Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ukraine Implosion and Elections

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Ukraine Implosion and Elections

    Internally there is increasing competition between various factions.

    Batkivshina (Yulia, Turchinov, Yatsenuk) is positioning itself slowly to dominate the polity.

    Udar (Klitchko) was more or less created in my mind to appease South-East and it seems utterly failed in this regard.

    Party of Regions still exists in some semblance but there are no political slogans of any kind to provide distribution of power towards that region at all. Not even Russian as second official promotion.

    Svoboda is slowly being thrown under the bus both by media and Batkivchina/Udar it is excluded from any negotiations and vectors of power. If you look at it from a certain angle "Right Sector" becoming a party is going to split the nationalist vote and assure that Svoboda is slowly excluded from marginal competition first on presidential and then most likely parliament elections.

    On the political front there are two necessary functions, money flows which are non-existant and will most likely end in default sooner rather than later. Law and order is more or less collapsing as cops are 'disciplined' or fired for intervening in 'Right Sector' enforcement of political will.

    The undercurrent of regional struggle is becoming more and more active. After Odessa had a 30k meeting the organizer was arrested and sent to kiev same as Gubarev. The problem with this is that Odessa unlike Lugansk/Donetsk/Kharkov is very well organized and does not really have a mass of oligarchic force that could be applied. It has some but potential is more evenly distributed.

    Anyway zoom out a bit and consider certain trends.
    Money flows collapsing
    Political will to reform or strengthen government is non existent other than replacing heads of regions with others favorable to you. It does not really change the underlying structure or create a feedback loop of any kind just switches power from party to party.
    Rada has not passed any law to improve the life of people. Only things that have been passed are political externalities in respect to EU, Crimea, visa ban, and similar aspects. Nothing internal other than the national guard (which the Right Sector said it won't join mind you) is happening. Everything is rather cosmetic and non-institutional in nature. No reform of land ownership or rights of any kind nothing. Just blatant waiting for things to come down.
    In about two months you have harvest time and it coincides with the financial strain being at the apex point with June being the most painful payment month. Seems likely that harvest will be botched both from the resources point of view and also from distribution/export point of view. Until that time pensions and wages will probably be semi-frozen and unpaid in most areas.

    Theoretically there could be federalization into three constituencies below.

    My guess this won't happen but it could under certain scenarios.
    Federalization would save cohesiveness for debt-reorganization. So from the point of view of IMF or other debt holders it would be optimal to having Ukraine completely break apart and the debt going for pennies on the dollar. Language rights and tax flows accommodating federalization could happen but my guess they will be partial and revocable since anyone in federal center will always want more to be under their control. Theoretically it would be possible to devolve power but this would require a new constitution and real reform something similar to Canada is possible with half/half tax flow division or there about and non-revocable power structure.

    There are several problems with Federalization and they revolve around political distribution. There is a vacuum in South-East and even in Center as well. A lot of dissillusionment on the grass roots level with what has been done and what is being done. It is possible that we could see certain new parties fill that gap.

    I could see Poroshenko have a new party that fills some of that gap.
    I could also see Medvedchuk and his vybor party emerge. The reason is that he is mentioning things specifically about which people care devolution of local power, and Russian as second language. Ergo right now his party is the only one representing South-East since Party of Regions is essentially is in frozen liquidation.

    All of this takes time, which Ukraine simply does not have. Imagine trains running out of diesel or electricity being cut off for non-payment and distribution of food being impossible due to fuel shortages. Complete dis-functionality and law and order break down and financial system being inaccessible for payments of pensions or any other aspects. That is where it is going.

    The other factor that is not noticed is the rank and file nationalists that were in power and held positions are not happy. Most of them are from NSNU and other Orange parties from Yushenko and some from Batkivchina. They see this whole collapse and realize that nothing is being done to stem it or reform of any meaningful kind. In some sense they could be approached to negotiate for Federalization because they understand the situation and want some sort of meaningful change.

    Several catalysts that could occur. If we have just one Oblast blocking transit rail/road and demanding some sort of federalization either gov't caves or has to crack down. If it does not cave the spiraling out of control could force a chain reaction.
    The other catalyst is outright destabilization of law and order in Kiev in the sphere of things on the ground but most likely in the government sector with everyone trying to grab as much power as they could handle. In this scenario you have center which is completely immobilized by their power struggle internally. With regions slowly realizing they could do as they wish if they topple the 'appointed governors' and other central controllers. I think this is very likely especially as disillusionment spreads to political elite.
    Attached Files
    Originally from Sochi, Russia.

