Reforms that successive governments have failed to introduce will not be made easier by the huge economic challenges the country now faces, the lingering menace of further Russian intervention in the east and the motley crew of far-right nationalists that played their part in bringing down the government and who have reaped their reward with important posts in the new administration. They will have to work hard to ensure that all Ukrainians feel they have an equal share in their country’s future.
If there is a chance that our neighbouring country could make something of itself with the active participation of the United States and Europe and be built on different principles (in this case it is not important whether these are more liberal or the opposite, obscurantist neo-Nazi values) the opportunity for agreement has disappeared. Moscow is no longer counting the costs linked to the possibility that relations with the West as a whole could be severely damaged.
A week before the vote just 41 percent of Crimeans wanted their land to be a part of Russia, yet the returns came back showing 96.6 pecent approval. The electoral commission, such as it is, released numbers indicating 474,137 people voted in the port city of Sevastopol, which would be 123 percent of the registered population there.
Over the weekend about 5,000 pro-Russian protesters roamed central Donetsk in eastern Ukraine smashing doors and windows and forcing entry to government buildings.
By late Monday afternoon, Crimea’s leaders had stripped all references to Ukraine from the government’s website and made it clear that Ukrainian institutions, assets and state agencies in the peninsula now belonged to the Republic of Crimea.
I’ve doubts about the “long way around” — appeals for “diplomatic measures”, years to decades of protracted hot air (“negotiations”), the tolerance, first, then institutionalization of barbaric Russian imperial expansion.
Dictators are machines without brakes: they don’t stop on their own as self-restraint would seem not to become them.
______
The main alarming uncertainty of this day is the fate of the Ukrainian military in Crimea. They are being presented with ultimatums and coerced into betrayal, but they keep standing firm. But their future is unknown, which is particularly frightening.
. . .
The good news:
1. The Ukrainian authorities finally announced partial mobilization. It came as a response both to the Crimean “referendum” and to the Moscow-provoked events in the Southeast of Ukraine.
Mobilization will simultaneously strengthen two armed formations with considerably different tasks – namely, the army and the National Guard. The former would be used to fight the enemy’s regular army, and the latter, to destroy gangs. This means that Kyiv is demonstrating that it’s preparing for all possible operations of Moscow, be it an armed invasion or the “Crimean scenario” (actions of the so-called “self-defense” supported by mysterious “little green men”). Such foresight on the part of Kyiv is reassuring.
The revolutionary government in Kiev knows well Russian duplicity, and, perhaps, it is learning about the relationship between post-WWII, post-Hitler European comfortableness, productivity, and to this date largely unchallenged security.
Apart from the infiltration of Islamic Jihad within overall Muslim migration, Europe has seen nothing like an old fashioned 19th Century military invasion — but it would seem its radars detect something like it now.
______
As anger at the corrupt government expands through Russian society, the experience of Ukrainian revolutionaries could prove invaluable. It revealed that demonstrations led by activists willing to risk their lives can topple a regime that looks impregnable. Ukraine’s success might encourage similar attempts to unseat a corrupt Russian regime.
STUTTGART, Germany — NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove asserted Tuesday that soldiers surrounding Ukrainian bases in Crimea are Russian forces, dismissing accounts that the troops are pro-Russia local militia.
“After extensive review of multiple information sources, we believe these are Russian military forces acting on clear orders to undermine Ukraine forces in Crimea,” Breedlove wrote in his blog, From the Cockpit.
It’s hard to believe that it has been a quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan began to dismantle the ideological wall that divided Europe. Harder still to believe that American politicians, Right and Left, are trying to resuscitate the Cold War — or something hotter. Recent events in the Ukraine seem to be giving the citizens of Europe and America hot flashes of deja-vu.
As with the Islamic Small Wars, of which Putin has made himself a part in the middle east’s unholy troika that is Putin-Assad-Khamenei, the European Theater with the curtain coming up on the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine revolves around the simplest of democratic open society concepts: integrity.
Putin, who appears to fit well the concept that is “malignant narcissist”, invests in deceits and lies, in under-the-table (“behind the curtains”) dealing, in control of entire information atmospheres. In the post-Soviet, post-KGB era, the ideology may have been thrown out the window but not the unbridled urge for absolute control and power over all others (and for the purpose of, yawn, obtaining unlimited “narcissistic supply”).
