The above were posted today, May 17, 2017, on YouTube. The “feed” from Ukraine’s war with Russia is continuous, but all seems to quiet at the desktop as the drama becomes familiar and outside anger dissipates into other breaking news.
Every hour, all 24, every day, the global public may not see the “blast and battle” taking place in Crimea, but what is happening appears in the government’s response to exigencies as well as reports from the front lines.
BackChannels hopes it will “scrape” less and interview now and then as the post-Cold War conflicts move through time and, God willing, resolve against the feudal past and for the more favorable modern democratic future with the strength to support rule of law in service to liberal ideals.
For this post, the blog may only encourage looking at the struggle of a state leaning westward and putting distance between itself and a demonstratively barbaric, corrupt, criminal, cruel, disingenuous, and kleptocratic feudal society that adorns itself on the spoils of malign narcissistic thieving under the guise of “protection”.
Wiesenthal Center Urges Ukrainian Authorities to Take Action Against General Who Threatened to Murder Jews
May 17, 2017
Jerusalem-The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Ukrainian government to take legal action against retired Security Service General Vasily Vovk in the wake of a recent Facebook post of his in which he wrote that he intends to murder Jews, among them Jewish MP Vadim Rabinovych. In a letter sent to Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Hennadii Nadolenko by its Director of Eastern European Affairs, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center emphasized the severity of the general’s comments and lack hitherto of an appropriate response by the Ukrainian authorities.
According to Zuroff’s letter:
“I am aware of the fact that the embassy here in Israel responded to express your regret about the ‘highly provocative post of [an] anti-Semitic character,’ but there is no indication that any legal action of any sort has or will be taken against General Vovk. So although the embassy ‘condemns all kinds of manifestations of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance,’ the bottom line as far as the Ukrainian authorities are concerned, is absolute impunity for vicious anti-Semites.
“We urge you to convey our concerns to the authorities in Kiev with a demand that appropriate and resolute action be taken against General Vovk, to send a clear message that in democratic Ukraine there will be no tolerance whatsoever for anti-Semites and bigots of any type.”
The poor countries from Latin America and Africa need an international bailout plan such as the Marshal Plan to Europe after the world war, with economic loans at low bank interest of 1% and 2% and more than 40 years to pay, which is could extend to 60 years term to pay and up to 80 years term, not as now happens with the perversion of the capital market with economic loans to 7% and 8% bank interest with only 5 year to pay to poor countries due to moral degeneration of Wall Street people who lives in Park Avenue … it is also necessary to allow the transfer of technology from rich countries to poor countries to build cars, trucks, buses, industrial machinery, tractors, televisions, computers, cell phones, build nuclear power plants and ensure that poor countries can grow at 5% of GDP per year over the next 50 years to reduce poverty, violence, migration, pay the foreign debt also and maintain world peace…
Source of the above will remain unattributed.
Below: recent documentary coverage of the collapse of Venezuela’s economy.
It’s been 3 years and over 10,000 people dead, 23,000 wounded and over 1.5 million displaced people in Donbas region. We all know that this bloody conflict is a covert Russian war against Ukraine, and its objective is to destabilize Ukraine and to prevent it from ever having a chance to be a part of Europe and exist independently from Russian influence.
But many Americans don’t realize that the war in Eastern Ukraine is far from being over.
This is why we will march and rally on May 20th to raise the awareness about an on going Russian aggression and to ask the US for support.
We demand that the Russian assisted militia immediately vacate the Donbas region and that Crimea be returned to Ukraine ASAP.
If these demands are not met, we insist on the American government sticking to its promise made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by all means necessary, in order to restore territorial integrity of the Ukrainian nation. American Government needs to be tough on Russia.
Above: BackChannels edited (re-paragraphed) excerpt from the San Francisco promotion for the May 20, 2017 march.
For democracy, for classical liberalism, for dignity and freedom, for rule of law (as opposed to the rule of thugs), fight back. Attend or publicize the above-listed marches.
BackChannels finds its unbelievable how so active a war as that taking place in Ukraine — and brought to Ukraine by invading Russian forces — has been so off the headlines in major media. To catch up with events, BackChannels has a portal page, “Ukraine Conflict Resources – Short List“.
Choose your Ukrainian conflict reporting or news outlet and get acquainted.
Russia has launched an unprecedented active measures / disinformation campaign across the web in association with its feudal aggression in Ukraine, and if you have been well informed, you may take measure of that yourself by having a look at the “alternative media” and “alternative news” outlets or the propaganda listings appearing to the right of the videos displayed here. You will find plenty evidence of “reflection in the mirror” or what BackChannels refers to as the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” in Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s portion of the “information warfare space”.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994, providing security assurances by its signatories relating to Belarus’s, Kazakhstan’s and Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The Memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.[1]
The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Russia has deployed as many as 10,000 troops in eastern Ukraine for more than a year and has actively sought to hide the deaths of its soldiers, according to a new report that provides a comprehensive assessment of the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor.
The report was published Thursday by the Interpreter, a daily online journal that translates Russian media and reports on Russian affairs, also detailed the Kremlin’s provision of increasingly sophisticated weaponry and vehicles to separatists in Ukraine. Nearly 8,000 people have been killed in the Ukrainian conflict since April 2014.
As Ukraine marked Armed Forces Day today, Poroshenko said that more than 2,500 Ukrainian servicemen and 7,500 civilians had been killed since the outbreak of the war in the spring of 2014.