  • #2
    Hey Cyppock, hows it feel to be a shill for fascists?

    By Cathy Young

    The claim that last month’s democratic revolution in Ukraine was actually driven by ultra-right extremists, fascists, or even “neo-Nazis” has been a staple of Kremlin propaganda. It is also echoed by Western pundits who think that Vladimir Putin is getting a bum rap and the United States is backing the bad guys in this conflict. It is true that far-right nationalists are a troubling, though by no means dominant, presence on Ukraine’s political scene and a potential problem for the new leadership’s quest for European integration. But the cries of “fascism” from Moscow and its apologists are breathtakingly hypocritical, considering the Putin regime’s entanglement with far-right, ultranationalist and, yes, fascist elements at home and abroad.

    It’s hard to gauge the actual extent of extremist involvement in the Maidan protests, which began in late November in response to Yanukovych’s rejection of a European Union trade deal. At the start of February, Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Russian Jewish journalist and board member of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, estimated that “radical nationalists” made up about one percent of the protesters. On one occasion in the early days of the “Euromaidan,” a notorious hatemonger, poet Diana Kamlyuk, took advantage of an open microphone night to make overtly racist and anti-Semitic remarks; but Likhachev stressed that this was an isolated, widely condemned incident, and that the rallies featured prominent Jewish speakers as well as Jewish religious and cultural events.

    AT-M Ad
    As tensions between protesters and riot police escalated, the radicals took on a larger role—particularly Right Sector, a paramilitary group some view as bordering on neo-Nazism because of its admiration for World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist, onetime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. (While Bandera’s record on anti-Semitism is a matter of some dispute, his followers unquestionably committed atrocities toward Poles, Russians, Jews, and others; by any objective reckoning, he was certainly more terrorist than freedom fighter.) Right Sector has made some effort to improve its image: its leader, Dmitro Yarosh, has met with the Israeli ambassador in Kiev to assure him that the group strongly opposes anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Yarosh and other militants have also praised Jewish fighters on the Maidan. Still, concerns about their influence justifiably remain.

    Another alarming factor is the nationalist party Svoboda (“Freedom”), whose head, 45-year-old Oleg Tyahnibok, has a history of anti-Semitic and racist comments—though he has tried to reinvent himself as a moderate. Svoboda has about 8 percent of the seats in Ukraine’s parliament; thanks to the deal brokered by Germany and France before Yanukovych’s resignation, it also holds four of the twenty posts in the interim government, including that of Minister of Defense. The party’s attempts to shed its thuggish reputation have not been entirely successful; on March 18, three Svoboda parliament members threatened and assaulted the chief of Ukraine’s TV Channel 1, angered by what they regarded as the station’s pro-Russian slant, and forced him to write a statement of resignation. The incident, which caused near-universal outrage, is now being investigated.

    The good news, as historian Timothy Snyder points out in The New Republic, is that current polls show Svoboda getting 2 or 3 percent of the vote in May’s presidential election. And some reports on the right-wing menace in Ukraine clearly overstate the party’s impact. Thus, a March 13 column in the Los Angeles Times and a March 18 Foreign Policy article pointed to Svoboda’s successful push for a law making Ukrainian the country’s sole official language—without mentioning that Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov later vetoed the bill.

    Meanwhile, in Russia, nationalists in the upper echelons of power include such prominent figures as former NATO envoy and current Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who first entered the political scene as a leader of the nationalist bloc Rodina (Motherland). In 2005, Rodina was banned from Moscow City Council elections for running a blatantly racist campaign ad: the clip showed three Azerbaijani migrants littering and insulting a Russian woman and Rogozin stepping in to tell them off, and ended with a slogan promising to “clean up the trash.” While Rogozin is no fan of America, he has some peculiar American fans: in 2011, a glowing tribute that concluded with, “Let’s hope that Rogozin rises to power in Russia—and for the rise of a ‘Rogozin’ in America and elsewhere throughout the West,” appeared on the “white identity” website, Occidental Observer.

    Rodina co-founder and Rogozin’s erstwhile rival for its leadership, Sergei Glazyev, most recently served as Putin’s man in charge of developing the Customs Union—the alliance with Kazakhstan and Belarus that was also to include Ukraine. Like Rogozin, Glazyev has attracted the sympathetic attention of far-right kooks in the Unites States—in this case, Lyndon LaRouche: in 1999, LaRouche Books published an English translation of Glazyev’s book, “Genocide: Russia and the New World Order,” with a foreword by LaRouche himself.

