MILAN — The Oprichniks were the murderous henchmen of Ivan the Terrible, torturing and killing the czar’s enemies.

It says a lot about the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s world view that he has chosen to reimagine these thugs as contemporary television executives in his exhilarating production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride” at the Teatro alla Scala here. This lurid tale of jealousy, insanity and the search for a royal wife has become, in Mr. Tcherniakov’s alchemical hands, a vivid, unsettling reflection on the media and the fast-disintegrating line between what seems real and what is.

It isn’t the first time that this director has brought a new angle to an older work. His charged, often claustrophobic interpretations of operas like Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” over the past few years have revealed fresh narratives and unexpected emphases in well-trodden classics. Just last month at the Metropolitan Opera, his new production of Borodin’s “Prince Igor” added some sections, cut others and rearranged what was left to create a dreamy portrait of a ruler and society thrown out of joint by the hunger for war.

But “Prince Igor” is a torso. Borodin never finished it and, as far as an overarching structure, barely even started it, a fact that even the Met’s strong production couldn’t conceal. While Mr. Tcherniakov’s version of “Igor” showed craft and care, it was bracing on Wednesday, at the second performance of “The Tsar’s Bride,” to see what he is capable of when he actually has a full opera to work with.

Like many Russian masterpieces, this Rimsky-Korsakov piece, which premiered in 1899, is still a relative rarity in the West, and it hasn’t always gotten the respect it deserves. It can seem, at first glance, a rather superficially sumptuous melodrama. But this performance made a strong case for its glimmers of forward-thinking angularity as well as its late-Verdian propulsion: it is an assemblage of set pieces — arias, ensembles, choruses — that presses forward with vigor.

The plot takes its cue from an encyclopedia footnote about which little is known: Ivan the Terrible’s brief third marriage to a commoner who was selected from 12 finalists for his hand and who died mysteriously a few days after their wedding. In the opera, this young woman, Marfa, is the pawn in a tangled love story that leaves her insane, succumbing to poison, and several other people dead.

The odd thing about Rimsky-Korsakov’s telling is that while there’s certainly a bride in it, there’s no czar. The one time in the original libretto that the fearsome Ivan seems to enter the picture, we’re not even sure it’s him: Marfa and her friend think they recognize his dreadful eyes in an anonymous man on horseback.

First at the Berlin Staatsoper in October and now in Milan, and both times with Daniel Barenboim conducting, Mr. Tcherniakov has taken this empty space at the opera’s core and run with it. The curtain rises on a TV studio where what seems to be a storybook pageant about old Russia is being filmed.

Before the overture is over, video projections bring us into an online chat among the Oprichnik-executives, who propose the need to invent a fake czar. A computer-generated leader is swiftly created for the public to revere and fear, and a “Bachelor”-style competition is started to help choose his bride.

At its heart this is yet another iteration of the theater-within-the-theater conceit that has tripped up even gifted directors. (See Stefan Herheim’s London production of Verdi’s “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” last fall.) But Mr. Tcherniakov makes it work with the fresh energy of his concept and the vital performances he draws from his cast.

All the world’s a screen in this “Tsar’s Bride,” a society distinguished most by the ceaseless generation and consumption of “content.” So Lyubasha, driven to desperation by jealousy, performs part of her first-act monologue in front of the cameras in an empty studio.

At the end, the innocent Marfa’s mad scene is filmed — ready to join happier, earlier clips flickering on the studio monitors. Becoming a media spectacle may be the most fitting way for her to go, in a live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword way: Throughout the previous acts, the Oprichniks’ product — a manufactured reality, half-news, half-entertainment — has been gobbled up from the television at Marfa’s family’s home. (We glimpse a few seconds of battle footage, too, lest anyone forget what all the fuss about a royal wedding is distracting from.)

Mr. Tcherniakov’s tweaks yield some of the production’s most effective moments. In the original libretto, the vindictive Lyubasha secretly spies on Marfa, her romantic rival. But here the encounter was face to face, making Lyubasha’s furious vows both more terrifying and more pitiable.

This director designed his own set, as is his usual practice, and it is a rotating wonder that makes possible, for instance, an elegant transition into the first-act trio. The world of the opera is rendered as a hermetic, arid interior. Nature is just another image, whether in the form of video of sun-dappled leaves or in the flowered wallpaper of Marfa’s living room.

The intense performances, not least that of the theater’s vibrant chorus, popped against this stark setting. The dusky-voiced mezzo Marina Prudenskaya’s Lyubasha was a small miracle of barely contained despair. The tenor Pavel Cernoch was a bright-voiced wimp as Marfa’s childhood sweetheart, Lykov, and the bass Anatoli Kotscherga a bearish presence as her father, Sobakin.

His baritone husky and lithe, Johannes Martin Kränzle was a bitter cynic at the heart of a cruel game as Gryaznoy, the Oprichnik mastermind of the czar’s bride scheme. The mezzo Anna Lapkovskaja was warm-hearted and warm-toned as Marfa’s friend, Dunyasha. The veteran soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow was touchingly deluded as her mother, Saburova.

Her voice and manner agile and girlish in the early acts, the soprano Olga Peretyatko was transformed into a bitter Norma Desmond lookalike for a riveting mad scene, her eyes glittering under the studio spotlights. (She gets another descent into insanity next month as Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” for her Metropolitan Opera debut.)

Mr. Barenboim brought out the music’s broad sweep and agitated details in moments like the febrile trembling as Gryaznoy toasts the bride-to-be in Act 3. He led the brass blasts at the start of the fourth act, each of which recedes into quiet unease, with a tautness and weight that revealed their debt to the opening of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.”

I wondered how the plusher Metropolitan Opera Orchestra would sound in this score, which has never been performed at the Met. I hope to have the chance to find out before too long, perhaps in Mr. Tcherniakov’s daringly theatrical production, a natural fit if ever there was one for media-driven New York.

The Tsar’s Bride. Directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Teatro alla Scala, Milan.Through March 14. teatroallascala.org.

Seeking An Exit From the Ukrainian Cul-de-Sac.

Posted: 03/07/2014The Huffington Post.

German chancellor Angela Merkel came away from a phone conversation with Russian president Vladmir Putin this week convinced that he is living “in another world,” she told Barack Obama — an Orwellian alternative universe, perhaps, in which freedom is slavery and lies are propagated by a Ministry of Truth. The political crisis that is consuming Ukraine has re-ignited the embers of cold war hostility and paranoia.

Yet as the West and Russia square off, Merkel has been reluctant to sanction and isolate Russia for destabilizing Ukraine. This only reinforces Washington hardliners’ disdain for Europe’s supposed ineffectuality: it was the European Union’s trade initiative that Putin torpedoed, triggering the Ukrainian upheaval — and now the E.U. expects the Americans to deal with Russia’s hardball reaction?

Europhile Henry Kissinger caustically blames E.U. “bureaucratic dilatoriness” for “turning a negotiation into a crisis.” The last disciple of Metternichian realpolitik, Kissinger at least recognizes the perils of reacting intemperately and urges a compromise with Moscow involving “Finlandization” of Ukraine. But his fellow Republicans have seized on Ukraine to launch a full-throated assault on Obama as a “weak indecisive leader” whose “feckless foreign policy” invited Russian aggression and who lacks the backbone to force Putin into ignominious retreat.

If cold-war reflexes still come quickly to life in conservative quarters in Washington, they are far more deeply ingrained in Russia. Putin famously told the Duma that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the last century.” NATO’s expansion eastward and its war with Serbia over Kosovo propelled his ascension to power in 1999, and what he sees through the Moscow looking-glass is an implacable Western drive to hem in Russia and impose Western economic and political models worldwide.

Russian rhetoric about Ukraine bitterly parodies the language of current Western internationalism. Russian military forces are undertaking a “humanitarian intervention,” just as the Western countries did in Libya and have proposed for Syria (though in Ukraine no one has been killed or remotely threatened by the current Kiev authorities).

The Crimean autonomous region has the right to secede from Ukraine, just as the Western countries asserted for Kosovo (juridically an uncomfortably snug parallel, though missing the small detail of internationally certified lethal repression by Belgrade).

Ejection of sitting government officials from their posts by militant protesters in Russified districts of Ukraine is an expression of the popular will, a just riposte to the “Euro-Maidan” protesters who finally forced the flight of president Viktor Yanukovych.

Sergey Aksyonov, whose fervently Russian party won four percent of Crimeans’ votes in regional elections, could then be legitimately installed as the region’s leader, while it was illegitimate for the national parliament, including Yanukovych’s own party members, to appoint Oleksandr Turchynov, whose Fatherland party had garnered 26 percent of Ukrainians’ votes for the Rada in 2012, to fill the purportedly vacant presidency.

All this pretended symmetry is simply pretextual. The bottom line is that Putin deemed even a modest European link for Ukraine as a serious threat to Russia, perhaps a first step toward NATO. He gambled that he could prevent it.

The gamble backfired badly, mobilizing legions of protesters and knocking Yanukovych, who had walked a fine line between Ukrainians’ European aspirations and Russian sympathies, off balance and finally out of power. While Obama does not see “some cold war chessboard,” Moscow concluded it had just lost its queen, and riskily upped the ante.

The confrontation, however, actually poses more danger to Putin’s economically brittle regime than to the West. And for a leader who craves international respect–basking in hosting the G-20 summit last September, sulking in the absence of his peers at the Sochi Olympics–Russia’s deepening isolation is a blow.

