Viktor Yanukovich, whose overthrow last month after protests triggered the gravest crisis in Europe since the Cold War, insisted from his refuge in Russia that he was still Ukraine’s legitimate president and commander of its armed forces.
“I want to remind you that I am not only still the legitimate president of Ukraine but also the supreme commander of the army and I haven’t stopped my duties as president early – I am still alive.”
He took no questions from the press after his speech.
Cash: $12 million. Decoration of a dining hall and tea room: $2.3 million. Statue of a wild boar: $115,000. “A bribe”: $4,000.
These are some of the expenses detailed in financial documents found in President Viktor Yanukovych’s abandoned residence, which was occupied by protesters after the leader fled the capital.
Borrowing from the Putin-Assad-Khamenei show in the middle east, I would further suggest Yanukovych has no tears, no real ones, for any of dead, injured, and maimed of Euromaidan. He lost the confidence of his people; he lost the streets; he lost his properties. Now he’ll pout and throw a tantrum, if he can, with the help of Uncle Vlad.
Perhaps the less they are on the inside, the larger despots wish to look on the outside.
On one hand, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani continues to engage the international community in a diplomatic process over Tehran’s nuclear program. He has achieved many successes in a charm offensive designed to rebrand his country as a reasonable and more moderate international player.
Simultaneously, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and its overseas special operation unit, the Quds Force, are strengthening, financing, and arming terrorist organizations all over the Middle East.
Iran, at a glance, has been sewing conflict around the middle east, building its own energy industry, establishing itself as a nuclear power — well, no one has yet stalled that ambition or dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for achieving it — and it illustrates its efforts in blood, or else why release Hezbollah to defend and sustain the brutality of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad? Against that sweeping influence in regional payola and arms shipments, Israel’s recent interdiction of arms intended for Gaza provides but a glimpse of Ayatollah Khamenei’s greater ambitions as the middle east’s greatest Lord of War.
At 21:15 local time Iraq, on December 26, 2013, Camp Liberty was targeted by dozens of missiles of different types. In the early hours 3 members of the Iranian resistance were slain and more than 50 were reported injured, some in critical condition.
This is the fourth missile attack on Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty (Iraq) in 2013, while the Iraqi government has not yet delivered the bodies of those massacred during the September 1, 2013 attack on Camp Ashraf, to Liberty residents for burial.
While American President Barrak Obama gives diplomacy and peace a chance over Iran’s developing nuclear weapons building potential, Ayatollah Khamenei’s efforts to produce influence and obtain it throughout the region has been also developing unobstructed. With that in mind, Israel’s interception of a lone arms shipment doubtless intended to arm Hamas for the destruction of the Jewish-majority state represents but a small interruption in the Ayatollah’s efforts to turn a large wheel, a wheel that, in fact, has turned.
Ten years ago Christine Spolar reported on the Iraq war. Last month she returned to find her old colleagues and friends living in fear, and a city traumatised by spiralling violence
Families of Hezbollah fighters in south Lebanon are growing increasingly angry that their sons are being sent to fight and die for Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al Watan reported over the weekend.
I saw this clip some time ago but am watching it now and appreciating it perhaps more than I did when first encountered.
* * *
FTAC composed while listening to the above:
Without Judaism — and I believe without Hillel the Elder (look him up if you are not familiar with the rabbi) — I believe there would have been no Christianity or Islam. Mohammad appears to borrow directly from Hillel, who said, ” whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I suggest only that we are more bound by our common humanity than by our will to destroy those who disagree with us; and that the Jews have been working on ethical and psychological issues — start with Pharaoh, that great malignant narcissists, start with Cain, that jealous brother — for 5,000 years. I know how you feel about the “poor Palestinians” but it might surprise you to know that Jews feel about the same way, but not so much about the PLO, PFLP, Fatah, or Hamas who exploit or keep their own in ethnic identification captive to the world’s oldest hate.
It’s not Israel, R. A portion of Hamas went to fight with al-Nusra in Syria in keeping with their interests as Sunni Muslims. Also, Hamas, along similar lines, lost a part of the faith invested in it by Ayatollah Khamenei . . . and then, because they had felt their interests aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they lost that too when the people of Egypt (in overwhelming millions on the streets) won their plebiscite and looked to the Egyptian military to intervene.
