Ukraine's European Revolution?

[Razgovory]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/12/who-predicted-russias-military-intervention-2/

Who predicted Russia's military intervention?

my confirmation bias alarm ticks with the failure of realism, but still, historical experiments are usually not this specific

I predicted this earlier on in this thread, so maybe it's just crazy people who know what other crazy people are going to do.

Were you thinking Crimea specifically or Ukraine proper?  Because I'd like to think I'd have considered Russian intervention in Crimea more likely, given the Russian majority and Russian naval base there.

When i said it, there wasn't a difference!  I said the Russian might come and if they did they would say they were invited.

[derspiess]

Seems the mayor of Sevastopol (on the right, with the grey beard) didn't receive the memo about the dress code for today's contract signing ...

That's Putin's choreographer-- he wasn't supposed to be in the shot.

[derspiess]

When i said it, there wasn't a difference!  I said the Russian might come and if they did they would say they were invited.

But there was a difference.  Crimea was a very different part of Ukraine. 

[KRonn]

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2014/03/will_barbarous_soviet_past_continues_to_haunt_ukraine

By: George F. Will
"Boys from another school pulled out the severed head of a classmate while fishing in a pond. His whole family had died. Had they eaten him first? Or had he survived the deaths of his parents only to be killed by a cannibal? No one knew; but such questions were commonplace for the children of Ukraine in 1933. ... Yet cannibalism was, sometimes, a victimless crime. Some mothers and fathers killed their children and ate them. ... But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: 'Mother says that we should eat her if she dies.' "

— Timothy Snyder, "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" (2010)

WASHINGTON — While Vladimir Putin, Stalin's spawn, ponders what to do with what remains of Ukraine, remember: Nine years before the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis embarked on industrialized genocide, Stalin deliberately inflicted genocidal starvation on Ukraine.

To fathom the tangled forces, including powerful ones of memory, at work in that singularly tormented place, begin with Snyder's stunning book. Secretary of State John Kerry has called Russia's invasion of Ukraine "a 19th-century act in the 21st century." Snyder reminds us that "Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the 20th century." Here is Snyder's distillation of a Welsh journalist's description of a Ukrainian city:

"People appeared at 2 o'clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until 7. On an average day 40,000 people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. ... The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. ... Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear."

This, which occurred about as close to Paris as Washington is to Denver, was an engineered famine, the intended result of Stalin's decision that agriculture should be collectivized and the "kulaks" — prosperous farmers — should be "liquidated as a class." In January 1933, Stalin, writes Snyder, sealed Ukraine's borders so peasants could not escape and sealed the cities so peasants could not go there to beg. By spring, more than 10,000 Ukrainians were dying each day, more than the 6,000 Jews who perished daily in Auschwitz at the peak of extermination in the spring of 1944.

Soon many Ukrainian children resembled "embryos out of alcohol bottles" (Arthur Koestler's description) and there were, in Snyder's words, "roving bands of cannibals": "In the villages smoke coming from a cottage chimney was a suspicious sign, since it tended to mean that cannibals were eating a kill or that families were roasting one of their members."

Snyder, a Yale historian, is judicious about estimates of Ukrainian deaths from hunger and related diseases, settling on an educated guess of approximately 3.3 million, in 1932-33. He says that when "the Soviet census of 1937 found 8 million fewer people than projected," many of the missing being victims of starvation in Ukraine and elsewhere (and the children they did not have), Stalin "had the responsible demographers executed."

Putin, who was socialized in the Soviet-era KGB apparatus of oppression, aspires to reverse the Soviet Union's collapse, which he considers "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century." Herewith a final description from Snyder of the consequences of the Soviet system, the passing of which Putin so regrets:

"One spring morning, amidst the piles of dead peasants at the Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its mother, whose face was a lifeless gray. Passersby had seen this before ... that precise scene, the tiny mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, quietly, as they passed: 'These are the buds of the socialist spring.' "

U.S. policymakers, having allowed their wishes to father their thoughts, find Putin incomprehensible. He is a barbarian but not a monster, and hence no Stalin. But he has been coarsened, in ways difficult for civilized people to understand, by certain continuities, institutional and emotional, with an almost unimaginably vicious past. And as Ukraine, a bubbling stew of tensions and hatreds, struggles with its identity and aspirations, Americans should warily remember William Faulkner's aphorism: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." 

[Queequeg]

I can honestly say that the descriptions of cannibalism during the Holodomor in Bloodlands are the single most disturbing thing I've ever read.  I had sleeping problems after reading that. 

[Syt]

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/03/18/ukraine-crisis-moldova-idINDEEA2H09V20140318

Moldova tells Russia: don't eye annexation here

(Reuters) - The president of ex-Soviet Moldova warned Russia on Tuesday against considering any move to annex his country's separatist Transdniestria region in the same way that it has taken control of Crimea in Ukraine.

The president's comments came one day after the speaker of Transdniestria's separatist parliament, during a trip to Moscow, urged Russia to incorporate his mainly Russian-speaking region, which split away from Moldova in 1990.

Moldovan President Nicolae Timofti said Russia would be making a "mistake" if it agreed to the request for annexation from Transdniestria's parliamentary speaker, Mikhail Burla.

"This is an illegal body which has taken no decision on inclusion into Russia," Timofti told a news conference.

"I believe that Burla's actions are counter-productive and will do no good for either Moldova or Russia. And if Russia makes a move to satisfy such proposals, it will be making a mistake," he said.