Last year the Pew Research Center found barely a third of citizens across 38 countries had a favorable view of Russia, compared to the half that saw China favorably and the nearly two-thirds favorable to the United States. Without bonds of amity, every relationship becomes transactional. Now, Putin’s tough talk and rough action are only exacerbating the international distaste. Even China, often an ally in the United Nations Security Council, is warning Moscow “not to interfere in others’ internal affairs.”

The militiamen in Crimea who blocked U.N. envoy Robert Serry’s way sent a particularly disquieting signal. The United Nations provides one of the few international mechanisms of ingrained impartiality that can walk everyone back from confrontation.

Presumably a deal can be made. Putin had evinced no interest in Russian control of Crimea so long as the government in Kiev was neutral between East and West, and permanently detaching it from Ukraine tilts the country’s electoral balance decisively toward the Russoskeptics. An international accord that guarantees a democratic Ukraine’s territorial integrity and bars it from any military alliance, on the Finnish and Austrian model, will likely be at the heart of a resolution. And if Putin decides to proceed with Crimea’s incorporation into Russia, he is signing off on NATO membership for Kiev, and other countries can permanently reject visa applications from Crimea or economic transactions with it.

The United States has proved itself essential to mobilizing the political pressures most persuasive to Putin, and Secretary of State John Kerry is managing the diplomacy with admirable firmness and nuance. But this is really a European affair. It is Europe that has the economic leverage that matters to Russia, and Europe whose prosperity Ukrainians want to share. Let Europe lead.

A DISCLOSURE:

INTERESTING HOW AVNERY REMINDS US THAT I MIGHT BE A DESCENDENT OF THE UKRAINIAN KHAZARS – PERSONALLY I KNOW THAT FATHER AND ME LOOK LIKE THAT – BUT HE ALSO TELLS US THAT BINATIONALISM DOES NOT WORK, AND THAT NETANYAHU IS BUILDING THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL AS A JEWISH STATE – AND THAT HURTS VERY MUCH. YES – ABSOLUTELY A MUST STUDY ARTICLE.

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Uri Avnery

March 8, 2014

                                                God Bless Putin

BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is very good at making speeches, especially to Jews, neocons and such, who jump up and applaud wildly at everything he says, including that tomorrow the sun will rise in the west.

The question is: is he good at anything else?

HIS FATHER, an ultra-ultra-Rightist, once said about him that he is quite unfit to be prime minister, but that he could be a good foreign minister. What he meant was that Binyamin does not have the depth of understanding needed to guide the nation, but that he is good at selling any policy decided upon by a real leader. 

(Reminding us of the characterization of Abba Eban by David Ben-Gurion: “He is very good at explaining, but you must tell him what to explain.”)

This week Netanyahu was summoned to Washington. He was supposed to approve John Kerry’s new “framework” agreement, which would serve as a basis for restarting the peace negotiations, which so far have come to naught.

On the eve of the event, President Barack Obama gave an interview to a Jewish journalist, blaming Netanyahu for the stalling of the “peace process” – as if there had ever been a peace process.

Netanyahu arrived with an empty bag – meaning a bag full of empty slogans. The Israeli leadership had striven mightily for peace, but could not progress at all because of the Palestinians. It is Mahmoud Abbas who is to blame, because he refuses to recognize Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

What…hmm…about the settlements, which have been expanding during the last year at a hectic pace? Why should the Palestinians negotiate endlessly, while at the same time the Israeli government takes more and more of the land which is the substance of the negotiations? (As the classic Palestinian argument goes: “We negotiate about dividing a pizza, and in the meantime Israel is eating the pizza.”)

Obama steeled himself to confront Netanyahu, AIPAC and their congressional stooges. He was about to twist the arms of Netanyahu until he cried “uncle” – the uncle being Kerry’s “framework”, which by now has been watered down to look almost like a Zionist manifesto. Kerry is frantic for an achievement, whatever its contents and discontents.

Netanyahu, looking for an instrument to rebuff the onslaught, was ready to cry as usual “Iran! Iran! Iran!” – when something unforeseen happened.

NAPOLEON FAMOUSLY exclaimed: ”Give me generals who are lucky!”  He would have loved General Bibi.

Because, on the way to confront a newly invigorated Obama, there was an explosion that shook the world:

Ukraine.

It was like the shots that rang out in Sarajevo a hundred years ago.

The international tranquility was suddenly shattered. The possibility of a major war was in the air.

Netanyahu’s visit disappeared from the news. Obama, occupied with a historic crisis, just wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible. Instead of the severe admonition of the Israeli leader, he got away with some hollow compliments. All the wonderful speeches Netanyahu had prepared were left unspeeched. Even his usual triumphant speech at AIPAC evoked no interest.

All because of the upheaval in Kiev.

BY NOW, innumerable articles have been written about the crisis. Historical associations abound.

Though Ukraine means “borderland”, it was often at the center of European events. One must pity Ukrainian schoolchildren. The changes in the history of their country were constant and extreme. At different times Ukraine was a European power and a poor downtrodden territory, extremely rich (“the breadbasket of Europe”) or abjectly poor, attacked by neighbors who captured their people to sell them as slaves or attacking their neighbors to enlarge their country.

The Ukraine’s relationship with Russia is even more complex. In a way, the Ukraine is the heartland of Russian culture, religion and orthography. Kiev was far more important than Moscow, before becoming the centerpiece of Muscovite imperialism.

In the Crimean War of the 1850s, Russia fought valiantly against a coalition of Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia, and eventually lost. The war broke out over Christian rights in Jerusalem, and included a long siege of Sevastopol. The world remembers the charge of the Light Brigade. A British woman called Florence Nightingale established the first organization to tend the wounded on the battlefield.  

In my lifetime, Stalin murdered millions of Ukrainians by deliberate starvation. As a result, most Ukrainians welcomed the German Wehrmacht in 1941 as liberators. It could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but unfortunately Hitler was determined to eradicate the Ukrainian “Untermenschen”, in order to integrate the Ukraine into the German Lebensraum.

The Crimea suffered terribly. The Tatar people, who had ruled the peninsula in the past, were deported to Central Asia, then allowed to return decades later. Now they are a small minority, seemingly unsure of where their loyalties lie.

THE RELATIONSHIP between Ukraine and the Jews is no less complicated.

Some Jewish writers, like Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand, believe that the Khazar empire that ruled the Crimea and neighboring territory a thousand years ago, converted to Judaism, and that most Ashkenazi Jews are descended from them. This would turn us all into Ukrainians. (Many early Zionist leaders indeed came from Ukraine.)

When Ukraine was a part of the extensive Polish empire, many Polish noblemen took hold of large estates there. They employed Jews as their managers. Thus the Ukrainian peasants came to look upon the Jews as the agents of their oppressors, and anti-Semitism became part of the national culture of Ukraine.

As we learned in school, at every turn of Ukrainian history, the Jews were slaughtered. The names of most Ukrainian folk-heroes, leaders and rebels who are revered in their homeland are, in Jewish consciousness, connected with awful pogroms.

Cossack Hetman (leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who liberated Ukraine from the Polish yoke, and who is considered by Ukrainians as the father of their nation, was one of the worst mass-murderers in Jewish history. Symon Petliura, who led the Ukrainian war against the Bolsheviks after World War I, was assassinated by a Jewish avenger.

Some elderly Jewish immigrants in Israel must find it hard to decide whom to hate more, the Ukrainians or the Russians (or the Poles, for that matter.)

PEOPLE AROUND the world find it also hard to choose sides.

The usual Cold-War zealots have it easy – they either hate the Americans or the Russians, out of habit.

As for me, the more I try to study the situation, the more unsure I become. This is not a black-or-white situation.

The first sympathy goes to the Maidan rebels. (Maidan is an Arab word meaning town square. Curious how it travelled to Kiev. Probably via Istanbul.)

They want to join the West, enjoy independence and democracy. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing, except that they have dubious bedfellows. Neo-Nazis in their copycat Nazi uniforms, giving the Hitler salute and mouthing anti-Semitic slogans, are not very attractive. The encouragement they receive from Western allies, including the odious neocons, is off-putting.

On the other side, Vladimir Putin is also not very prepossessing. It’s the old Russian imperialism all over again.

The slogan used by the Russians – the need to protect Russian-speaking people in a neighboring country – sounds eerily familiar. It is an exact copy of Adolf Hitler’s claim in 1938 to protect the Sudeten Germans from the Czech monsters.  

But Putin has some logic on his side. Sevastopol – the scene of heroic sieges both in the Crimean War and in World War II, is essential for his naval forces. The association with Ukraine is an important part of Russian world power aspirations.

A cold-blooded, calculating operator, of a kind now rare in the world, Putin uses the strong cards he has, but is very careful not to take too many risks. He is managing the crisis astutely, using Russia’s obvious advantages. Europe needs his oil and gas, he needs Europe’s capital and trade. Russia has a leading role in Syria and Iran. The US suddenly looks like a bystander.

I assume that in the end there will be a compromise. Russia will retain a footing in the coming Ukrainian leadership. Both sides will proclaim victory, as they should.

(By the way, for those here who believe in the “One-State Solution”: Another multicultural state seems to be breaking apart.)

WHERE WILL this leave Netanyahu?

He has gained some months or years without any movement toward peace, and in the meantime can continue with the occupation and build settlements at a frantic pace.

That is the traditional Zionist strategy. Time is everything. Every postponement provides opportunities to create more facts on the ground.

