BEIJING, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) — Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao met with Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s vice president for economic affairs on Friday and they pledged to cement the strategic partnership between the two countries.
Hailing the development of the bilateral relationship in recent years, Li said he hopes the two sides will consolidate political trust in each other, and boost practical cooperation in energy, mining and finance.
China stepped up its purchases of U.S. government debt late last year, increasing its holdings of Treasurys to an all-time record of $1.317 trillion in November, government data released this week revealed.
The political art that is “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” has been well remarked on this blog as it has worked its way around the Islamic Small War. However, unrest in Venezuela and Ukraine have signaled the need to glance, at least, at the character of their conflicts and their drivers.
Primary dimension and theme: autocracies, autocrats, and their God-given inherent right to destroy the freedom and humanity of others if they can figure out how to do it and keep getting away with it.
So far, so good!
The dictators are doing just fine.
North Korea may consider itself secure.
No Russian oligarch needs to pack it up on the Ring and light out for the brighter horizon of southern Spain.
Note: undated references are current within 24 hours.
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PEREVALNE, Ukraine (AP) — Warning that it was “on the brink of disaster,” Ukraine put its military on high alert Sunday and appealed for international help to avoid what it feared was the possibility of a wider invasion by Russia.
Outrage over Russia’s military moves mounted in world capitals, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry calling on President Vladimir Putin to pull back from “an incredible act of aggression.”
“This is not a threat: this is actually the declaration of war to my country,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said in English. Yatsenuik heads a pro-Western government that took power when the country’s Russia-backed president, Viktor Yanukovich, was ousted last week.
Of potentially even greater concern are eastern swathes of the country, where most of the ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian as a native language. Those areas saw violent protests on Saturday, with pro-Moscow demonstrators hoisting flags at government buildings and calling for Russia to defend them.
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a press conference that Russia should pull back its forces and refrain from interfering elsewhere in Ukraine, according to Reuters. NATO is urging the two countries to seek a peaceful resolution through dialogue.
Secretary of State John Kerry — who is heading to Kiev on March 4 to meet with representatives of Ukraine’s new government — has called Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine “an incredible act of aggression” and said Putin has made “a stunning, willful” choice to invade another country.
The Bear regards the old system of buffers as its own, but it has a remarkable failure going in Syria. That President Vladimir Putin pumped $52 billion into the Winter Olympics at Sochi while pledging $10 million for humanitarian relief in Syria has not gone unnoticed — nor have election shenanigans, the Night Wolves, allegations about “mafia state” and “fragile empire” — and all will reflect poorly on his sense of responsibility to Russians and to others.
However, Ukraine is also a borderland naturally spanning a cultural divide between Europe and Eurasia, between the politics of the now open democracies and their common currency and shared values and a stalwart attempting to build some kind of new Slavic society out of the 19th Century manners of aristocracy, now an energy-fueled oligarchy committed not only to its survival but the survival of Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, a veritable arc of despotic displays of power.
While Syria has become a battleground squeezing out Syrians as casualties and refugees between despots, Ukraine’s democratic revolutionary opposition to despotism has its feet and spirit planted against the “vertical of power” in Moscow.
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As Russian forces seize key objects in Crimea, their objective is not just to create chaos in Ukraine but also to protect kleptocratic rule in Russia itself.
Russia and Ukraine under Yanukovych shared a single form of government – rule by a criminal oligarchy. This is why the anti-criminal revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a precedent that is perfectly applicable to Putin’s Russia. It is also the reason why, from the Russian regime’s point of view, the Ukrainian revolution must be stopped at all costs.
Perhaps the last time the Russian intelligentsia watched the internal struggle in another country this intently was in 1968 during the Prague Spring, when they hoped the Czechs would succeed in building what they called “socialism with a human face”. They also believed it would hold out the promise of something better for life in the Soviet Union. In August 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, quashing the Prague Spring. In Moscow, seven people came out to protest against the invasion; they were arrested and the modern dissident movement was born.
“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska. I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine,” Palin wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. Palin was resoundingly mocked by comedians like Tina Fey and eggheads for saying in 2008 that Alaska’s proximity to Russia forced her to deal with foreign policy issues just like George W. Bush said thatTexas’s proximity to Mexico compelled him to deal with Mexico when he was governor of Texas.
It was a country where the late actor Bogdan Stupka could move audiences by playing Tevye the Dairyman—in Ukrainian. In 2004, during the Orange Revolution—triggered by protests against a fraudulent election “won” by Viktor Yanukovych—my Ukrainian friends demonstrated alongside Boris Naumovich, an octogenarian veteran of the Red Army with whom I practiced speaking Yiddish. Now, a decade later, an equally diverse coalition has turned out for the past three months again to protest Yanukovych, who over the weekend was ousted from the presidency he took over in 2010, and who appears to have fled to the Crimea.
It takes as much or more time to compile quotations and reference as it may to reflect and speak, so for this scraping post, I may say very little: Ukraine has come to the new dawn riven with internal conflicts about being Ukrainian with but one exception: being modern.
In the modern ethos, and would that I would have influence in it, those five bulwarks to the left-and-top count: Compassion • Empathy • Humility • Inclusion • Integrity.
Notably, if quite accidentally, my web surf took me first to “Ukraine, revolution, anti-Semitism” and then to “Ukraine, revolution, Jewish”, which somehow brought up another how-did-I-ever-miss-this encounter with a proper noun: “Viktor Pinchuk”.
Never heard of him.
(Quick: name Putin’s top ten oligarchs)!
I didn’t think so (but am nonetheless prepared to be surprised by the odd persnickety personality).