Along with the adjective, agitprop, and all that early learning, I want to suggest that real independent journalism, from Fox to Mother Jones, seeks factual data to report with reflection and honesty. It takes a dose of paranoia from elsewhere to view “9/11” as an “inside job” or Hamas as a “Zionist invention”.
The central fact about the Jews is their refusal to accept authority at face value and without insight and to then search for knowledge and insight about humanity every day, if perhaps using the Torah as a basis that works — but it never works without argument, commentary, additional research in every realm — or these days an actualizing psychology (Maslow) or an ethical humanism (Hillel to Adler). Either way, trust a Jew to support others in their development, culturally, individually, according to the unique (and wonderful) qualities of each.
That is something narcissists, who are busy with themselves, either don’t care to do or don’t know how to do: they’re better at exploiting others. Putin-Assad-Khamenei, bound together in Syria’s Civil War, have the qualities of malignant narcissists (http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1). One might add to Khamenei, “Khamenei-Nasrallah” — and what they do themselves, they will tell you the Jews do, Israel does, the west most of all: except the criminality they complain about is not that of the Jews, Israel, or the west: the accusation is the project of what is in themselves and has been allowed or enabled by fate and a vast ignorance. And fear.
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People who care about people, or say they do, carry their prejudices with them, and that perhaps often with anti-Semitism foremost. The above note, which by the time I got to it seems to have been off-topic, addresses the ad hominem attack rhetoric that passes for thought in some places. At the end, it found its way to the Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation that provides despots the language leveraging tool to launch arms against the innocent and unprepared.
On Ukraine and Crimea, on democracy and human rights in Russia, forget about Ketchum and company and what they do for money: go with the girls, Femen and Pussy Riot, for integrity.
Obama said Thursday that the referendum would violate both the Ukrainian constitution and international law. He called on Russia to help reduce tensions on the Crimean Peninsula, as he ordered sanctions on Russians involved in Russia’s military intervention and Ukrainians who have jeopardized democracy and looted national assets. Obama later spoke by phone with Putin for more than hour.
Putin also claims that “there is every reason to believe” chemical weapons were “used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists,” despite a forthcoming U.N. report that will reportedly finger the Assad regime as the culprit.
I’m going with Femen — those gals put their boots on the ground and boobies in the air every time out, never mind catching cold.
One might wish one could say as much of Russians standing off to the side of Russian nationalists whom Putin means to portray as majority Russians, the only Russians, the Russians who are represented, at least by himself, not by the pestered Alexy Navalny (three hours ago: “Navalny Fined for Participation in Unsanctioned Public Gathering,” RFE — it’s got to be back in business big time with Russia’s rush backwards to despotism) or the now absent-from-Russia-until-Putin-leaves Gary Kasparov:
Mr. Putin belongs to an exclusive club, along with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Miloševic, as one of the very few leaders to invade a neighboring nation in the nuclear age. Such raw expansionist aggression has been out of fashion since the time of Adolf Hitler, who eventually failed, and Joseph Stalin, who succeeded. Stalin’s Red Army had its share of battlefield glory, but his real triumph came at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, three months before the end of the war in Europe. There Stalin bullied a feeble Franklin Roosevelt and a powerless Winston Churchill, redrawing the Polish borders and promising elections in Poland when he knew that the Communist government the Soviets were installing was there to stay.
In Washington, D.C., Ketchum represents Vladimir Putin and Putin’s Russia. One may trust it was well paid for the September placement denying Assad’s use, well investigated, of chemical warheads in the Syria’s civil war.
At least one might consider Ketchum in the best of like company:
In May 2009, Waldman filed paperwork with the DOJ indicating he would be working with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to provide “legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions.”
Deripaska had his U.S. visa revoked in 2006 due to longstanding concerns about his links to organized crime and because the State Department was concerned he lied to American investigators who were looking into his business.
American Executives Working For Putin – Business Insider – 3/5/2014, on Adam Waldman representing Oleg Deripaska. Others included in the Business Insider story by Hunter Walker include Ketchum Inc.; Robert C. Jones, an attorney “ultimately responsible to Ketchum, Inc. (the money involved: about $535,000 in contracts devoted to working for Russia); William Nordwind, partner in a consultancy serving both Gazprom and Ketchum (I don’t want to relay the earnings — the story is larger than this paragraph and the curious reader may click to it.