Netanyahu’s prayers have been answered. God bless Putin.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve.”

JOHN KERRY, secretary of state, on Russia’s actions in Crimea, a region in Ukraine.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“The only thing we had to do, and we did it, was to enhance the defense of our military facilities because they were constantly receiving threats and we were aware of the armed nationalists moving in.”

VLADIMIR V. PUTIN, president of Russia.

No Easy Way Out of Ukraine Crisis.

WASHINGTON — For all his bluster and bravado, President Vladimir V. Putin’s assurance on Tuesday that Russia does not plan, at least for now, to seize eastern Ukraine suggested a possible path forward in the geopolitical crisis that has captivated the world. Global markets reacted with relief, and the White House with cautious optimism.

But the development presented a tricky conundrum for President Obama and his European allies. Even if Russia does leave eastern Ukraine alone and avoids escalating its military intervention, can it effectively freeze in place its occupation of the Crimean Peninsula? Would the United States and Europe be forced to tacitly accept that or could they find a way to roll it back — and, if so, at what price?

Ever since Russian forces took control of Crimea, Mr. Obama’s aides have privately conceded that reversing the occupation would be difficult, if not impossible, in the short run and focused on drawing a line to prevent Mr. Putin from going further.

If Crimea in coming weeks remains cordoned off, it will then require a concerted effort to force Russia to pull back troops, an effort that could divide the United States from European allies who may be more willing to live with the new status quo.

For the moment, the White House was focused on preventing the confrontation from escalating. While dismayed if not surprised by Mr. Putin’s bellicosity and justification of his actions, American officials took some solace that he said he saw no need at this point for intervention in Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine. They were also encouraged by his seeming acceptance of elections in May as a way to legitimize a new Ukrainian government and by his decision to cancel a military exercise near the border. And they detected no new influx of troops into Crimea.

While Secretary of State John Kerry visited Kiev on Tuesday to show support for its beleaguered pro-Western government, Mr. Obama consulted with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany by telephone about finding a face-saving way for Mr. Putin to withdraw in favor of international monitors.

Speaking with reporters, Mr. Obama said some had interpreted Mr. Putin’s remarks earlier in the day to mean he “is pausing for a moment and reflecting on what’s happened.”

Others cautioned against reading too much into Mr. Putin’s statements. “It would be a mistake on our part to look at what he’s saying and think this crisis is almost over: ‘O.K., we’ve lost Crimea, but the rest of the country is with us,’ ” said Ivo Daalder, Mr. Obama’s first ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

He said Crimea would become a precedent: “Crimea is a big deal. It means a country can be invaded, and a big piece of it can be taken away with no price. But two, this isn’t just about Crimea. This is about who is ultimately in control of Ukraine.”

The situation remained tense, as Obama administration officials moved forward with plans for sanctions that could be imposed by the United States and, they hoped, in conjunction with European allies. The administration is developing plans for actions that would escalate over time if Russia continued to leave forces in place in Crimea, an autonomous region of Ukraine.

Mr. Obama has authority to take several steps without new legislation from Congress. For starters, under a law called the Magnitsky Act, the State Department has already drafted a list of Russians tied to human rights abuses. The administration could promptly bar them from traveling to the United States, freeze any assets here and cut off their access to American banks.

The president also has the power under existing Syria sanctions to go after Russian individuals and institutions involved in sending arms to help President Bashar al-Assad crush the rebellion there. The administration had held back on such actions while trying to work with Russia to resolve Syria’s civil war, but if applied they could cut off certain Russian banks from the international financial system.

Mr. Obama could also sign an executive order creating another set of sanctions specifically against Russian officials and organizations blamed for creating instability in Ukraine and violating its sovereignty. In theory, that could include everyone up to Mr. Putin, but officials indicated that they would instead work their way up the chain of command.

Leaders in Europe, a region dependent on Russian natural gas and with far deeper economic ties to Russia, have expressed reluctance to go along with the toughest sanctions.

But an American order declaring a Russian bank in violation would be sent to banks around the world, forcing them to cut ties with that Russian institution or risk being barred from doing business with the American financial sector.

“My view is that Russia can be forced out of Crimea with the combination of financial sanctions plus straightforward hard diplomacy,” said Anders Aslund, a longtime specialist on Russia and Ukraine at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Still, others are more dubious, noting that Mr. Obama may not be willing to go as far as necessary without the support of allies, particularly given that it would presumably jeopardize Russian cooperation on a range of issues, including Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Middle East peace.

The precedent may be Abkhazia and South Ossetia, pro-Moscow regions that broke away from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. After Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, the Kremlin defied the United States and the rest of the world by recognizing their independence and left troops in place to guarantee it. The United States and Europe ultimately resumed doing business as usual with Russia.

Mr. Obama’s aides said that Ukraine was different and that they had a hard time imagining going back to a normal relationship as long as Russian troops occupied Crimea. Their first priority is preventing Russia from annexing the peninsula outright, but even leaving it as an enclave under Moscow’s control would not be acceptable, they said.

White House officials said they saw three possibilities. The first would be a Russian escalation into eastern Ukraine, one they hope Mr. Putin was signaling he would not pursue. The second would be Russia deciding to stay put in Crimea, either through annexation or through de facto rule. The third would be Russia taking what American officials call an offramp, agreeing to let international monitors replace Russian troops in the streets to guard against any attacks on Russian speakers and accepting the Ukrainian government that emerges from the May elections.

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he recognized that Russia had natural interests in its neighbor. But he said he would not accept what he called a violation of international law.

“I know President Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers making a different set of interpretations,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s fooling anybody.”

Mr. Obama added that Ukrainians should have the right to determine their own fate. “Mr. Putin can throw a lot of words out there, but the facts on the ground indicate that right now he’s not abiding by that principle,” he said. “There is still the opportunity for Russia to do so, working with the international community to help stabilize the situation.”

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The Opinion Pages|Editorial

A Rational Response to Ukraine’s Crisis.

The tensions over Ukraine eased somewhat after President Vladimir Putin of Russia halted military maneuvers on the Ukrainian border and declared at a news conference on Tuesday that there was no immediate need to send troops into eastern Ukraine. The conciliatory talk prompted Russian financial markets to rebound from their plunge on Monday. The markets reward peaceful behavior.

But the crisis is not over: Russia remains in control of Crimea, and Mr. Putin prepared the way for possible annexation of the peninsula to Russia when he said it was up to Crimean citizens, a majority of whom are Russian-speaking, to determine their future. The question remains what the United States and the European Union should or can do.

The Ukrainian crisis has provoked a broad range of reactions in the West, including angry demands for immediate sanctions against Russia and charges in the United States that President Obama is somehow “losing” in the confrontation to Mr. Putin and thus endangering Washington’s credibility and global leadership. Yet leadership and credibility in a crisis mean reacting coolly and rationally, not rattling sabers, or rushing into economic warfare that allies may or may not support, or painting “red lines” that the other side can cross with impunity.

A bully welcomes a slugfest, and Mr. Putin revels in claiming American conspiracies; at his news conference on Tuesday, he even described the battering to Russia’s markets on Monday as a result of American policies. But that battering and the decline of the value of the ruble were no doubt major factors behind Mr. Putin’s conciliatory tone on Tuesday.

The Russian economy is not in great shape, and Russian businessmen understand full well that the $60 billion wiped off the value of their firms on Monday was because of a needless crisis.

Mr. Putin and his countrymen must be reminded, again and again, that seizing Crimea under a blatantly concocted pretext, or taking other measures against the new authorities in Ukraine, will carry a price.

Short of war, there is little the United States can do on its own to punish Russia. It is not among Russia’s major trading partners. Europe, which does far more business with Russia, has more leverage, but also a dependence on Russian gas, and, so far, European leaders have shown little enthusiasm for economic sanctions.

The measures that have been suggested — exclusion from the Group of 8, selective sanctions and travel bans — would not alone cause much pain. But the consequences of isolation take a toll over time. With every new demonstration of Mr. Putin’s authoritarian and expansionary tendencies, whether it was the invasion of Georgia in 2008 or the imprisonment of the Pussy Riot members in 2012, the West has become more wary of doing business with Russia. In a conversation with Mr. Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said she was unsure whether Mr. Putin was in touch with reality. That, from the leader of Europe’s most powerful economy and one of Russia’s biggest trading partners, cannot be heartening for Mr. Putin, and certainly not for Russian businessmen.

These are exactly the buttons Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are pushing — threatening further isolation if Mr. Putin does not back down, and cooperation if he does, while rallying allies and pledging substantial assistance to the new authorities in Ukraine.

Closing the door to any further dealings with Mr. Putin, as hard-core cold-warriors want Mr. Obama to do, would not serve any purpose. Russia has already announced that it is ending discounts on the sale of Russian gas to Ukraine, and it could make life even more difficult for its bankrupt neighbor. But at his news conference, Mr. Putin said he felt a sympathy for the longing of the Kiev crowds to throw out a corrupt regime, and he insisted that Russian and Ukrainian soldiers “will be on the same side of the barricades.”

If he meant all that, then he must agree that the optimal conclusion to the crisis would be the election of a balanced Parliament and a universally accepted president in Ukraine, which would also reassure Russians that their ties to Ukraine, including Crimea, won’t be severed.

The United States and its European allies must prepare contingency plans for any escalation of Russian aggression or for the unilateral annexation of Crimea. The Europeans will have to overcome their reluctance on sanctions and form a common front with the United States. But, at the same time, they should reassure Mr. Putin that the West appreciates Russia’s historic ties to Ukraine and has no interest in turning Kiev against Moscow. So far, Mr. Obama is on the right track.