Today’s post-KGB FSB employs more staff per capita than the KGB; the media of Glasnost has returned to “glass? No!” as regards independence and rendering key elements within the state transparent.
Putin’s Russia is no more a benign dictatorship than would be a pirate’s cove dominating the Caribbean — or, look to that mansion in Marbella, Gibraltar.
______
MOSCOW —Russia effectively absorbed Crimea Tuesday afternoon, moments after President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine.
As Russia and the rest of the world move ever closer to a cold war footing over Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised Crimean invasion, an important dimension of this conflict has received scant coverage, in both Western and Russian media: how do Russian citizens feel about this escalating conflict?
Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
THE outcome of the “referendum” in Crimea was never in doubt. With Russian troops occupying the peninsula and anyone who does not want to join Russia staying away from the bogus procedure, the 97% vote in favour of becoming part of Russia is not a surprise.
The government in Kiev has accused Moscow of deliberately stirring up tensions in the east by bringing in professional activists and provocateurs from across the border. In a series of ominous statements, Russia’s foreign ministry has said it may be forced to act to “protect” ethnic Russians – an expression that appears to provide a rationale for future military incursions.
The Kremlin describes last month’s uprising in next-door Ukraine as an illegitimate fascist coup. It says dark rightwing forces have taken over the government, forcing Moscow to “protect” Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority . . . With Ukraine on the brink of invasion and division, most people in Kiev blame the country’s troubles on the former president. “This is Yanukovych’s fault,” Zhenia, a pensioner, said, surveying the battleground in Institutska Street, where many were gunned down. She was crying.
Links between Yanukovych, the Party of Regions and crime have been long known to policymakers as seen in U.S. cables from Kiev available through WikiLeaks.
At least 18 Party of Regions deputies have criminal ties, according to Hennadiy Moskal, deputy head of Parliament’s Committee on Organized Crime and Corruption.
When one wants something one shouldn’t have, when one wishes to hide something with which one doesn’t wish to be associated, one may resort to lying but not always, much less inevitably, erase the trail.
In fact, the trail follows in the kept anger of those wronged by criminal behavior, in the bent verdicts and forged documents attending sophisticated theft, or, in Yanukovych’s case, which journal keeping may be likened to the records of plunder and murder maintained by benumbed Nazi officials, the diary of bribes and of breathtaking sums acquired and spent across multiple estates and headier symbols of wealth.
A liberal socialist myself, somewhat, I’d nonetheless offer the problem of whether men shouldn’t be wealthy, filthy rich, swimming in moolah — I think private wealth is great but legally obtained, earned or inherited for a generation or two.
The truth is simple: I’d rather the rich man were the audited owner of a Fortune 500 company than a dumb mafia boss or vicious — and equally vacuous — pirate.
Stalin engineered the famine to rid himself of a stubborn enemy. Ukrainians had fought for their independence during the Russian Revolution, and for a short time, they had beaten back the Reds. What’s more, Ukraine, being the “bread basket of Europe,” had a rich and ancient culture of farmers, who wanted to hold on to their language, their land and their identity. As a civilization, Ukraine is a thousand years older than Moscow. For Stalin, as for Putin today, this would be a very hard back to break.
The combination of military adventurism and domestic crackdown is not a well-advised recipe for stabilizing the regime. This Saturday’s planned march in downtown Moscow against the war on Ukraine will now be joined by people outraged at the imposition of censorship. Putin’s Kremlin, not opposition leaders, remains the best recruiter for the Russian protest movement.
President Obama has one crucial lever he can activate immediately, as was done in the case of deposed Ukrainian Viktor Yanukovich: identify, freeze, and disclose stolen assets hidden in the West.
MOSCOW — When Vladimir V. Putin returned to the Russian presidency in 2012, one of the first messages he sent to his political elite, many of them heads of banks and large corporations, was that the times had changed: Owning assets outside Russia makes you too vulnerable to moves by foreign governments, he told them. It is time to bring your wealth home.
One notable statistic about Russia is that the mean wealth of its 110m adults last year was $10,980 while the median was $870. In other words, if the country’s assets were equally divided, the man in the middle would possess more than $10,000 but, in practice, his net worth is less than a 10th of that sum. This is the result of 110 billionaires controlling 35 per cent of the wealth.
The pundits fret over what to do with the Russia-Crimea-Ukraine debacle not in relation to mere Slavic expansionism — start, oh Russians, with investments in the east for that — but rather the expansion of Putin’s “mafia state“.