Caption: “On the mourning of March 6 2014 Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, along with Peter Verzilov and members of their prisoners rights NGO “Zone of the Rights” arrived in the city of Nizhny Novgorod to inspect a local prison. At 7.20 am an organized group barged into the McDonalds where members of Pussy Riot with their crew were having breakfast and attacked them with pepper spray, green antiseptic and other weapons.”
So sad to see these two so less wild after gulag time, but they were peacefully doing their new NGO thing, and by that I mean doing what human rights NGOs do, i.e., looking into matters involving the victimization of others.
On Ukraine and Crimea, on democracy and human rights in Russia, forget about Ketchum and company and what they do for money: go with the girls, Femen and Pussy Riot, for integrity.
Putin’s “vertical of power” brand has well established the arc that is Putin-Assad-Khamenei, without which Syria’s initial revolution may have taken a turn toward the moderate.
Of course, it may be as useless second-guessing yesterday as trying to outwit tomorrow.
Nonetheless, one tries.
🙂
Along The Bear’s southern flank in eastern Europe, the potential arc “Putin-Orbán-Yanukovych” would seem to be enjoying significantly less success. Suddenly stateless Viktor Yanukovych appears to have leaped into Mother Bear’s arms (or off a roof somewhere — who knows? He’s missing in action); Viktor Orbán appears to have chosen an energy-based stance founded on a nuclear power development agreement with Russia (that may in time transform Hungary into an energy exporting state) while nonetheless hewing to NATO and European interests and values, clearly rebuffing interest Putin may have in recovering or retaining Soviet-era buffer and client states in eastern Europe.
Simply put, Orban has successfully noted the difference between doing business with a Great Power and kissing its ass at the same time.
Not everyone sees Orban as standing strong for European democratic and open society values:
According to LMP politician Katalin Ertsey, who also serves as a deputy chairman of the committee, the Hungarian position in the Ukraine-Russian conflict is “as invisible as Vladimir Putin would like it to be”.
However, Orban’s national security arrangement with NATO and his greater constituency’s pro-European stance better fit a cool-tough trade relationship with Moscow than a warm fuzzy between autocrats with the “vertical of power” at its center.
If the rightness doesn’t make the argument, the wrongness most certainly does: along with the rest of the world, Orban saw what has happened to Yanukovych (and his estates, which have been seized as “frozen assets”).
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “For Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who as opposition leader in 2007 railed against turning his country into the “happiest barrack of Gazprom,” the persuasion took the shape of an offer to lend the country as much as $14 billion. Orban trekked to Moscow yesterday to hand Rosatom Corp., Russia’s state nuclear holding company, a deal to expand Hungary’s lone nuclear power plant using that loan.”
Related: The Putin-Orbán nuclear deal: a short assessment | Heinrich Böll Foundation – 1/27/2014: “A resource-poor country with shaky economic fundaments would make major investments in order to become an energy exporter, and subsidies provided by Hungarian taxpayers would be redistributed among foreign consumers. Around 55-65% of the country’s electricity production would be based on Russian technology, operating at a single location (Paks). This is a project with an obscure past and a murky future.”
Wikipedia Section: Viktor Orbán – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – “At the age of 14 and 15, he was a secretary of the communist youth organisation (KISZ) of his secondary grammar school.[8][9] In 1988, Orbán was one of the founding members of Fidesz (an acronym for Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, English: Alliance of Young Democrats). The first members were mostly students who opposed the Communist regime.”;
BackChannels Section: Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation | BackChannels – I’ve include this reference to concept predicting that Putin will accuse Ukrainian nationalists of fomenting conflict over Crimea while enjoying the services of Russian nationalist militia in Crimea to help him wrest it from Ukraine. Moreover, the manner in which Putin has presented to Russians (via RT and other state media) the Syrian Civil War may not be so easily repeated in eastern Europe. Word on Crimea gets around in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, and Russians in Crimea and Russia may demand and expect a complete, accurate, and clear explanation for a separatism devolving back to Putin’s own penchant for inexhaustible self-aggrandizement, rather well illustrated by that $52 billion price tag for Sochi (while in the same period Russia pledged $10 million to ease the suffering of Syria’s displaced population).
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