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The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Columnist – The New York Times

Why Putin Doesn’t Respect Us

Just as we’ve turned the coverage of politics into sports, we’re doing the same with geopolitics. There is much nonsense being written about how Vladimir Putin showed how he is “tougher” than Barack Obama and how Obama now needs to demonstrate his manhood. This is how great powers get drawn into the politics of small tribes and end up in great wars that end badly for everyone. We vastly exaggerate Putin’s strength — so does he — and we vastly underestimate our own strength, and ability to weaken him through nonmilitary means.

Let’s start with Putin. Any man who actually believes, as Putin has said, that the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century is caught up in a dangerous fantasy that can’t end well for him or his people. The Soviet Union died because Communism could not provide rising standards of living, and its collapse actually unleashed boundless human energy all across Eastern Europe and Russia. A wise Putin would have redesigned Russia so its vast human talent could take advantage of all that energy. He would be fighting today to get Russia into the European Union, not to keep Ukraine out. But that is not who Putin is and never will be. He is guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations toward his people and prefers to turn Russia into a mafia-run petro-state — all the better to steal from.

So Putin is now fighting human nature among his own young people and his neighbors — who both want more E.U. and less Putinism. To put it in market terms, Putin is long oil and short history. He has made himself steadily richer and Russia steadily more reliant on natural resources rather than its human ones. History will not be kind to him — especially if energy prices ever collapse.

So spare me the Putin-body-slammed-Obama prattle. This isn’t All-Star Wrestling. The fact that Putin has seized Crimea, a Russian-speaking zone of Ukraine, once part of Russia, where many of the citizens prefer to be part of Russia and where Russia has a major naval base, is not like taking Poland. I support economic and diplomatic sanctions to punish Russia for its violation of international norms and making clear that harsher sanctions, even military aid for Kiev, would ensue should Putin try to bite off more of Ukraine. But we need to remember that that little corner of the world is always going to mean more, much more, to Putin than to us, and we should refrain from making threats on which we’re not going to deliver.

What disturbs me about Crimea is the larger trend it fits into, that Putinism used to just be a threat to Russia but is now becoming a threat to global stability. I opposed expanding NATO toward Russia after the Cold War, when Russia was at its most democratic and least threatening. It remains one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course, laid the groundwork for Putin’s rise.

For a long time, Putin has exploited the humiliation and anti-Western attitudes NATO expansion triggered to gain popularity, but this seems to have become so fundamental to his domestic politics that it has locked him into a zero-sum relationship with the West that makes it hard to see how we collaborate with him in more serious trouble spots, like Syria or Iran. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is engaged in monstrous, genocidal behavior that also threatens the stability of the Middle East. But Putin stands by him. At least half the people of Ukraine long to be part of Europe, but he treated that understandable desire as a NATO plot and quickly resorted to force.

I don’t want to go to war with Putin, but it is time we expose his real weakness and our real strength. That, though, requires a long-term strategy — not just fulminating on “Meet the Press.” It requires going after the twin pillars of his regime: oil and gas. Just as the oil glut of the 1980s, partly engineered by the Saudis, brought down global oil prices to a level that helped collapse Soviet Communism, we could do the same today to Putinism by putting the right long-term policies in place. That is by investing in the facilities to liquefy and export our natural gas bounty (provided it is extracted at the highest environmental standards) and making Europe, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, more dependent on us instead. I’d also raise our gasoline tax, put in place a carbon tax and a national renewable energy portfolio standard — all of which would also help lower the global oil price (and make us stronger, with cleaner air, less oil dependence and more innovation).

You want to frighten Putin? Just announce those steps.

But you know the story, the tough guys in Washington who want to take on Putin would rather ask 1 percent of Americans — the military and their families — to make the ultimate sacrifice than have all of us make a small sacrifice in the form of tiny energy price increases. Those tough guys who thump their chests in Congress but run for the hills if you ask them to vote for a 10-cent increase in the gasoline tax that would actually boost our leverage, they’ll never rise to this challenge. We’ll do anything to expose Putin’s weakness; anything that isn’t hard. And you wonder why Putin holds us in contempt?

(photo: Baz Ratner/Reuters)

Putin Goes to War

By David Remnick, The New Yorker

02 March 14

ladimir Putin, the Russian President and autocrat, had a plan for the winter of 2014: to reassert his country’s power a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He thought that he would achieve this by building an Olympic wonderland on the Black Sea for fifty-one billion dollars and putting on a dazzling television show. It turns out that he will finish the season in a more ruthless fashion, by invading a peninsula on the Black Sea and putting on quite a different show—a demonstration war that could splinter a sovereign country and turn very bloody, very quickly.

Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist and pro-democracy activist who was recently detained by the police in Moscow, described the scenario taking shape as “Afghanistan 2.” He recalled, for Slon.ru, an independent Russian news site, how the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, under the pretext of helping a “fraternal” ally in Kabul; to Parkhomenko, Putin’s decision to couch his military action as the “protection” of Russians living in Crimea is an equally transparent pretext. The same goes for the decorous way in which Putin, on Saturday, “requested” the Russian legislature’s authorization for the use of Russian troops in Ukraine until “the socio-political situation is normalized.” The legislature, which has all the independence of an organ grinder’s monkey, voted its unanimous assent.

Other critics of Putin’s military maneuvers in Ukraine used different, but no less ominous, historical analogies. Some compared the arrival of Russian troops in Simferopol to the way that the Kremlin, in 2008, took advantage of Georgia’s reckless bid to retake South Ossetia and then muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended with Russia taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In a recent Letter from Sochi, I tried to describe Putin’s motivations: his resentment of Western triumphalism and American power, after 1991; his paranoia that Washington is somehow behind every event in the world that he finds threatening, including the recent events in Kiev; his confidence that the U.S. and Europe are nonetheless weak, unlikely to respond to his swagger because they need his help in Syria and Iran; his increasingly vivid nationalist-conservative ideology, which relies, not least, on the elevation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been so brutally suppressed during most of the Soviet period, as a quasi-state religion supplying the government with its moral force.

Obama and Putin spoke on the phone today for an hour and a half. The White House and Kremlin accounts of the call add up to what was clearly the equivalent of an angry standoff: lectures, counter-lectures, intimations of threats, intimations of counter-threats. But the leverage, for now, is all with Moscow.

The legislators in the Russian parliament today parroted those features of modern Putinism. In order to justify the invasion of the Crimean peninsula, they repeatedly cited the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” in Kiev helping Russia’s enemies. They repeatedly echoed the need to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin’s rhetoric about Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the fall of the Soviet Union, in December, 1991.

If this is the logic of the Russian invasion, the military incursion is unlikely to stop in Crimea: nearly all of eastern Ukraine is Russian-speaking. Russia defines its interests far beyond its Black Sea fleet and the Crimean peninsula.

Marina Korolyova, the deputy editor of the liberal radio station Echo of Moscow, told Slon.ru, “I am the daughter of a military officer who went in with the troops that invaded Czechoslovakia, in 1968. Today’s decision of the President and the Federation Council—I feel the pain personally. It is shameful. Shameful.”

It is worth noting that, in Moscow, the modern dissident movement was born in 1968, when four brave protesters went to Red Square and unfurled a banner denouncing the invasion of Prague. Those demonstrators are the heroes of, among other young Russians, the members of the punk band Pussy Riot. This is something that Putin also grasps very well. At the same time that he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet, his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic mercy has come to an end.

It’s also worth noting that, in 1968, Moscow was reacting to the “threat” of the Prague Spring and to ideological liberalization in Eastern Europe; in 1979, the Kremlin leadership was reacting to the upheavals in Kabul. The rationale now is far flimsier, even in Moscow’s own terms. The people of the Crimean peninsula were hardly under threat by “fascist gangs” from Kiev. In the east, cities like Donetsk and Kharkov had also been quiet, though that may already be changing. That’s the advantage of Putin’s state-controlled television and his pocket legislature; you can create any reality and pass any edict.

I spoke with Georgy Kasianov, the head of the Academy of Science’s department of contemporary Ukrainian history and politics, in Kiev. “It’s a war,” he said. “The Russian troops are quite openly out on the streets [in Crimea], capturing public buildings and military outposts. And it’s likely all a part of a larger plan for other places: Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson. And they’ll use the same technique. Some Russian-speaking citizens will appear, put up a Russian flag, and make appeals that they want help and referendums, and so on.” This is already happening in Donetsk and Kharkov.

“They are doing this like it is a commonplace,” Kasianov went on. “I can’t speak for four million people, but clearly everyone in Kiev is against this. But the Ukrainian leadership is absolutely helpless. The Army is not ready for this. And, after the violence in Kiev, the special forces are disoriented.”

Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West. As it happens so often in these situations—from Tahrir Square to Taksim Square to Maidan Square—people were taken up with the thrill of uprising. After Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, the coverage moved to what one might call the “golden toilet” stage of things, that moment when the freedom-hungry crowds discover the fallen leader’s arrangements and bountiful holdings—the golden bathroom fixtures; the paintings and the tapestries; the secret mistress; the lurid bedrooms and freezers stocked with sweetmeats; the surveillance videos and secret transcripts; the global real-estate holdings; the foreign bank accounts; the fleets of cars, yachts, and airplanes; the bad taste, the unknown cruelties.

