Can we have a Ukraine/ Russia/ Crimea thread for dummies?

[chicaguapa]

In other words, could someone explain the situation in really simple terms please. I don't understand it but feel it's important and I should know what's going on.

And because DD(12) asked me this morning and I couldn't answer.

It is certainly the case that goat cannot bring herself to answer the question:

In your opinion, were Stalin and Bandera, who both co-operated with Nazi Germany and both killed many people, Nazis?

This is a very interesting paper by a well-respected Swedish historian

Per A. Rudling
University of Pittsburgh
www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees/cbpaper.html.

The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths

Abstract
During the past decade, particularly under the presidency of the third Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010) there have been repeated attempts to turn the leading fi gures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) into national heroes. As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of memory management and myth making were organized, a key function of which was to deny or downplay OUN-UPA atrocities. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yushchenko’s legitimizing historians presented the OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fi ght shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN’s own post-war forgeries, aimed at cover up the organization’s problematic past. As employees of the Ukrainian security services, working out of the offi ces of the old KGB, the legitimizing historians ironically dismissed scholarly criticism as Soviet myths. The present study deals with the myth-making around the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust, tracing their diaspora roots and following their migration back and forth across the Atlantic.

You were obsessed with wanting to attach labels to mass murderers. I don't know if you seriously believe that the label makes them better or worse people, but you persistently went on and on about it.

I've given you my opinion, so, what's yours?

Per A. Rudling
University of Pittsburgh
www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees/cbpaper.html.

The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths

Some quotes from the author:

Policing the National Memory: Institutionalized Victimization

In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency represented the pinnacle of diaspora infl uence on history writing in Ukraine. It elevated the diaspora’s historical myths to state policy and provided state funding to institutions tasked with the development of legitimizing narratives which the cult of the OUN leaders required. Yushchenko developed a memory politics based heavily upon a vicitimization narrative, “a meta-narrative that categorized Ukraine as a nation-victim by integrating all central historical events of the twentieth century, from the civil war and Sovietization to the Chernobyl disaster.”265 The culmination was the 1932–1933 famine, presented as the central and defining event of the Soviet period.

A somewhat paradoxical situation appeared as a new, aspiring democracy with a stated commitment to democratic values, pluralism, and human rights used state institutions to rehabilitate fascists and elevated them to national heroes, symbols of the young democracy.

As Wilfried Jilge has aptly observed:

The absence of the Holocaust from the Ukrainian culture of memory is directly connected to the closeness of the OUN to National Socialism, particularly in its relation to anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism. . . . Nationalist intellectuals can legitimize the heroic role of the OUN and UPA only by ignoring the Jewish Holocaust and its connection to Ukrainian national history.

Could it possibly be that you are hoping to create the impression that Ukrainians are planning to build gas chambers? The idea is both repellent and ridiculous. But why else do you keep referring to Nazis?

Or is it just that you want to maintain the fiction that one mass-murdering regime is better or worse than another mass-murdering regime?

Per A. Rudling
University of Pittsburgh
www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees/cbpaper.html.

The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths

Some more quotes from the author:

Diaspora Nationalist Myth-making: The Fanatics

The Bandera group dominated heavily among Ukrainian émigrés—U.S. intelligence reports estimated that 80 percent of the Ukrainian Displaced Persons (DPs) from Galicia remained loyal to Bandera, who tried to establish a dictatorship in exile that would be transferred to a liberated Ukraine.

They benefited from their pre-existing clandestine political network. In the immediate postwar period, Bandera was protected by a group of former SS men.155

The US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) described him as “extremely dangerous,” surrounded by bodyguards ready to “do away with any person who may be dangerous to him or his party.156

The OUN(b) maintained discipline by the use of systematic terror and kept kidnapping, murdering, and abusing political opponents well into the 1970s. The main center of its activity was in Bavaria, in the U.S. zone of occupation, where Evhen Lozyns’kyi was the local providnyk, or leader, for the OUN(b).157 West German police reports contain estimates that the Bandera movement carried out about one hundred assassinations in Germany after the war.158

Could it possibly be that you are hoping to create the impression that Ukrainians are planning to build gas chambers? The idea is both repellent and ridiculous. But why else do you keep referring to Nazis?

Piglet, why those crowds in the video are shouting
"Bandera hero of Ukraine"
"Death to Muscovites"?

Why is Bandera officially elevated into hero by the president?

Piglet*,
Is Bandera a hero?

Do you acknowledge that he is a Nazi and commited genocide?

You are clearly very interested in 70-year old history. Are you suggesting that today's Ukrainians are planning mass murder? Do you think today's Russians will do the same?