    But Rogozin and Glazyev are mere peons compared to self-style “traditionalist” intellectual Alexander Dugin, a writer and professor at Moscow State University. In his New Republic article, Snyder identifies Dugin—“an actual fascist”—as “the founder of the Eurasian movement,” the ideology that provides the foundation for Russia’s expansion into Ukraine.

    In fact, Dugin—who, in his writings in the 1990s, was quite explicit about the fascist and even Nazi roots of his views, asserting that true fascism had never been tried and would be born in Russia—is more than just the father of an idea. As documented in a 2009 article by Ukrainian scholar Andreas Umland (who has also chronicled the rise of extremism in Ukraine), Dugin has extensive, close ties to Russia’s political elites and the pro-Kremlin media. A number of high-level officials and journalists have served on the leadership council of his organization, the International Eurasian Movement. Dugin’s admirers include Ivan Demidov, a TV producer who at one point, in 2008, headed the ideology section of the ruling party, United Russia.

    Dugin’s frightening rhetoric has been on display in recent days. After a massive antiwar demonstration in Moscow on March 15, he wrote on his Facebook page, “This is no longer simply filth, ideological opponents, or dissenters, but a parade of traitors. Today, they have risen against the Russian people, against our State, against our history. They are defending murderers, occupiers, Nazis, and NATO. All the participants in this march of the fifth column have been condemned—by history, by the people, by us.” Then, he quoted a line from a famous wartime poem: “As many times as you see them, kill them.” (The poem, of course, referred to German invaders.)

    If those are the ideologues, it’s hardly surprising that some of Russia’s foot soldiers in the conflict with Ukraine are of the brownshirt type. Most notable among these is Pavel Gubarev, the pro-Russian activist in Donetsk who briefly proclaimed himself the city’s “People’s Governor” and raised a Russian flag over the local government building. A few days after Gubarev gained notoriety, it was revealed that he had once been an activist in the militant group Russian National Unity, whose emblem bears an unmistakable resemblance to the swastika. (Photos of Gubarev in uniform made the rounds of the Internet.) And, shortly before the March 16 referendum, the Kremlin’s man in Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, used a blatant anti-Semitic code in a televised speech, referring to Ukraine’s new leadership as “an unnatural union of cosmopolite oligarchs who have grown rich plundering the Soviet era’s heritage, and neo-Nazis.” Of course, “cosmopolite” was once an infamous Soviet euphemism for “Jew”—and it is no accident that the best-known business oligarch allied with the new government is a Jewish man, Ihor Kolomoysky.

    Then there’s the matter of the “international observers” Moscow invited to the referendum in Crimea—a veritable freak central of neo-Stalinists and far rightists including Belgian neo-Nazi Luc Michel, Hungarian right-wing extremist Bela Kovacs, and Serbian-born American paleocon and war crime apologist Srđa (Serge) Trifković. Another observer, Polish parliament member Mateusz Piskorski, who praised the referendum in a Russia Today interview, is a former neo-Nazi in a very literal sense. As one of Poland’s leading newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza, reported in 2006, in the late 1990s and early 2000s Piskorski published a magazine called Odala, which openly praised Nazi Germany, interviewed Holocaust deniers, and proclaimed that “considering the decay and multi-racialism of the West,” a united Slavic empire was “the only hope for the White Race.” Piskorski now belongs to Dugin’s Eurasian Movement.

    Umland’s 2009 article on Dugin and creeping Russian fascism ended with the eerie prediction: “Should Dugin and his followers succeed in further extending their reach into Russian high politics and society at large, a new Cold War will be the least that the West should expect from Russia, during the coming years.” Perhaps fascism has indeed won—and not in Ukraine.

    Comment


    • #3
      I talked about internal dynamics which you completely ignored.
      Svoboda and Right Sector are not just labeled by me or Russia as extremists/neo-nazis.
      You can add Czech Republic, News from France, Finland, Germany, UK, U.S, and myriad of other material.

      brown-revolution-in-ukraine--the-triumph-of-the-neo-nazis
      https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/b...the-neo-nazis/
      The Neo-Nazi Question in Ukraine*|*Michael Hughes
      For starters, Andriy Parubiy, the new secretary of Ukraine's security council, was a co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), otherwise known as Svoboda. And his deputy, Dmytro Yarosh, is the leader of a party called the Right Sector which, according to historian Timothy Stanley, "flies the old flag of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators at its rallies."
      Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine? - Salon.com

      Look at what I mentioned. It has more to do with internal dynamics and vectors rather than any political party.
      Ergo if there is no representation because the top is entirely externally controlled and the nationalists are split to limit their say.
      You create a polity where every outlet is completely blocked for redress and the country simply has to implode.