The English-language Kyiv Post published a classic in the genre when it reported how journalists arriving at the “inner sanctum” of the mansion where Yanukovych had lived in splendor discovered that he had been cohabiting not with his wife of four decades but, rather, with—and try not to faint—a younger woman. It “appears” that Yanukovych had been living there with a spa owner named Lyubov (which means “love”) Polezhay. “The woman evidently loves dogs and owns a white Pomeranian spitz that was seen in the surveillance camera’s footage of Yanukovych leaving” the mansion.

But that was trivia. Masha Lipman, my colleague in Moscow, sketched out in stark and prescient terms some of the challenges facing Ukraine, ranging from the divisions within the country to the prospect of what Putin might do rather than “lose” Ukraine.

Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own people. He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don, in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004, failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy, while another country has troops on its territory?

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian politician who no longer holds office, said that the events were not only dangerous for Ukraine but ominous for Russia and the man behind them. “It’s quite likely that this will be fatal for the regime and catastrophic for Russia,” he told Slon.ru. “It just looks as if they have taken leave of their senses.”

Tough Times Again for Ukraine’s Jewish Population.

Protesters in Ukraine. Photo: Wikipedia.

We are now witnessing the latest round of violence and tragedy in the Ukraine. And not for the first time, hundreds of thousands of Jews in that embattled country, perhaps as many as 400,000, find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

Historically, Jews in Ukraine have suffered disastrous losses during times of upheaval. During the Cossack uprising of 1648-57, led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, 15-30,000 Ukrainian Jews out of a total population of 51,000 were murdered or taken captive. The organized violence against the helpless and impoverished Jews in the Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th century spawned a new word in the lexicon of hate - pogrom. Many of our grandparents fled the Ukraine, arriving on American shores penniless with little more than a dream of a safe haven. During the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, another estimated 30,000-100,000 Jews were killed.

The total civilian losses during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine is estimated at 7 million, with more than 1 million Jews shot by Einsatzgruppen killing squads and Ukrainian collaborators in Western Ukraine.

To be sure, the Jewish community has not been center stage in the current epic struggle for Ukraine’s future. The just-deposed Prime Minister represents the still powerful pull of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin has always made it clear he will not accept a Ukraine that is tied to NATO or the European Union. So far he’s used the economic carrot of cheap oil and other incentives, but possible military intervention in Eastern Ukraine, with its significant Russian population — cannot be dismissed.

On the other side are Ukrainian activists who rallied around a Euro-centric vision of the future. Anyone and anything that insists on a link to Moscow and the memories of 70 years of tyrannical Soviet rule is out of the question. Unfortunately, among the masses of people who braved beatings, bullets, and death, were members of the nationalist Svoboda party, some of whose leaders have openly expressed anti-Semitic views.

Against this unsettling backdrop, after last month’s beating of two Jews, Kiev’s Chief rabbi has called on the city’s Jews to leave. Now comes word that unknown perpetrators hurled firebombs at the Giymat Rosa Synagogue in Zaporizhia, located 250 miles southeast of Kiev. That house of prayer opened in 2012 – a sign of Jewish renewal in the Ukraine – was built on the spot where the Jews of that community were ordered to gather before being deported by the Nazis to their deaths.

It goes without saying that Jewish institutions are bolstering security and it has been reported that some public events have been canceled. One can only wonder what kind of Purim and Passover await our Jewish brothers and sisters in the Ukraine.

What will members of Europe’s third largest Jewish community do? Will they stay or go? The late Simon Wiesenthal imparted sage advice when he said, “Where democracy is strong it is good for Jews and where it is weak it is bad for the Jews.”

We can only hope and pray and that the forces of true democratic values and inclusion win the day in the Ukraine. That would be a blessing for all its people. In the meantime, today’s Ukrainian Jews are free to ponder an option their forefathers could only dream about. Israel is but a non-stop flight from Kiev. Look for those flights to be extra crowded in the days ahead.

 What we ask is whom do represent the black clad military people that took over Crimea?  Are they representing a new force or their old Russian military. We see a way out if the lack of insignia means that there is a new force being born.

FIRST CLEAR CASUALTY – THE SOCHI G8 MEETING THAT BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE WITH RUSSIA AT WAR.
SO – IT IS NOW CLEAR THAT SOCHI IS NOT THE PUTIN PLANNED  RUSSIAN GOLD MINE.

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Ukraine PR Says UN Charter Brutally Violated, Meeting Format Fight.

By Matthew Russell Lee, Inner City Press Follow Up

UNITED NATIONS, March 1 — As the UN Security Council on Saturday afternoon held its second emergency meeting in as many days on Ukraine, that country’s Permanent Representative Yuriy Sergeyev stopped and told the press it is now a Russian “aggression” and that the UN Charter has been “brutally” violated.
Video here.

 He said an appeal is being made to the US, France, UK and China, under the rubric of non-proliferation; he said there is still time, before Russian president Vladimir Putin signs the order for military moves in Crimea.

  Then the Security Council “suspended” for ten minutes; Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin emerged and said some members of the Council are trying to change the format of the meeting, that Russia agrees with the format proposed by Luxembourg, which took over today as Council president.

After UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s envoy Robert Serry spun the contents of a closed door Security Council consultation on Ukraine on which there was no agreed outcome, Ban himself did the same on Saturday.

   Could Serry go to Crimea?  Hours before Serry through the spokesperson had said no. But the purpose of the UN TV theater is to get this spin “on camera” – that’s the role Falk’s UNCA is playing.

   Also Ban said he is going to speak with Putin soon. Will his spokesperson take question, this time with notice, on that?

   On February 28, Serry’s impartiality as “UN” envoy on Ukraine was called into question, on camera, in front of the UN Security Council by Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

   A “Note to Correspondents” was put out Saturday morning by the UN Spokesperson’s Office in which Serry put his spin on the Security Council consultations at which he was not present, and at which not even a Press Statement was agreed:

Note to correspondents: Statement by Mr. Robert Serry, Senior Advisor to the Secretary-General, at the end of his mission to Ukraine

Kyiv, 1 March 2014

Following the consultations in the United Nations Security Council yesterday, the Secretary-General requested me to go to Crimea as part of my fact-finding mission. I have since been in touch with the authorities of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and have come to the conclusion that a visit to Crimea today is not possible. I will therefore proceed to Geneva, where I will tomorrow brief the Secretary-General on my mission and consult with him on next steps.

In Crimea, I would have conveyed, also on behalf of the Secretary-General, a message for all to calm the situation down and to refrain from any actions that could further escalate an already-tense environment.

It became very clear from yesterday’s Council consultations that the unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine is not to be called into question. This is a time for dialogue and to engage with each other constructively.

Note to correspondents: Statement by Mr. Robert Serry, Senior Advisor to the Secretary-General, at the end of his mission to Ukraine.

March 1, updated — After the Ukraine open meeting then consultations of the UN Security Council took place, Council president for March Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg came out and read a short statement.

  Inner City Press asked her if this was a mere “elements to the press,” not even an agreed Press Statement. This seems to be the case. She politely answered, but not why China and the ten elected members did not speak in the open meeting.

  Inner City Press asked UK Ambassador Lyall Grant about the Budapest Memorandum — has it already been violated, including by the Western IMF side, in terms of economic coercion? Is it just a superseded document summoned up for pragmatic reasons now?

  Lyall Grant acknowledged that some time has passed. From the UK Mission transcript:

Inner City Press: The Budapest memorandum. There’s been a lot of talk about it. It requires the UK, Russia and France to seek immediate Security Council action if there’s a threat of force, so is this the end of your duties, or do you have a duty to defend Ukraine? And it also seems to commit the UK and others to refrain from economic coercion, so some people have been saying that on both sides, the economic coercion factor has been played. Has this memorandum been complied with since ‘94, or is it just pulled out at this time as a convenient document?

Amb Lyall Grant: Clearly, this document has become very relevant in the last few days. We believe that the first step should be a meeting of the signatories of the Budapest memorandum, as Ukraine government has suggested should take place. Proposals have been made for a meeting of the three signatories as early as Monday, but so far Russia has not agreed to that meeting.

  Lyall Grant also said his prime minister David Cameron spoke with Vladimir Putin and his foreign secretary William Hague will be in Ukraine on Sunday.

  Inner City Press asked Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson of Russia’s critique of envoy Robert Serry “getting played,” and of the leaked (US) audio about former US now UN official Jeffrey Feltman “getting” Ban to send Serry to Ukraine.

   Eliasson said Serry is an international civil servant, but that the UN is not mediating, he is only a go-between for now. Will that change?

  US Samantha Power came out, saying another things that President Obama is suspending participation in the preparation for the G8 in Sochi. She took only two questions; it was not possible to ask her about movement on loan guarantees, or her view of the US’ duties under the Budapest Memorandum. So it goes at the UN.

  When the open meeting happened, after two hours of wrangling about format, not all 15 members of the Council — not even all five Permanent members — spoke. (China didn’t).

  Instead, UN Deputy Secretary General Eliasson led off, saying that Ban Ki-moon would speak with Vladimir Putin. That had already taken place, but even an hour later, no read-out.

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Ukraine’s EU embassy details ‘Abkhazia scenario’

01.03.14 @ 12:56

1. By Andrew Rettman

CIFNews
Administrative Unit, Climate Investment Funds
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Recent updates to the CIF Voices (blogs), videos  and news articles on CIF projects:

Snakes, Tomatoes, and Other Take Aways from the Asia-Pacific Dialogue on the GCF
Martha Stein-Sochas, CIF AU, Feb 26
Last week at the Asia-Pacific Dialogue on the Green Climate Fund (GCF), I heard many helpful suggestions and ideas from private sector participants on the GCF’s future Private Sector Facility, which aims to provide financing for climate action in the private sector.  But no advice was more powerful than that of Paul Needham, President and Co-founder of Simpa Networks, who related to us the need to move quickly, take risks, and be catalytic.