Why will you not answer the question about Stalin's co-operation with Nazi Germany?

More quotes:

The diaspora culture of memory, developed primarily in North America and re-exported to Ukraine after 1991, denies not only the OUN’s fascism and anti-Semitism, it denies the crimes themselves, presenting perpetrators as rescuers . Fact-based historical analysis is rejected and replaced by comfortable and politically expedient myths of the past.

There are two interrelated groups of myth-makers. The first group consists of the immediate heirs to the fascists: authoritarian nationalists and neofascists who share the tenets of the OUN philosophy—authoritarianism, leader cult, and anti-Semitism. [+ Russo-phobia, goat] …. The second group consists of politicians, propagandists, and pundits who describe themselves as democrats yet identify with and celebrate the OUN, defending its fascist activities while denying its fascism. Both groups pick and choose the parts of the legacy they ?nd convenient. They gloss over, downplay, deny, or legitmize the OUN-UPA mass murders. Under Yushchenko, this nationalist narrative was elevated to of?cial policy and the myth-making given state funding. While the ideology of these two groups differ, they often work in tandem…. Both groups are apologists for a fascist tradition. Neither one has admitted the OUN’s war crimes, let alone condemned them.

still no answer to the question of whether you think Stalin and Bandera were Nazis. Yet it was so important to you earlier. Perhaps you are finding it too difficult.

I suppose that if you are trying to suggest that people who live today, will behave the same as people who lived 70 years ago, it would be very difficult for you to smear today's Ukrainians without implicating today's Russians.

HopefulGoat, at 3:26 in the video the hotel employee clearly calls the marchers 'Nazis'. It appears that in the opinion of at least one western Ukrainian close enough to the microphone to have his words picked up, the link between the Banderites and the Nazis is clear.

Channel4 also details the Nazi link, and reports that the far right played a pivotal role in the events in the Maidan.

^Friday 24 January 2014 Ukraine
Ukraine: far-right extremists at core of 'democracy' protest^

As violent scenes play out on the streets of Kiev, we look at the major role extremist right-wing movements have played in Ukraine's "pro-democracy" movement.

Ukraine's far-right is gaining support and confidence through its role in the street protests, with the Svoboda party assuming a leading role in the movement and paramilitary groups leading the street fighting.

In December US senator John McCain travelled to Ukraine to offer his support to the opposition, appearing on stage with leaders of the three opposition parties leading the protests - including the far-right Svoboda party.

Svoboda is currently Ukraine's fourth biggest party and holds 36 seats in parliament. It is also part of the Alliance of European National Movements, along with the BNP and Hungary's Jobbik.

Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok is one of the faces of the protests, appearing regularly along with opposition leader and former boxer Vitali Klitschko voicing opposition to Putin's influence over the region.

However, Tyahnybok has provoked controversy in the past with his anti-Semitic claims that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine...

...As violent scenes played out in recent days, groups of "autonomous nationalists" separate from Svoboda, who recruit from far-right football hooligan groups, have taken a leading role in the fighting.

Acting under the name Pravy Sektor, they are reported to have 500 militants inside government buildings seized by the protesters...

[Pravy Sector is 'Right Sector']

The report also notes:
In 2012 the presence of a violent and highly organised far-right in Ukraine and Poland became global news ahead of the Euro 2012 tournament.

The dominance of racist chants, Nazi salutes and neo-Nazi banners among football fans provoked controversy ahead of the tournament, prompting President Yanukovych to promise matches would be closely watched by security services.

The World Jewish Congress has called for Svoboda to be banned for its hardline anti-Semitic stance, and public Jewish events celebrating hanukkah were cancelled last month due to fears of violence, with Jewish leaders urging people to "increase security everywhere".

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish student, Dovbear Glickman, was stabbed while leaving a synagogue last week, suffering massive blood loss. It is the second anti-Semitic assault this month after a Hebrew teacher was followed home from synagogue by a gang before being beaten.

Once again, John McCain's gobsmacking lack of judgement does not go unnoticed.

One more quote:

The cult of the OUN-UPA has polarized Ukraine and antagonized its neighbors. The deliberate distortions have complicated the process of historical and political reconciliation among Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles.

^Yanukovych has continued Yushchenko’s
legacy of playing the eastern and western parts of Ukraine against each other, further polarizing the pro-nationalist and “anti-Orange” camps.
The right-wing extremist Svoboda party has become the largest party in the local elections in Western Ukraine and the fi fth largest party nationwide. While its political breakthrough came under Yanukovych, the responsibility must be shared by Yushchenko and his legitimizing historians, whose offi cial veneration, state-sponsored myth making and denial of the OUN-UPA atrocities provided political legitimacy and paved the way for this second turn to the right^

An open inquiry of the past is an important component of the building of a liberal democratic society with rule of law, pluralism, and respect for human rights.

