rightly concerned with the actions of my own government. In almost no case on the planet do I support covert interventions, arms sales, or American invasions of any kind, almost ever, not because they might not seem justified against given bad actors, but because history shows they are never conducted for good and honest reasons and almost always make everything worse. As an American, I abhor the idea that American empire is the exceptional primary actor of world history that must take a side and choose the winner in every conflict on the planet.

Over several generations this idea and practice has sown chaos, exacerbated conflicts, started and perpetuated wars, prevented and distorted economic development, destroyed democracies, erected dictatorships, spread sufferings throughout the world, brought us very near to nuclear war on several occasions, distracted from and exacerbated the much more important ongoing planetary ecological catastrophe, and reinforced all of the worst features of US government and society.

It is why we are still manufacturing our own enemies, why we are in a crazy nuclear arms race entering its fourth or fifth technological generation, why we blow about a trillion a year (if you count the related budgets) primarily on aggression, destruction, waste and fraud, why we still think this budget that exceeds those of all potential antagonists combined is not enough, why militarism and historical ignorance are inculcated among the people and the children, why we have developed and deployed the most complete individual surveillance technology in the world's history (now being implemented even more drastically elsewhere), why many nation-states around he world are rationally motivated to prepare for war with us, and, finally, why the imperatives of the military industrial intel complex largely run the country in concordance with the high finance that reaps the lion's share of profit deriving from these actions.

It is one of the biggest reasons why we do not have a democracy, since it requires and bolsters the rule of secret agencies and associated free agents within the government, who also have their tentacles all over the corporate media and everywhere else. This in turn contributes to the ecology of dark money, secrecy and impunity within all sectors, public and private, local and global. It makes a lot of money for the wrong kind of people, who use it to fuck up the national politics further.

Nobody running for office announced while campaigning that they were going to conduct covert operations and set up proxy groups to advance some anti-Russian geostrategy, or to impose some version of better governance in Ukraine, or to get a better slice of the Ukrainian profits pie (such as it is). This was not debated. It was not put to a vote. Actions were funded largely out of a federal black budget of $50-80 billion a year rendered as a single line item, the details of which must be kept secret for national security purposes. It was done by the fiat of unelected parties in private and public capacities and in line with an ideology of US global hegemony, without an adversarial process to reach a policy ruling in the legal sense. And once it got hot, only then were we flooded with simplistic aggressive bullshit and propaganda about it, and told we had to go along with this and shut up about that lest we help the "Russians."

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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