Lessons from the field on CIF results monitoring and reporting
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For the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), understanding the tangible results of its funding is essential to learning and accountability. It has been no small task to make monitoring and reporting (M&R) a reality across the four programs and 48 countries that comprise the CIF. But this year, 2014, all CIF pilot countries will report on results and annually thereafter.

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World Bank, Government of Samoa Launch Climate Resilience Program
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“The World Bank is committed to helping small island states manage pressing risks from natural disasters and climate change,” said Drees-Gross. “Through the Climate Investment Funds, we are proud to support Samoa in critical efforts to increase the resilience of coastal communities and infrastructure, which could help protect their very survival as well as long-term development.”
Keeping Partnership Strong as PPCR Planning Turns to Action in Samoa
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Open Call to Private Sector
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Rooted in Learning, Growing with Results
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USELF Boosts Ukraine’s Renewable Energy Sector
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AfDB affirms its support for Power Africa, with a commitment of more than US $600 million
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AfDB supports Ghana local communities with $14.55 million to reduce deforestation
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The project, called Engaging Local Communities in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) /Enhancement of Carbon Stocks, benefits from the support from the Climate Investment Funds’ (CIF) Forest Investment Program (FIP).  It will directly benefit 12,000 people, half of them women, by providing capacity building, seeds and equipment, and financial incentives through benefit-sharing agreements to develop forestry, agroforestry and alternative livelihoods. The project will also indirectly benefit 175,000 people in the two regions.

“Their Mothers, their Fathers” – or maybe even ours -  a movie that tries to promote thinking about the triteness of the reality of an evolution of crime as a worm that eats into what looks like civilized normalcy.

These days in New York we host the Carnegie Hall Festival “Vienna City of Dreams” which is a celebration of culture of the last 100 years which is in effect the time-span since the break out of WWI on June 28, 1914, and as a matter of fact includes also WWII.

To above Festival The Calgary, Alberta, CHUMIR FOUNDATION for Ethics in Leadership contributed a three events Symposium – “Vienna’s History and Legacy of the Past 150 Years” – and this morning coincidentally I received the Uri Avnery mailing about the German Film “THEIR MOTHERS, THEIR FATHERS” that is being shown in Israel. We find it all connects – and we start looking into this by bringing here the Uri Avnery article.

Also, these days the Peace Islands Institute, which is connected to a Turkish Cultural Center, had its own events in New York of which one – linked – without mentioning it – to the previous mentioned events – it was a panel on Intergovernmental Relations among Balkan Nations & The EU with the participation of the Ambassadors to the UN from Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia, chaired by the President of the Federation of Balkan American Associations, that followed a similar earlier event that included Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia but never looked at Slovenia or Austria. Then the same Peace Islands Institute followed on its studies of the three Abrahamic religions with a first inroad into Muslim – Buddhist understanding after quite successful previous activities into ethics of Muslim -Jewish mutual acceptance. These days such are events happening in  New York.

Uri Avnery

March 1, 2014

                                    Their Mothers, Their Fathers

IT IS the summer of 1941. Five youngsters – three young men and two young women – meet in a bar and spend a happy evening, flirting with each other, getting drunk, dancing forbidden foreign dances. They have grown up together in the same neighborhood of Berlin.

It is a happy time. The war started by Adolf Hitler a year and a half before has progressed incredibly well. In this short time Germany has conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. The Wehrmacht is invincible. The Führer is a genius, “the greatest military strategist of all times”.

So starts the film that is running now in our cinemas – a unique historical document. It goes on for five breathless hours, and continues to occupy the thoughts and emotions of its viewers for days and weeks.

Basically it is a film made by Germans for Germans. The German title says it all: “Our Mothers, Our Fathers”. The purpose is to answer the questions troubling many of the young Germans of today: Who were our parents and grandparents? What did they do during the terrible war? What did they feel? What was their part in the horrible crimes committed by the Nazis?

These questions are not asked in the film explicitly. But every German viewer is compelled to ask them. There are no clear answers. The film does not probe the depths. Rather, it shows a broad panorama of the German people in wartime, the various sections of society, the different types, from the war criminals, through the passive onlookers, to the victims.

The Holocaust is not the center of events, but it is there all the time, not as a separate event but woven into the fabric of reality.

THE FILM starts in 1941, and therefore cannot answer the question which, to my mind, is the most important one: How could a civilized nation, perhaps the most cultured in the world, elect a government whose program was blatantly criminal?

True, Hitler was never elected by an absolute majority in free elections. But he came very close to it. And he easily found political partners who were ready to help him form a government.

 Some said at the time that it was a uniquely German phenomenon, the expression of the particular German mentality, formed during centuries of history. That theory has been discredited by now. But if so, can it happen in any other country? Can it happen in our own country? Can it happen today? What are the circumstances that make it possible?

The film does not answer these question. It leaves the answers to the viewer.

The young heroes of the film do not ask. They were ten years old when the Nazis came to power, and for them the “Thousand-Year Reich” (as the Nazis called it) was the only reality they knew. It was the natural state of things. That’s where the plot starts.

 TWO OF the youngsters were soldiers. One had already seen war and was wearing a medal for valor. His brother had just been called up. The third young man was a Jew. Like the two girls, they are full of youthful exuberance. Everything was looking fine.

The war? Well, it can’t last much longer, can it? The Führer himself has promised that by Christmas the Final Victory will be won. The five young people promise each other to meet again at Christmas. No one has the slightest premonition of the terrible experiences in store for each of them. 

 While viewing the scene, I could not help thinking about my former class. A few weeks after the Nazis’ assumption of power, I became a pupil in the first class of high school in Hanover. My schoolmates were the same age as the heroes of the film. They would have been called up in 1941, and because it was an elitist school, all of them would probably have become officers.

Half way through the first year in high schooI, my family took me to Palestine. I never met any of my schoolmates again, except one (Rudolf Augstein, the founder of the magazine Der Spiegel, whom I met years after the war and who became my friend again.) What happened to all the others? How many survived the war? How many were maimed? How many had become war criminals?

In the summer of 1941 they were probably as happy as the youngsters in the film, hoping to be home by Christmas.

 THE TWO brothers were sent to the Russian front, an unimaginable hell. The film succeeds in showing the realities of war, easily recognizable by anyone who has been a soldier in combat. Only that this combat was a hundredfold worse, and the film shows it brilliantly.

The older brother, a lieutenant, tries to shield the younger one. The bloodbath that goes on for four more years, day after day, hour after hour, changes their character. They become brutalized. Death is all around them, they see horrible war crimes, they are commanded to shoot prisoners, they see Jewish children butchered. In the beginning they still dare to protest feebly, then they keep their doubts to themselves, then they take part in the crimes as a matter of course. 

One of the young women volunteers for a frontline military hospital, witnesses the awful agonies of the wounded, denounces a Jewish fellow nurse and immediately feels remorse, and in the end is raped by Soviet soldiers near Berlin, as were almost all German women in the areas conquered by the revenge-thirsty Soviet army. 

 Israeli viewers might be more interested in the fate of the Jewish boy, who took part in the happy feast at the beginning. His father is a proud German, who cannot imagine Germans doing the bad things threatened by Hitler. He does not dream of leaving his beloved fatherland. But he warns his son about having sexual relations with his Aryan girlfriend. “It’s against the law!”

When the son tries to flee abroad, “aided” by a treacherous Gestapo officer, he is caught, sent to the death camps, succeeds in escaping on the way, joins the Polish partisans (who hate the Jews more than the Nazis) and in the end survives.

 Perhaps the most tragic figure is the second girl, a frivolous, carefree singer who sleeps with a senior SS officer to further her career, is sent with her troupe to entertain the troops at the front, sees what is really happening, speaks out about the war, is sent to prison and executed in the last hours of the war.

 BUT THE fate of the heroes is only the skeleton of the film. More important are the little moments, the daily life, the portrayal of the various characters of German society.

 For example, when a friend visits the apartment where the Jewish family had been living, the blond Aryan woman who was allotted the place complains about the state of the apartment from which the Jews had been fetched and sent to their death: “They didn’t even clean up before they left! That’s how the Jews are, dirty people!”

Everyone lives in constant fear of being denounced. It is a pervading terror, which nobody can escape. Even at the front, with death staring therm in the face, a hint of doubt about the Final Victory uttered by a soldier is immediately silenced by his comrades. “Are you crazy?”     

Even worse is the deadening atmosphere of universal agreement. From the highest officer to the lowliest maid, everybody is repeating endlessly the propaganda slogans of the regime. Not out of fear, but because they believe every word of the all-pervading propaganda machine. They hear nothing else.

It is immensely important to understand this. In the totalitarian state, fascist or communist or whatever, only the very few free spirits can withstand the endlessly repeated slogans of the government. Everything else sounds unreal, abnormal, crazy. When the Soviet army was already fighting its way through Poland and nearing Berlin, people were unwavering in their belief in the Final Victory. After all, the Führer says so, and the Führer is never wrong. The very idea is preposterous. 

