““Essence of Time” unit informed about the shelling of Donetsk, Gorlovka, and Dokuchaevsk outskirts by Ukrainian artillery on their official page in the social networks in the evening of June 2nd. The destruction of the civilian infrastructure was reported.” http://eu.eot.su/2016/06/03/essence-of-time-unit-report-donetsk-gorlovka-dokuchaevsk-are-shelled-again/ – 6/3/2016
Related to the above report: “The Essence of Time Movement (Russian: “Суть Времени”) is an international organization with headquarters in Moscow and departments in all of Russia, in countries of Europe, as well as in USA, Canada and China.” — http://eu.eot.su/about/
Apparently also related:
“The night was tense in the zone of the ATO. Pro-Russian illegal armed groups continue to resort to more intense armed provocations,” reads a statement. “Militants opened fire 49 times at the Ukrainian defenders. In the Donetsk direction, the enemy shelled the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 15 times. Positions near Opytne, Pesky, Nevelske, Avdiyivka, Novoselivka Druga came under 82mm and 120mm mortar fire, and at about 23:00 Kyiv time, the Russian mercenaries fired on the defenders of Pesky another 20 artillery shells of a 122mm caliber,” the press service said.
BackChannels cannot fact check either the latest in video recordings from Ukraine nor claims or reports interpreting the same. However, BackChannels may note the Moscow-based initiative taken to reach BackChannels and others on the Internet with the spin that “Ukrainian fascists” comprise the opposition.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) has prepared a dossier laying out evidence for what it calls “Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
The report alleges there are some 9,000 Russian troops deployed in Ukraine, forming 15 battalion tactical groups. The force includes about 200 tanks, more than 500 armored fighting vehicles, and some 150 artillery systems, according to the dossier.
In today’s Washington Post, Jackson Diehl notes Russia’s suspension of gas deliveries to Ukraine and the west’s distractions with Greece and Iran, asking at the end of his piece “Will this be remembered as the summer when the West let Ukraine die?”
I won’t give away his answer.
My hope: I hope not.
Remember Yanukovych Leaks and the state-borne internal piracy that drove Ukrainians to give Putin’s stooge the boot.
Remember Putin’s $52 billion Sochi Winter Olympics, which obscene spending ignored and masked off the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria and the nearly 10 million displace while Putin-Assad-Khamenei fairly cultivated “The Terrorists” for Assad’s Big Political Theater and Khamenei’s teleological commitment to bringing forth the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle.
“I want you to know why thousands of people all over my country are on the streets,” she said to the global audience, her voice full of feeling. “There is only one reason: They want to be free from a dictatorship. … We are civilized people but our government are barbarians. This is not a Soviet Union.” The video has since been seen by more than 8.3 million people.
Remember Milan Kundera’s famous statement about remembering: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
The main purpose of keeping the Donbas conflict in a smoldering state is to let Putin remain in power. The Donbas war will distract the Russians and help Putin stay in power, the ex-FSB officer said.
The BackChannel’s term for what Putin (and Putin and Khamenei together) represent in contemporary political possibility: “21st Century Neo-Feudalism”.
Dzerzhinsky may be a Communist saint, but the symbolism of the prince’s statue is inescapable. It will celebrate the new Vladimir, not just the old one. This may be obvious, but the subject is avoided in polite conversation.
There are other topics — rising prices, the fighting in Ukraine, the shape of things to come — that people don’t like to think about, even though these subjects are at times unavoidable. The economy is entering “a full-fledged crisis,” former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin told Parliament recently. He warned that Russia’s gross domestic product is forecast to be 4 percent lower this year than it was in 2014. Meanwhile, food prices are rising. Official figures indicate a 23 percent jump for the year ending in March, but an informal survey of grocers in my neighborhood suggests a 30 percent jump is more realistic.
But Vyrypaev’s wider summing-up was admirably succinct: “This means that [the state] has the right to intervene, to control, direct, grow, regulate, monitor, and finally to develop the cultural process. It means that the state assumes the role of a kind of spiritual and educational shepherd for the people.”