______ For readers who have a couple of hours to spare (right now) ______
In light of unfolding events in Ukraine, the question now arises whether anyone in the Kremlin is thinking of how Russia’s own kleptocratic regime will fare once the population begins to question the right of their rulers to loot their country in the way that Viktor Yanukovych and his cronies have been doing.
It appears the thugs want to remain thugs, crashing peaceful demonstrations, vandalizing cars, beating unarmed innocents.
Perhaps Putin’s oligarchs wish to remain responsible for paying thugs to do thuggish things for political ends a while longer.
Yo ho ho!
One more hour.
However, it would not surprise me to see, say, Gary Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky running for office in Russia some (intentionally vague) years from now, but realpolitik today has it that Vladimir Putin controls the wealth of a vast and uncertain Russian Federation, and he’s not only sustaining his own self-aggrandizement but that of a host of interests who may fear that when he’s gone, if ever, their own channels wealth and power will vanish as well.
* * *
As the erstwhile British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once sourly remarked, “What we anticipate seldom occurs, and what we least expect generally happens.” Russia watchers in the West expected the Russian economy to prosper, as did the Chinese economy, once Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected Russian president, cast off the communist mantle in 1991. Instead, he fostered the growth of crony capitalism, deliberately enriching a handful of men in return for their political support. Since Yeltsin’s resignation in 1999, journalists and scholars have begun to analyze his regime more frankly.
According to US diplomats, his main motivation for carrying on is to guarantee the safety of his own assets and those of his inner circle. No one quite knows how much Putin and his friends are worth. (Several of them feature prominently on the Forbes annual list.) But the sums involved allegedly total many billions of dollars.
Although Putin’s escapades — or rackets — may have him intent on remaining in power for life, he has with Ukraine and his bid to hold Crimea come up against a hard border: the Ukrainians who launched and succeeded with their “Euromaidan” are not having back their deposed arch-kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovich, and what got to Viktor in mid-stride may now through Ukraine-launched spoken Russian — for not all of Ukraine’s Russian speakers are with Putin — zing through the air and Internet back to Vladimir.
With or inspiring “consequences”.
The political imbroglio over Crimea isn’t about the fate of Crimea, which is secure if it does not become the centerpiece in a Syrian-style civil war, but rather about the limits to Putin’s projection of power and, perhaps too, his time in power as the oligarchs and the Russian people en masse and outside of the tightly knit power circles in Moscow find their way to standing on their own feet.
* * *
As I have said for years, it is a waste of time to attempt to discern deep strategy in Mr. Putin’s actions. There are no complex national interests in a dictator’s calculations. There are only personal interests, the interests of those close to him who keep him in power, and how best to consolidate that power. Without real elections or a free media, the only way a dictator can communicate with his subjects is through propaganda, and the only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.
“This is our land,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a crowd gathered at the Kiev statue to writer and nationalist Taras Shevchenko. “Our fathers and grandfathers have spilled their blood for this land. And we won’t budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land. Let Russia and its president know this.”
Khodorkovsky’s voice shook and his lips at one stage quivered as he told the receptive crowd he was deeply shocked by the violence that has gripped the ex-Soviet state.
“I want you to know — there is a different Russia. There are people who despite the arrests, despite the long years they have spent in prison, go to anti-war demonstrations in Moscow,” Khodorkovsky said in reference to the dozens arrested last week near the Kremlin during a protest against Russia’s de facto seisure of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
Putin may bellow about anti-Semitic nationalist Ukrainians seizing power in Kiev and his Russian army standing in to defend Slavs in Crimea — and oh how that bullshit rolls through the old propaganda press — but, for the record, an IDF-experienced Jew named “Delta” helped defend the “Blue Helmets of Euromaidan” — he seems to feel anti-Semitism is barely there — and Ukrainians have made plans to stay away from an illegal referendum on Crimea, rendering voting fixed from that perspective alone.
Sochi may have been Putin’s zenith, a fine $52 billion hour, but the planting of Russian troops in Crimea seems a step down for the statesman and a big step backward in time for Russia. In Crimea, Putin may be expected to lose his balance, to tumble off his landing while the atrocities spinning off Assad’s brutality in Syria fly into the past beside him along with the many other dark phantoms of a suddenly long ago Soviet ignominy.
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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