Pinchuk and the Jewish community of about 200,000 in Ukraine are not “Ukraine”, but they are certainly a fine and legitimate part of it, and Ukraine, rather like Hungary, hasn’t a soul more pure than any other of the world’s states, but then too, it has its language and languages are distinct and matched to culture, so whether Christian or Jewish or Muslim, capitalist or communist, far left or far right or somewhere between, Ukrainians have a common investment in land and language, a true meta-ethnicity adorned by differences.
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On the one hand, one of the three long-ago gates of Kiev was known as Judaic. On the other hand, there was Khmelnitsky.
He is the Ukrainian national hero, who led the Cossacks to power and whose massacres of the Jews were some of the bloodiest in our history.
Among the events reporte, Rabbi Margolin lists: a fire bomb thrown at a synagogue in Zhprozha, a message telling the rabbi of Krivoy Rog that he must leave the city within 72 hours, a graffito on the home of the rabbi of Blitzkorov saying “we are already near you,” another graffito near a Jewish building in Kiev saying “you are next,” and other anti-Semitic graffiti.
Protest coverage focused on the call for European integration and the struggle against the Yanukovich regime has largely glossed over the rise in nationalist rhetoric, often chauvinist, that has led to violence not just against police, but also against left-wing activists.
He called upon his supporters saying: “[You are the ones] that the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine fears most.”
It was an apparent reference to a Moscow-leaning political leadership, and the strong presence of ethnic Jewish billionaires in Ukraine’s business elite.
A number of young Jews are involved in the protests, which have drawn together a diverse coalition of liberal youth and opposition party leaders, including members of the ultranationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has freely trafficked anti-Semitic stereotypes.
“If the nationalists are in favor of a regime change in the country, and I am also, then they won’t prevent me from going out into the Maidan with everyone and expressing my opinions,” Evgenia Talinovskaya told JTA. “The EuroMaidan movement is primarily identified with the educated youth. And Jewish youth in Ukraine primarily fall under that description.”
He has spent the years since the Orange Revolution working to build a profile as a philanthropist. He recently pledged half his fortune, estimated by Forbes at $3.8 billion, to charity and has underwritten large-scale AIDS campaigns, opened up a free museum of contemporary art in central Kiev, and teamed up with Steven Spielberg to produce a documentary about the Holocaust in Ukraine. As pro-European reforms have stalled, Pinchuk has emerged as his country’s top advocate in the West, using his annual Yalta summits to push for Ukraine’s closer integration with the European Union.
Victor Pinchuk said: “A peaceful solution must be found, it is imperative to refrain from the use of force and find a compromise. Ukraine since its independence has avoided bloodshed. We must return to this tradition immediately. From this minute, this is the responsibility of everyone – those in power, the opposition, civil society, business. It is time for all sides to take courageous steps towards compromise that they may not yet have been ready to take even this morning. For each of us, love for Ukraine must be immeasurably more important than any other feelings and interests.”
We never had in our newest history even one drop of blood on the streets, but today we already have four or five people who were killed. I’ve never been so worried about my country, about the future of my country. I don’t want to bring politics in here but I want to ask you to share …here are hundreds of people from more than 50 countries from 5 continents, I want to ask you to share silence for 60 seconds in which we send our thoughts to Ukrainian people and we pray for peace, reason, compromise and reconciliation.
Sorry about the last clip. I had brief cause to check back on this post and found it totally gone — but other clips remain available (update: 3/3/2014).
The CNN footage: great (and in English). “The luxury never seemed to end,” says Nick Paton Walsh.
What kind of a world has Putin in mind that laces together so much wealth beneath private hands sustained on state treasuries and armies?
“Putin-Assad-Khamenei” has become a trope on this blog.
“Putin-Yanukovych” may have too, but he is gone and the people of the Ukraine have, probably, a new museum and park — and, also possibly, a new brand of vodka with a pirate’s cachet.
The newly emboldened Ukrainian parliament then voted to restore the 2004 constitution, which reduces the power of the president and gives them more control, and approved an amnesty for the demonstrators who defied Yanukovych.
Legislators also fired Yanukovych’s widely despised interior minister, Vitali Zakharchenko, who is being blamed for giving the order to shoot at protesters in Kiev.
I was in the KGB . . . I’m retired now . . . President is nobody to me . . . Nobody. Honestly. I voted for my grandchildren. I have two. I voted for the sake of the future.
The two dimensions in the Ukrainian conversation: 1) decency in governance; 2) economic survival.
Putin appears to believe in the ultimate power of money.
🙂
Money, of course, is the mafia god, and that god is no different in Caracas than it is in Damascus or Kiev: whatever they may have to do to get it, the “men of respect” get it and get it to work for them to get more of it.
Where the getting is piratical, the business is protected against the development of sufficient challenge, a large part of which begins with the control and spin of information likely to reach a constituency about to be captured, made dependent, infantilized, inhibited, patronized, and subjugated in the cause of the greater aggrandizement of the dictator.
It appears Ukrainians (and Russians) have approached a fork in time and must choose between a complacent acceptance of piratical dictatorship and its capricious and centrally manipulated governance or a more vigorous embrace of democratic governance with its uniform legal codes and fair and equal enforcement, open courts subject to expert and open review, tolerance of a broad and independent press, and, ultimately, governance responsive to the needs and will of whole cultures and the complex societies in which they must thrive.
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Undated links correspond with the date of the post.
No need to date links in this compilation: I believe all were published today, and some within a few hours or an hour of this news watching typing that goes on around here most days.
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