It is this element of the situation that is difficult for many people to grasp. A citizen under a criminal totalitarian regime becomes a child. Propaganda becomes for him reality, the only reality he knows. It is more effective than even the terror.

 
THIS IS the answer to the question we cannot abstain from asking again and again: How was the Holocaust possible? It was planned by a few, but it was implemented by hundreds of thousands of Germans, from the engine driver of the train to the officials who shuffled the papers. How could they do it?

They could, because it was the natural thing to do. After all, the Jews were out to destroy Germany. The communist hordes were threatening the life of every true Aryan. Germany needed more living space. The Führer has said so.

 That’s why the film is so important, not only for the Germans, but for every people, including our own.

People who carelessly play with ultra-nationalist, fascist, racist, or other anti-democratic ideas don’t realize that they are playing with fire. They cannot even imagine what it means to live in a country that tramples on human rights, that despises democracy, that oppresses another people,  that demonizes minorities. The film shows what it is like: hell.

THE FILM does not hide that the Jews were the main victims of the Nazi Reich, and nothing comes near their sufferings. But the second victim was the German people, victims of themselves.

Many people insist that after this trauma, Jews cannot behave like a normal people, and that therefore Israel cannot be judged by the standards of normal states. They are traumatized.

This is true for the German people, too. The very need to produce this unusual film proves that the Nazi specter is still haunting the Germans, that they are still traumatized by their past.

When Angela Merkel came this week to see Binyamin Netanyahu, the whole world laughed at the photo of our Prime Minister’s finger inadvertently painting a moustache on the Kanzlerin’s face.

But the relationship between our two traumatized peoples is far from a joke.

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THE 90 year young URI AVNERY NEVER ENDED HIGH-SCHOOL BUT HE IS NON-DISPUTABLE ISRAEL’S GREATEST JOURNALIST AND MOST FAMOUS EX-MEMBER OF THE KNESSET (PARLIAMENT). WHO COULD SAY WHAT GERMANY LOST – IF NOT FOR HITLER – HE WOULD HAVE HIMSELF BEEN NOW A SECULAR COMPLETELY ASSIMILATED GERMAN?

———————————————————————————————————

Sustaining Ukraine’s Breakthrough.

By George Soros

Following a crescendo of terrifying violence, the Ukrainian uprising has had a surprisingly positive outcome. Contrary to all rational expectations, a group of citizens armed with not much more than sticks and shields made of cardboard boxes and metal garbage-can lids overwhelmed a police force firing live ammunition. There were many casualties, but the citizens prevailed. This was one of those historic moments that leave a lasting imprint on a society’s collective memory.

How could such a thing happen? Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics offers a fitting metaphor. According to Heisenberg, subatomic phenomena can manifest themselves as particles or waves; similarly, human beings may alternate between behaving as individual particles or as components of a larger wave. In other words, the unpredictability of historical events like those in Ukraine has to do with an element of uncertainty in human identity.

People’s identity is made up of individual elements and elements of larger units to which they belong, and peoples’ impact on reality depends on which elements dominate their behavior. When civilians launched a suicidal attack on an armed force in Kyiv on February 20, their sense of representing “the nation” far outweighed their concern with their individual mortality. The result was to swing a deeply divided society from the verge of civil war to an unprecedented sense of unity.

Whether that unity endures will depend on how Europe responds. Ukrainians have demonstrated their allegiance to a European Union that is itself hopelessly divided, with the euro crisis pitting creditor and debtor countries against one another. That is why the EU was hopelessly outmaneuvered by Russia in the negotiations with Ukraine over an Association Agreement.

True to form, the EU under German leadership offered far too little and demanded far too much from Ukraine. Now, after the Ukrainian people’s commitment to closer ties with Europe fueled a successful popular insurrection, the EU, along with the International Monetary Fund, is putting together a multibillion-dollar rescue package to save the country from financial collapse. But that will not be sufficient to sustain the national unity that Ukraine will need in the coming years.

I established the Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine in 1990 – before the country achieved independence. The foundation did not participate in the recent uprising, but it did serve as a defender of those targeted by official repression. The foundation is now ready to support Ukrainians’ strongly felt desire to establish resilient democratic institutions (above all, an independent and professional judiciary). But Ukraine will need outside assistance that only the EU can provide: management expertise and access to markets.

In the remarkable transformation of Central Europe’s economies in the 1990’s, management expertise and market access resulted from massive investments by German and other EU-based companies, which integrated local producers into their global value chains. Ukraine, with its high-quality human capital and diversified economy, is a potentially attractive investment destination. But realizing this potential requires improving the business climate across the economy as a whole and within individual sectors – particularly by addressing the endemic corruption and weak rule of law that are deterring foreign and domestic investors alike.

In addition to encouraging foreign direct investment, the EU could provide support to train local companies’ managers and help them develop their business strategies, with service providers remunerated by equity stakes or profit-sharing. An effective way to roll out such support to a large number of companies would be to combine it with credit lines provided by commercial banks. To encourage participation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) could invest in companies alongside foreign and local investors, as it did in Central Europe.

Ukraine would thus open its domestic market to goods manufactured or assembled by European companies’ wholly- or partly-owned subsidiaries, while the EU would increase market access for Ukrainian companies and help them integrate into global markets.

I hope and trust that Europe under German leadership will rise to the occasion. I have been arguing for several years that Germany should accept the responsibilities and liabilities of its dominant position in Europe. Today, Ukraine needs a modern-day equivalent of the Marshall Plan, by which the United States helped to reconstruct Europe after World War II. Germany ought to play the same role today as the US did then.

I must, however, end with a word of caution. The Marshall Plan did not include the Soviet bloc, thereby reinforcing the Cold War division of Europe. A replay of the Cold War would cause immense damage to both Russia and Europe, and most of all to Ukraine, which is situated between them. Ukraine depends on Russian gas, and it needs access to European markets for its products; it must have good relations with both sides.

Here, too, Germany should take the lead. Chancellor Angela Merkel must reach out to President Vladimir Putin to ensure that Russia is a partner, not an opponent, in the Ukrainian renaissance.

Source: Project Syndicate

Don’t Just Do Something. Sit There.

by Thomas L. Friedman,   Op-Ed Columnist of The New York Times

With Russia growling over the downfall of its ally running Ukraine and still protecting its murderous ally running Syria, there is much talk that we’re returning to the Cold War — and that the Obama team is not up to defending our interests or friends. I beg to differ. I don’t think the Cold War is back; today’s geopolitics are actually so much more interesting than that. And I also don’t think President Obama’s caution is entirely misplaced.

The Cold War was a unique event that pitted two global ideologies, two global superpowers, each with globe-spanning nuclear arsenals and broad alliances behind them. Indeed, the world was divided into a chessboard of red and black, and who controlled each square mattered to each side’s sense of security, well-being and power. It was also a zero-sum game, in which every gain for the Soviet Union and its allies was a loss for the West and NATO, and vice versa.

That game is over. We won. What we have today is the combination of an older game and a newer game. The biggest geopolitical divide in the world today “is between those countries who want their states to be powerful and those countries who want their people to be prosperous,” argues Michael Mandelbaum, professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins.

The first category would be countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea, whose leaders are focused on building their authority, dignity and influence through powerful states. And because the first two have oil and the last has nukes that it can trade for food, their leaders can defy the global system and survive, if not thrive — all while playing an old, traditional game of power politics to dominate their respective regions.

The second category, countries focused on building their dignity and influence through prosperous people, includes all the countries in Nafta, the European Union, and the Mercosur trade bloc in Latin America and Asean in Asia. These countries understand that the biggest trend in the world today is not a new Cold War but the merger of globalization and the information technology revolution. They are focused on putting in place the right schools, infrastructure, bandwidth, trade regimes, investment openings and economic management so more of their people can thrive in a world in which every middle-class job will require more skill and the ability to constantly innovate will determine their standard of living. (The true source of sustainable power.)

But there is also now a third and growing category of countries, which can’t project power or build prosperity. They constitute the world of “disorder.” They are actually power and prosperity sinks because they are consumed in internal fights over primal questions like: Who are we? What are our boundaries? Who owns which olive tree? These countries include Syria, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Congo and other hot spots. While those nations focused on state power do play in some of these countries — Russia and Iran both play in Syria — the states that are more focused on building prosperity are trying to avoid getting too involved in the world of disorder. Though ready to help mitigate humanitarian tragedies there, they know that when you “win” one of these countries in today’s geopolitical game, all you win is a bill.

Ukraine actually straddles all three of these trends. The revolution there happened because the government was induced by Russia, which wants to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence, into pulling out of a trade agreement with the European Union — an agreement favored by the many Ukrainians focused on building a prosperous people. This split has also triggered talk of separatism by the more Russian-speaking and Russian-oriented eastern part of Ukraine.

So what do we do? The world is learning that the bar for U.S. intervention abroad is being set much higher. This is due to a confluence of the end of the Soviet Union’s existential threat, the experience of investing too many lives and $2 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan to little lasting impact, America’s rising energy independence, our intelligence successes in preventing another 9/11 and the realization that to fix what ails the most troubled countries in the world of disorder is often beyond our skill set, resources or patience.

In the Cold War, policy-making was straightforward. We had “containment.” It told us what to do and at almost any price. Today, Obama’s critics say he must do “something” about Syria. I get it. Chaos there can come around to bite us. If there is a policy that would fix Syria, or even just stop the killing there, in a way that was self-sustaining, at a cost we could tolerate and not detract from all the things we need to do at home to secure our own future, I’m for it.