President Vladimir Putin and the ethnic Russian leaders of Ukraine's Crimea region signed a treaty on Tuesday in Moscow making the Black Sea peninsula part of Russia after its voters overwhelmingly backed such a move in a referendum on Sunday.

The Russian-speakers of Transdniestria seceded from Moldova in 1990, one year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, amid fears that Moldova would shortly merge with neighbouring Romania, whose language and culture it broadly shares.

The separatist region fought a brief war with Moldova in 1992 and it declared itself an independent state, but it remains unrecognised by any country, including Russia.

"INTERNATIONAL NORMS"

Attempts to resolve the dispute have made little progress, with Russian "peacekeepers" standing guard over a large Soviet-era arsenal.

A referendum in Transdniestria in 2006 produced a 97.2 percent vote in favour of joining Russia, an even higher score than in Crimea's referendum. Unlike Crimea, however, it is located far from Russia. It shares a border with Ukraine.

Moldova, one of Europe's poorest countries, has been governed by pro-Western leaders since 2009. It has clinched an association agreement with the European Union, as currently sought by the pro-Western leaders who came to power in Ukraine after the removal of Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovich.

In his remarks, Timofti denounced as illegal the referendum in Crimea and any bid by Russia to annex the peninsula, echoing criticism from Ukraine's pro-Western leaders, the United States and EU countries. Russia says it is acting in Crimea in accordance with international law.

Timofti said Moldova wanted to solve its Transdniestria standoff through talks anchored in upholding the country's territorial integrity.

"Russia has repeatedly stood by this. Our expectations from Russia are that it will observe international norms in Transdniestria," he said.

Reports from Moscow said speaker Burla told Russian officials his region had given approval in principle to a law that would ensure the implementation of Russian legislation by Transdniestria.

"Transdniestria's very difficult situation could be made even worse if Moldova, which has already signed an association agreement with the EU, now adopts restrictive economic measures," Russian media quoted Burla as saying.

It was Yanukovich's decision last November not to sign Ukraine's association agreement with the EU and to seek closer economic ties with Russia instead that ignited the street protests that eventually forced his removal from office.

Also, it seems Erdogan phoned Putin and told him that if he messed with the Tatars, Turkey would close the Bosphorus for Russia.

[katmai]

I can honestly say that the descriptions of cannibalism during the Holodomor in Bloodlands are the single most disturbing thing I've ever read.  I had sleeping problems after reading that.

[Queequeg]

I can honestly say that the descriptions of cannibalism during the Holodomor in Bloodlands are the single most disturbing thing I've ever read.  I had sleeping problems after reading that.

It's incredibly disturbing. 

[Tamas]

Also, it seems Erdogan phoned Putin and told him that if he messed with the Tatars, Turkey would close the Bosphorus for Russia.

And Putin mentioned in his speech that Tatar rights must be respected - that's how you deal with them Russians: show force and determination. Not by banning 7 guys from the EU

[Queequeg]

Also, it seems Erdogan phoned Putin and told him that if he messed with the Tatars, Turkey would close the Bosphorus for Russia.

Turkish response to Christians being murdered: *crickets*
Turkish response to Muslims having rocks thrown in their windows: GENOCIDE!
Turkish response to people making jokes about Turkic peoples:WAR!

[katmai]

I can honestly say that the descriptions of cannibalism during the Holodomor in Bloodlands are the single most disturbing thing I've ever read.  I had sleeping problems after reading that.

It's incredibly disturbing.

you are incredibly disturbing, but don't hear me whining about not sleeping.

[Queequeg]

 

[KRonn]

Eastern Ukraine is next, then Moldova, or a part of it, in the next year or so. Putin has his excuse, his cassus belli, with the Moldovan group meeting in Moscow to ask for annexation. The Uzbeks and Kazakhs can't be much further away from being assimilated into the Russian hive.

[Admiral Yi]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russias-putin-prepares-to-annex-crimea/2014/03/18/933183b2-654e-45ce-920e-4d18c0ffec73_story.html

Putin mentioned Kosovo several times in a 50-minute speech that was a catalog of Russian complaints about the West over the past 20 years. He touched on the downfall of the Soviet Union, Kosovo, NATO expansion, missile defense, Libya, Iraq and Syria. He mentioned Soviet support for the reunification of Germany in 1990. "I hope Germans will support the aspirations of Russians to restore Russia," he said.

"Our Western partners have crossed a line," he said. "They've been unprofessional."

He said the challenge presented to Russia by the Ukrainian crisis couldn't be ducked.

"We have to admit one thing -- Russia is an active participant in international affairs," he said. "At these critical times we see the maturity of nations, the strength of nations."

Putin traced Russian roots in Crimea to the baptism there of Vladimir, who converted the Russian people to Christianity just over 1,000 years ago. He mentioned that the bones of Soviet soldiers who fought the Germans in World War II are buried all across the peninsula.

"All these places are sacred to us," he said. After noting that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev assigned Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, he argued that Russia by rights should have gotten it back in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved.

"Russia was not just robbed -- it was robbed in broad daylight," he said.

In his historical remarks, he also touched on Russians' roots in Ukraine, in a way that a large number of Ukrainians may not have found to be reassuring. "We sympathize with the people of Ukraine," he said. "We're one nation. Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities."

I take it as a good thing that Putin is actually trying to advance arguments for Russia's claim.

[DGuller]

  Yi takes a lot of things as a good thing.