      Even the nationalists would turn against what is currently mascarading as the powers in charge. I specifically mention that some of them are turning to question the motives of inaction. They may not like self-determination but they do agree on self-representation in local/regional power structures this is universal in the polity.
      Originally from Sochi, Russia.

      Comment


      • #4
        No, those internal dynamics are not ignored you over play them while underplaying the fact that if this was the the 1940's Putin and his cronies would by a hiwi or SS volunteer. he cares less about Russia and more about power and you are happy to lick ether his boot or ass which ever he presents.

        Comment


        • #5
          The Ukrainian prosecutor's office declared referendum in Crimea illegitimate

          (Real photo: the sign behind these guys - "The prosecutors' Office of Ternopol region".)

          Attached Files

          Comment


          • #6
            I dunno, they look Russian to me.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by zraver View Post
              I dunno, they look Russian to me.
              They are.Little Russians,Rusyns.

              Reading the allegations of fascism on both sides is one of the funniest things at the moment.Mirror,mirror on the wall,who's the fascist in this war?

              The sublime thing in all this idiocy is that ''fascists'',both Russian and Ukrainians, are about the only reasonable people in this mess.They have no issue with each other,which btw is one of the trademarks of modern nationalism.Putin arrests them left,right and center.The approved sort is the neo-soviet kind.

              As for the Ukrainian lot,their only fault is that they're way too moderate.The state apparatchiks must go,even if they're replaced with masked lads.They guys in the picture are well intentioned and that can't be said about those who used to sit in those chairs.
              Those who know don't speak
              He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. Luke 22:36

              Comment


              • #8
                If true, the Russians have reduced the Ukrainian Navy to a sailing club without even firing a single shot. This is bad.

                The Russian Defence Ministry announced on Saturday that fewer that 2,000 of the more than 18,000 Ukrainian troops stationed in Crimea said they wanted to return to Ukraine and will be assisted in relocation. Russian flags have been raised on 54 out of 67 Ukrainian naval vessels, including eight combat ships and Ukraine’s only submarine. This would mean that Ukraine has lost almost its entire Navy.
                Russia gives green light to international monitors for Ukraine - The Hindu

                Comment


                • #9
                  Π“Π»Π°Π²Π° Π”ΠΎΠ½Π΅Ρ†ΠΊΠΎΠ³ΠΎ облсовСта Π³ΠΎΡ‚ΠΎΠ²ΠΈΡ‚ Ρ€Π΅Π³ΠΈΠΎΠ½ ΠΊ Ρ€Π΅Ρ„Π΅Ρ€Π΅Π½Π΄ΡƒΠΌΡƒ | ΠŸΠΎΠ»ΠΈΡ‚ΠΈΠΊΠ° | The Kiev Times
                  Donetsk is preparing to have a referendum.

                  Lyashko the deputy that abducted Klinchaev is proposing the death penalty...

                  Stopping Donetsk would be very hard if it actually went through with it.

                  Odessa had another meeting with about 20k people.

                  Saying Russian-speakers are a diaspora(non-core people) was idiotic and so was getting rid of May 9th Victory day celebrations. But hey the powers in Kiev keep showing their colors in force. Soon it will all end.
                  Is Ukraine Canceling Victory Day? (No)
                  "Reports from Kyiv say that all preparations for celebrations of May 9 as a public holiday have been cancelled," wrote LiveJournal user Dima Kamayuga. "Any march to mark the day of victory over fascism in Kyiv will be banned by the new authorities and citizens and officials preparing these activities are receiving threats.
                  The Purpose of Starting A Rumor About Ukraine Giving Territory To Poland if this is true it will be very very funny.
                  Yatsenyuk says he has become sick of the radicals -- especially [Right Sector leader Dmytro] Yarosh and [ultranationalist Oleksandr] Muzychko. He's scared of them and wants a way out of the situation. [He] has been forced to negotiate with Polish officials on the transfer to Poland of three Galician regions until the end of 2014, under the pretext of saving the population from a humanitarian catastrophe.
                  they will probably end him if this is true. Very destabilizing either way.
                  Last edited by cyppok; 23 Mar 14,, 19:40.
                  Originally from Sochi, Russia.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Russian paid posters of course must be the ones who understand implosion best. They got lots of experience from the time when it happened to them 20 years ago.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X