In an interview with Holos Ukrainy, the official journal of the Ukrainian parliament, the defense minister, Viktor Muzhenko, specified today that 3,064 members of the security forces had been killed in the east since the start of what the Ukrainian government calls the “anti-terrorism operation” (ATO) in April, 2014.
Of this number, Muzhenko said, 2,636 were soldiers in the Ukrainian armed forces (VSU), the others presumably being volunteer fighters or servicemen in the National Guard, police or State Border Service. 2,148 of the VSU casualties were combat losses.
8 December 2016 – A new United Nations report out today has confirmed that Ukrainians living close to the “contact line” – the area between Government-controlled and armed group-controlled territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – not only suffer due to fighting near their homes but also face the threat of landmines and unexploded ordinance as well as have to contend with severe restrictions on movement.
According to the Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine launched today by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), between mid-August and mid-November, at least 32 civilians were killed in conflict-related incidents and another 132 injured. Between mid-April 2014 and 1 December this year, more than 2,000 civilians are estimated to have dined while an additional 298 were killed in the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17.
Conflict-related civilian injures are estimated between 6,000 and 7,000.
“It is of deep concern that Government forces and armed groups operating in civilian areas do not take all feasible precautions against the effects of fighting, resulting in damage to schools, kindergartens, and medical facilities,” noted the report.
It added that it was worrying that Ukrainian military forces and armed groups continued to be positioned in civilian homes and buildings in villages and towns adjacent to the contact line.
The report also raised concern that armed groups in the self-proclaimed “Donetsk people’s republic” and “Luhansk people’s republic” continue to deprive people of their fundamental rights as well as of effective mechanism for redress.
The total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Crimea and eastern Ukraine is 1,590,056 as of 3 April 2017, according to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine.
IOM assisted over 137,000 vulnerable IDPs and conflict affected people in 24 regions of Ukraine.
Lack of funds made 40% of vulnerable IDPs IOM assisted with cash in Ukraine refuse medical treatment, according to the post-distribution monitoring of IOM’s project in 13 regions of Ukraine.
The march – with a full police escort – is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. at the Washington Monument and conclude at the Holodomor Memorial, near Union Station, where a vigil is to be held, concluding at approximately 5:30 p.m.
Among the invited guest speakers are analyst Paul Goble, Peter Borisow, president of the Hollywood Trident Foundation; other noted Ukraine advocates are expected and, at the time of writing, were still being confirmed, among them Ukraine’s Ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly. Clergy from the Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches, as well as leaders of the Jewish and Muslim faiths in Ukraine have been invited to properly represent the people of Ukraine.
As stated by Mr. Skibicki: “We demand that the Russian-backed terrorists immediately vacate the Donbas region and that Crimea be returned to Ukraine. If these demands are not met, we insist on the American government to stick to its promise made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by providing modern defensive weapons in order to help the Ukrainian people restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine. We are NOT calling for American troops to be deployed to Ukraine.”
AMUDA, Syria — At long last, those of us struggling to maintain a fledgling democracy in Northern Syria have been buoyed by the announcement from the Trump administration that the American military will begin to directly arm the Kurdish men and women who make up the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Those forces have been America’s most valued and effective allies in the war against the Islamic State.
This is something we’ve asked for repeatedly during the nearly three years our militias have been fighting the Islamic State and winning, victories achieved despite tough odds and a lack of heavy weapons. We’ve steadily driven the jihadists back hundreds of miles to the brink of defeat at Raqqa. The Islamic State won’t give up its self-styled capital easily. This military aid will be crucial in finishing the job.
But as President Trump prepares to meet next week with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — no friend to the Kurds in Syria or in his own country — we ask the American president and people to be mindful of the enormous sacrifice the Kurdish people have made in this fight, and the importance of the unique democratic system we have worked hard to build in the area of Northern Syria known as Rojava.
Beirut: A group of Kurdish and Arab militias supported by the United States captured a district of the town of Tabqa from IS on Monday, they said in a statement, a step towards the capture of Syria’s largest dam.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has been fighting IS in Tabqa for weeks, aiming to capture not just the town but its Euphrates dam, a vital strategic objective before assaulting the extremists’ regional stronghold of Raqqa.
“At the end of the day”, which has come this day to Istanbul, Turkey will have as “Presidential System of Government”, i.e., as suggested by the above video from Moscow, another state featuring a paranoid “centralized government” featuring an autocrat, his military, including secret police, and his aristocracy.
The amendments were received with heavy criticism from opposition parties and non-governmental organisations, with criticism focusing particularly on the erosion of the separation of powers and the abolition of parliamentary accountability. Constitutional legal experts such as Kemal Gözler and İbrahim Kaboğlu claimed that the changes would result in the Parliament becoming effectively powerless, while the executive president would have controls over the executive, legislative and judiciary.[36][37] On 4 December, the Atatürkist Thought Association (ADD), Association for the Support of Contemporary Living (ÇYDD) and the Trade Union Confederation held a rally in Ankara despite having their permissions revoked by the Governor of Ankara, calling for a rejection of the executive presidential system on the grounds that it threatened judicial independence and secular democratic values.[38]
“Those who report critically land behind bars,” stated Carl-Eugen Eberle. The media law expert heads the German branch of the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of publishers, journalists and industry insiders. IPI actively supports press freedom and, like similar organizations such as Reporters Without Borders or Writers-in-Prison, it appeals to political leaders, sends letters and travels to problematic countries.
Since the coup attempt in July 2016 and the resulting state of emergency in Turkey, the state of freedom of press in Turkey has drastically worsened, according to IPI. Reporters Without Borders has spoken of “repression on an otherwise unknown scale.”
BackChannels 