fuagf, thanks for this post, and the background of history re the Crimea. I knew that Russia, going back centuries had spilled blood in the Crimea... always wanting a warm water port. But evidently the history of USSR/Khrushchev having ceded the territory to Ukraine in the 50's was somehow skipped in my history studies.
After studying this further, it appears to me that we may need to reconsider our hawkish attitude of confronting Russia on this issue. Not to call Putin an "Indian giver", but what once was theirs is not worth us fighting for, especially since the majority of folks in the area seem to be "ethnic Russians"...whatever that is.
Let 'em have it, and establish some borders that are agreeable to both sides, and then line up NATO tanks and let Putin know this is the line you dare not cross.... President Obama should quit worrying about McCain and the other dilettante hawks and explain the history of the region to the American people and his reasons for this decision.
I tend to agree with Merkel in this situation... I don't want to start WWIII over a small piece of land that is ethnically Russian to begin with. We can draw our lines in much more important places... and I think Putin will understand. Give him this limited victory, stop the killing, and let's move on in peace. JMO.
George Soros knows how to fix this. It's too expensive for one man to do ( imo, unless he truly truly is a Saint ) ..He has done so much to free these countries from the russian plans and leaders. I wish I knew people who could match him with money like this.. oh well, our world is for the dreamers .. .;)
...interview of Svoboda and the history of Ukrainian nationalism: Part one of a two-part interview with Per Anders Rudling, associate professor of the Department of History at Lund University (Sweden) on The Real News Network" ... [by] JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER
The Real News Network, transcript of video interview, March 11, 2014
.. it's fairly long one .. oh, heads up if you read more, the 2nd part of the interview seems to be repeated .. if i got that wrong i'm really going bonkers .. lol .. anyway, one bit from Part 2 ..
RUDLING: Well, in the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko was a moderate nationalist, and he won this–he prevailed in this Orange Revolution together with a socialist ally and an ally of Tymoshenko’s party.
But Orange Revolution turned out to be a huge disappointment from any of the people involved. Corruption wasn’t uprooted overnight, and in fact, Yushchenko spent most of his time in office squabbling with his prime minister, Tymoshenko, and in the end he made sure that–well, he really made sure that she wasn’t elected president, but instead his rival from 2004, Yanukovych, became his successor.
So under Yanukovych what happened then was that Yanukovych continued his policy of polarization. He gave Svoboda, which was a party which got less than 1 percent support nationwide, disproportional representation in national media, primarily on TV, which was controlled by his government and by various oligarchs affiliated with his regime. And so Svoboda became very prominent in mass media.
And Yanukovych may have been calculating on–of course, this is very hard to know exactly what goes on in a non-transparent political system like that in Ukraine, but there are indications the elite was supporting Svoboda as a way to polarize the country, and then, in a runoff election in 2015, had it come to that, that it will be a runoff between Yanukovych and Svoboda, in which Yanukovych, even though he was quite unpopular towards–in the second half of his tenure, would actually prevail over Svoboda.
DESVARIEUX: Per, so wait. Am I understanding you correctly is that Yanukovych actually helped boost up Svoboda, who was essentially the group behind his ouster, in a sense, is did he sort of create a monster that eventually would come after him?
RUDLING: Essentially, yes. I mean, that’s one of the most depressing aspects of his legacy, that he exercised selective justice. He put Tymoshenko, a sort of a moderate nationalist, in jail. Well, maybe she belonged in jail. Few other people, people in Ukrainian political leadership, are not corrupt. The problem was, of course, that this was selective justice by a president and by a supreme court which was no less corrupt than Tymoshenko herself. So he went after moderate nationalists and gave the far right disproportionate attention in the media.
DESVARIEUX: But the far right, who’s behind them? I mean, they have to have some sort of money and power and influence. Who are the oligarchs supporting them?
RUDLING: Well, they are an ideological party in a political landscape which is rather non-ideological. Tymoshenko and Klitschko are not particularly ideologically driven. They’re sort of middle-of-the-road candidates and very adaptable.
Svoboda is based in the far west, and there they have a very strong position. In Lviv, the largest Western Ukrainian city, I believe they got roughly around 40 percent of the vote. So they have a majority in the local county administration. And they have similar situations in Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil, that is, in Halychyna, Galicia, the part of Ukraine which used to be part of Austria-Hungary before 1920 and has quite a different history than the rest of Ukraine.
So it’s based regionally. And these regions in the far west are also one of the poorer regions.
So the heavily industrialized east, that’s where a lot of the financial interests are. And in many ways Svoboda could be used as a sort of a bogeyman to mobilize the Yanukovych electorate. And clearly now, once Yanukovych is gone, Russia’s continued its policy of referring to the entire opposition as fascist or Banderites, even though–and I think this is very important to point out–this was genuine broad popular uprising against a regime which was immensely corrupt. According to Transparency International, Ukraine is on place 141 out of the world states. That means it’s divided 141 place with Nigeria and the Central African Republic. That is, Ukraine is not only the most corrupt country in Europe; it’s one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And it got worse under Yanukovych.
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