While Obama has for the public paired Putin with Soviet revanche, it’s not the Soviet that Putin (and the KGB cum FSB organization) have brought to Russia: “feudalism”, “state capitalism”, “neo-feudalism” better describe what Putin has done — is doing — to the Russians.
Avedissian, Karena. “The power of Electric Yerevan.” Open Democracy, July 6, 2015: “The corruption and mismanagement of ENA reflect wider problems of governance and the political environment in Russia. When Russian state-owned companies (in which theft is not the exception but the norm) take over infrastructure in neighbouring countries, this is, in effect, ‘exporting corruption’.”
Popova, Polina. “Freedom of speech under fire in Ukraine.” The Hill, June 16, 2015. (The story becomes convoluted as official Ukraine responds to the assault of Russian propaganda: writes Popova, “Some journalists fear that the ministry was actually created to muffle internal opposition, rather than tackling Russian propaganda. It’s not surprising that it has earned the Orwellian nickname “the Ministry of Truth”).
Not a few Russian intellectuals, depressed by the Orwellian state of Russian public discourse, have come to see Ukrainian cities as the hope for the future of Russian culture. In this light, the Russian invasion of Ukraine to protect freedom of speech in the Russian language is perhaps better compared to America invading Canada to save the welfare state or North Korea invading South Korea to protect capitalism.
War robs you of everything including your humanity. After the war, things are never like they used to be – it takes several generations to eradicate or simply to forget its tragic consequences.
However, all the valuable things, including peace, have their price. Most Europeans naively believe that it’s been paid by their grandparents and great-grandparents during WWI and WWII, but the truth is that this valuable thing is extremely fragile and requires continuous work to keep it alive.
The ties that bind are also contemporary and personal. Two Soviet leaders — Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev — not only spent their early years in Ukraine but spoke Russian with a distinct Ukrainian accent. This historic connectedness is one reason why their post-Soviet successor, Vladimir Putin, has been able to build such wide popular support in Russia for championing — and, as he is now trying to do, recreating — “Novorossiya” (New Russia) in Ukraine.
In selling his revanchist policy to the Russian public, Putin has depicted Ukrainians who cherish their independence and want to join Europe and embrace the Western democratic values it represents as, at best, pawns and dupes of NATO — or, at worst, neo-Nazis. As a result, many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London, and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.
Once again Ukraine finds itself in a state of revolution and war, and the outcome may affect all Europe and the United States. As accomplished author and Ukraine scholar Wendy Lower notes, the conflict over who controls Ukraine’s future is also a conflict over the interpretation of its history. With the intent of informing, and perhaps narrowing the gap between historical facts and inflammatory rhetoric, the editors of Holocaust and Genocide Studies have issued this special edition on the Holocaust in Ukraine, featuring selected articles from the past ten years. Read as a whole, these essays begin to fill in the bigger picture of the history of Holocaust in Ukraine and the Nazi occupation.
The number of political groups that are inclined to support Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is growing, both in the ruling parties of the European countries and in the opposition; from Hungary’s Victor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party to the far-right opposition parties that are performing spectacularly well in national elections, such as Marie Le Pen and her Front National of France. Sympathy and support also comes from Hungary’s Jobbik radical nationalists, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn, Austria’s Freedom Party, and Italy’s Lega Nord, just to name a few.
I would expect Russo-Iranian methods in the development of power and wealth to expand until stopped cold. The interior mythology in both units, to be clinical about it, have zero incentive to stall or stop aggression on the basis of the political accommodations and levers owned by others. That implacable will may be buttressed by an equally sociopathic view of humanity. For evidence of that in addition to Ukraine (and how Yanukovych milked it): Bashar al-Assad’s behavior in Syria.
Now Russia is presenting an alternative that poses a fundamental challenge to the values and principles on which the European Union was originally founded. It is based on the use of force that manifests itself in repression at home and aggression abroad, as opposed to the rule of law. What is shocking is that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has proved to be in some ways superior to the European Union—more flexible and constantly springing surprises. That has given it a tactical advantage, at least in the near term.
Europe and the United States—each for its own reasons—are determined to avoid any direct military confrontation with Russia. Russia is taking advantage of their reluctance.
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