As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union.

hey goat, when you've finished pasting in more suggestions that Ukrainians and Russians today will behave as their forefathers did 70 years ago, can you answer the question about Stalin and Bandera, please.

some photos of Russian troops massing around Ukraine

"A senior Nato spokesman says that when reviewed alongside images released by Shape earlier on Thursday, "it is clear that the military build-up of forces occurred in early March 2014".

He says that Nato "stands firm in its assessment that Russian forces in the vicinity of the border with Ukraine number in the range of 35,000 to 40,000 troops and are equipped with infantry fighting vehicles, tanks, combat aircraft, logistics, and artillery".

Is Russia ready to move into eastern Ukraine?

Russia's neighbours have been complaining that it is broadcasting "propaganda" on its television channels.

Previously, Ukraine's gas imports were subsidised in return for Russia's lease of the naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, the home of the Russian Black Sea fleet. But since Russia annexed Crimea last month, that agreement is no longer valid.

So Ukraine loses territory, and money.

The New York Times expresses dismay about the rise of the Right in Ukraine.

This is an article from December 2013.

These are heady days for the three opposition political parties here, who were largely marginalized before the demonstrations erupted. But none of them are benefiting quite so much as Svoboda, a name that means freedom.

And that is far from a universally welcomed development. The party traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, which was loosely allied with Nazi Germany, and its debut in Parliament last year elicited objections from Israel and groups that monitor hate speech.

In the protests, its activists make up much of the street muscle on the square, standing on ladders on the barricades, wearing bicycle helmets and ski masks, and toting clubs of table legs or pipe, on the lookout for the riot police. As the protests have unfolded, the party’s role has grown.

For Mr. Tyagnibok, a urological surgeon by training who joined the party at its inception in the early 1990s, the aim is to translate that higher profile into an even larger role in the country’s future politics, based on an unyielding nationalism.

“Our understanding of nationalism is love,” he said in a recent interview in one of the buildings in downtown Kiev that are occupied by protesters, a site known as the Headquarters of the Resistance. “Nationalism is love of the land, love of the people who live on the land, and it is love of a mother. Love of a mother cannot be bad.”

Members of Ukraine’s Parliament saw things differently a decade ago. In 2004, they voted to expel Mr. Tyagnibok over a speech in which he described World War II-era partisans bravely fighting Germans, Russians, Jews and “other scum.” He went on to slur what he called the “Jewish-Russian mafia” running Ukraine.

Until 2004, Svoboda had been called the Social-Nationalist Party, which critics said was just a word flip away from its true ambitions and a deliberate reference to the National Socialism of the Nazis. Unabashed neo-Nazis still populate its ranks, organizations that study hate groups in Europe say...

...As Svoboda has entered the mainstream, so have its symbols, particularly a black and red banner, ubiquitous on Independence Square, that was the flag of the partisans. This year, the flag was banned as a racist symbol at soccer matches by FIFA, the sport’s governing body, after Ukrainian fans waved it while making Nazi salutes and monkey chants in a World Cup qualifying match.

Western diplomats say they respect Mr. Tyagnibok for keeping control of the unruly nationalist wing on the streets. During the police action outside City Hall, bystanders found a bag of gasoline bombs made from half-liter beer bottles, but Svoboda officials maintain that the police planted them there, to frame the party.

racist chanting and monkey chants at a football match, you say?

what pigs those Russians are

can it be true?

lets hope Russia improves itself

what will happen in 2018?

But looking on the bright side

[[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26958822 The UK, Poland and Sweden have proposed that a European Union civilian mission be set up to help Ukraine improve its justice system.

In a leaked joint paper the three countries argue that "re-establishing confidence in the rule of law in Ukraine will be vital for future stability". ]]

"The European Commission has also announced that a "support group", similar to the task forces put in place to help Greece and Cyprus through their financial crises, is to be set up.

It will be made up of staff from countries in the EU with specific expertise. They will provide technical help to officials in Kiev - and will focus on reforming the political and economic systems in the country.

It is part of a package of measures - as the EU sees it - to support Ukraine and its interim government.

Other measures include development assistance, a loan of 1.6 bn euros (£1.3bn; $2.2bn) to help it pay off some of its debts as well as supporting economic reforms, the temporary removal of customs duties on Ukrainian exports to the EU, and a programme to lessen Ukraine's energy dependence on Russia.

Many in Ukraine will welcome such measures. The protests in Kiev and elsewhere focused on the need for reform to the public sector, particularly the rule of law and order and tackling corruption."

This is very much a European problem. The nations of Europe hope to help Ukraine put the corruption and instability of the past behind them, and establish a modern Western society. If agreement can be reached, substantial financial assistance will be provided to help Ukraine out of its deep hole.

It is thought possible that Russia may not like this.

In recent developments in Ukraine:

Yatseniuk finally stops posturing and gets down to business.
It is interesting to see that Rinak Akhmetov is involved in the talks in Donetsk, along with other regional officials and oligarchs. It remains to be seen whether anything will come of these talks or whether Yatseniuk is in any position to make any guarantees without consultation with the Right. Next week will see talks involving the EU, US, Ukraine and Russia.

Akhmetov is the owner of System Capital Management Group, which in turn owns Metinvest, one of Europe's largest mining and steel businesses. He has been accused of being a Donbass mafia leader in the past. It might be more in line with the stated democratic leaning of the Kiev government to hold a popular referendum on matters such as language, regional autonomy, etc., instead of deliberating behind closed doors with people like Akhmetov.

On the gas front -- Kiev failed to meet a deadline for payment for gas already received and consumed, after previously defaulting on the February payment. Effectively, Ukraine has been receiving free gas from Russia, or alternatively, Ukraine has been stealing gas from Russia, depending on how one chooses to look at it.
From Reuters, which states the bill now stands at $2.2bn:

'Kiev failed to meet a deadline on Monday to pay for its March gas supplies...
Putin called for talks involving [European] economy, finance and energy ministers on "concerted actions to stabilise Ukraine's economy" and ensure Russian gas deliveries.
"We must lose no time in beginning to coordinate concrete steps. It is towards this end that we appeal to our European partners," Putin wrote. He said Ukraine's economic crisis was partly caused by unbalanced trade with the EU.
"It goes without saying that Russia is prepared to participate in the effort to stabilize and restore Ukraine's economy. However, not in a unilateral way, but on equal conditions with our European partners," Putin wrote.'

Rinat, not Rinak..

Russia is going to switch off the gas as Ukraine owes Gazprom £1.7Bn. They have said that the only way around this is for Ukraine to pay upfront. As the pipeline to Europe currently crosses Ukraine this threatens supply here. Russia will sell to China and Iran instead, ignoring the illegal US sanctions against the latter. The neoturds really haven't thought this through. They're either going to have to back down and look silly or step things up with sanctions, and that ham faced moron won't like that. Nor will property markets in New York and London.

Should sanctions be applied, Russia will dump its entire stack of US Treasury Bonds, causing the dollar to take a dive. They won't care about losing dollars, they have gold in sufficient quantities for it not to matter. China has already stopped buying US Treasuries and is quietly getting out of the dollar as they see it is basically fucked. They also have enough gold, and are telling their citizens to buy it too, which tells us they know something is about to happen. GoldMoney.com has some brilliant research on this, as does Jan Skoyles of TheRealAsset.co.uk.

As it is, Ukraine will be forced into taking out a 'loan' from the IMF to allow banks to pay their debts, then they'll have austerity forced on them, which will see more riots and their oligarchs relocating for their own safety. Austerity doesn't work anyway, just look at Japan, who've been under austerity measures since the early '90s. GDP is down, debt to GDP is up massively, incomes are lower after adjusting for inflation and the only thing keeping them going is massive amounts of QE. This is all down to neoliberal policies, money flows up instead of trickling down. If the west get their hands on Ukraine (they've already stolen their entire gold holding of 33 tonnes) then that's their future.

A real problem with right-wing nationalists and neo-nazis (in Russia)

the lawlessness of Russia - a country where the armed ultra-nationalists seem to have almost been given free rein to take the law into their own hands

Russia neo-Nazis jailed for life over 27 race murders

Leading Russian judge shot dead in Moscow - Judge Eduard Chuvashov had presided over several high-profile trials including the sentencing of some of Russia's most notorious neo-nazis.

a series of cases involving racist attacks in Russia

The number of unresolved high-profile murders in Russia over the past 15 years paints a dismal picture of the work of Russia's law-enforcement organisations and its judiciary.

Of the 12 most infamous killings, only two have been solved.

Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev told journalists earlier this year that Russia was "moving in the right direction" in combating contract killings.

Yet many Russian MPs believe corruption and a labyrinthine bureaucracy are to blame for poor investigations and the frequent failure to secure justice.

perhaps when the EU has done its best to help Ukraine, it should offer a hand to Russia.

I am sure goat will have something to say about all this, as she is especially interested in Nazism and neo-Nazis.