But we should have learned some lessons from our recent experience in the Middle East: First, how little we understand about the social and political complexities of the countries there; second, that we can — at considerable cost — stop bad things from happening in these countries but cannot, by ourselves, make good things happen; and third, that when we try to make good things happen we run the risk of assuming the responsibility for solving their problems, a responsibility that truly belongs to them.

Jewish Afghan War vet killed fighting in Kiev.

The former soldier had drilled and organized protesters for months in the face of police brutality in Independence Square

Alexander Scherbatyuk ‘s funeral in Chernivtsi, Ukraine on February 23, 2014. (courtesy World ORT)

Read more: Jewish Afghan War vet killed fighting in Kiev | The Times of Israel www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-afghan-war-vet-killed-fighting-in-kiev-buried/#ixzz2uNkhWncI

Alexander Scherbatyuk, 46, was shot by police snipers Thursday as he and fellow Afghanistan War veterans led the protest’s bloody struggle against Berkut government riot police.

At the height of the violence in Kiev’s Independence Square Thursday, dozens were killed and hundreds wounded when police snipers were deployed to the hilly rises surrounding the plaza. A government inquiry is set to investigate the use of police force.

According to The Daily Mail, troops of riot police fell to their knees in a Monday night rally and “begged forgiveness” for excessive force against antigovernment protesters. Others have taken their weapons and fled in anticipation of the investigation’s results.

Scherbatyuk and other Afghanistan War veterans first became involved in the protest movement after riot police brutally beat unarmed students in the first round of public upheavals three months ago. In subsequent months Scherbatyuk drilled and organized protesters in anticipation of another violent stand.

Scherbatyuk’s body made the eight-hour journey from Kiev, where he had spent the past several months deeply involved with the protest movement, to his family in Chernivtsi, where it was received by his wife and two children.

David Benish, head of the World ORT Representative Office for CIS, Central Asia, Caucasian States & Baltic States, attended the funeral Sunday outside Chernivtsi’s Museum of Bukovinian Jewish History and Culture. He estimates some 10,000 came to pay respects before the body, with a kippa placed upon it in a visual and unusual reminder of the victim’s Jewishness, was taken to the city’s central cemetery.

One of Scherbatyuk’s two children, Dan, is a ninth grader at the Chernivtsi ORT school. “Dan is an excellent student. When he started at the school he didn’t know anything [Jewishly]. Now he speaks Hebrew, he knows about Judaism and Israel,” Benish told The Times of Israel Tuesday after arriving mid-day from Kiev.

The Scherbatyuk family received initial financial support of 10,000 Ukrainian hryvna (approximately $1,000) from World ORT to cover immediate costs and Benish has approached donors for continuing support.

Benish is also reaching out for donations to defray the private armed security companies the four Ukraine ORT schools have employed. With the “significant unquiet” in the state, World ORT feels the safety of the children is top priority and paid out of pocket for the emergency school guards.

“Right now there’s no gunfire, but there’s a huge problem of personal security… there are potential problems with xenophobia — hopefully not anti-Semisitm, but in such chaos, things like this rear their heads,” said Benish.

Julia Zlobina and Alexei Sitnikov of Azerbaijan during their ice dancing routine, performed to the soundtrack of Pina, a German documentary about the choreographer Pina Bausch. Chang W. Lee of The New York Times produced this image by making multiple exposures.

The best final review we found we take in part from the Guardian of the UK, but further down we will have our own evaluation which is stresses point that were only hinted at by the Guardian that was somewhat influenced by the home-country success of the recent London Olympics..

• Owen Gibson in Sochi

  from The Guardian, Monday 24 February 2014

Performers create the Olympic rings during the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Photograph: Ivan Sekretarev/AP

Russia could really use some help right now, what with the Olympic hockey team eliminated and the national spirit as vacant as some of the apartments newly built along Sochi’s Black Sea promenade.

Even the official Sochi bear mascot was photographed with his head in his hands after Wednesday’s humiliating defeat to Finland, as if to say, “I came out of hibernation for this?”

So don’t be surprised if Judge No. 7 in the women’s figure skating competition Thursday is a certain someone named Vladimir V. Putin. He may not give a flip about a triple flip, but, hey, a country’s honor is at stake. A president’s gotta do what a president’s gotta do. Maybe he’ll even get to wear one of those cute judging scarves.

No Russian woman has won an Olympic gold medal for skating by that time. But Adelina Sotnikova, 17, sits in second place, less than a point behind Kim Yu-na, the defending champion from South Korea. Maybe Sotnikova will hold up under pressure. After all, she won her first national championship at 12.   {She did in effect win – but the reaction was very negative as it seems that the Korean who got the silver should have received the gold.}

Another Russian teenager, Yulia Lipnitskaya, 15, was supposed to be a gold medal candidate. Unfortunately, she skated as if she were playing hockey against Finland, falling on a triple flip and winding up in fifth place after the short program.

That left Sotnikova to rescue a country’s wounded pride – so the pressure was on her.

“The last hope,” said Elena Vaytsekhovskaya, a sports columnist from Moscow who also happens to be the 1976 Olympic champion in platform diving.

Immediately after the hockey defeat, Vaytsekhovskaya said she was showered with e-mail messages, asking her for links to the figure skating coverage in her newspaper, Sport-Express.

“I think everyone is looking for positive emotions at the ice rink,” she said.

Even if Sotnikova had not won on Thursday, she was likely to fare better than Evgeni Plushenko, the four-time Olympic medalist who theatrically withdrew from the men’s competition at the exact moment he was supposed to skate, citing a bad back.

Plushenko has been roundly criticized for not bowing out earlier and giving another Russian man a chance to compete. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a grandstanding leader of a nationalist opposition party, said, “This invalid has brought shame upon us.”

Or was that the hockey team he was talking about?

The Ukraine as fly in the Putin’s Sochi Ointment – ah! – that old “Little Russia” trouble-makers! THEIR WOMEN WANT TO WEAR BLACK RIBBONS WHEN ON THE GOLD STAND AFTER BEATING THE RUSSIANS? Yulia Tymoshenko will be freed by a Parliament decission from the Russian-Ukrainian jail. Ukraine’s Parliament voted unanimously today to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office. – See more at: The Ukraine as fly in the Putin’s Sochi Ointment – ah! – that old “Little Russia” trouble-makers! THEIR WOMEN WANT TO WEAR BLACK RIBBONS WHEN ON THE GOLD STAND AFTER BEATING THE RUSSIANS? Yulia Tymoshenko will be freed by a Parliament decission from the Russian-Ukrainian jail. Ukraine’s Parliament voted unanimously today to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office. – See more at: See more at: 

then – to the actual count of medals – taking the listing in a way favored by the Russians – the listing according to GOLD Medals:

The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics

Medal standings

	Country				Total

1	Russia	13	11	9	33
2	Norway	11	5	10	26
3	Canada	10	10	5	25
4	United States	9	7	12	28
5	Netherlands	8	7	9	24
6	Germany	8	6	5	19
7	Switzerland	6	3	2	11
8	Belarus	5	0	1	6
9	Austria	4	8	5	17
10	France	4	4	7	15
11	Poland	4	1	1	6
12	China	3	4	2	9
13	South Korea	3	3	2	8
14	Sweden	2	7	6	15
15	Czech Republic	2	4	2	8
16	Slovenia	2	2	4	8
17	Japan	1	4	3	8
18	Finland	1	3	1	5
19	Great Britain	1	1	2	4
20	Ukraine	1	0	1	2
21	Slovakia	1	0	0	1
22	Italy	0	2	6	8
23	Latvia	0	2	2	4
24	Australia	0	2	1	3
25	Croatia	0	1	0	1
26	Kazakhstan	0	0	1	1

but five of the Russian Golds were achieved by very new Russians

Victor AN

Russian Fed.

Short Track

3  Three Gold 1   One Silve

of South Korea

Vic WILD

Russian Fed.

Snowboard

2  GOLD

of Colorado, USA

So in effect it was Norway that won the Gold rather then Russia. Furthermore, the Putin push to win by all means involved also money prizes to the successful winners and money invested in their training. These are issues that will not be just glanced over in US Congress that is sure to be upset by the meager US results. In short – Congress will have to consider that you win by investing money – so if they deny funding for sports the US is bound to lose in competitions.

======================

AND A FINAL HAPPY NOTE FROM THE TOURISM INDUSTRY:

The Sochi Winter Olympics concluded on Sunday, 23.02.14 night on a note of Global Unity and the viewers were taken through a journey of a cultural and artistic fair of Russians own indigenous treasures.

The ceremony was closed by Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee.

Bach was very happy with the way these “Athletes’ Games have united the world, and how thousands of global travelers come from around the world to visit and participate in these games. The Sochi Olympics have sent a message of peace, tolerance and respect, he said.

The evening was marked with several attractions, hundreds of silvery “fish” swam in the “Black Sea” on the floor of the stadium and they began to form the five Olympic rings. But like in the opening ceremony, one of the dots of white light failed to open — at first. Eventually, it sprang into form, too much laughter and cheers.

There also were two final medal ceremonies, including the crowd-pleasing awards for the top three — all Russians — in the men’s 50-kilometer cross-country ski race. In the other the crowd was reminded that Russia got nothing in the Hokey competition.
{this is my addition – the amazing original did not note it – but noted the happy one for Russia – the sweep of the grueling cross-country long race.}

The closing ceremony featured 62 classical pianists playing at one time, members of the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets performing moments from some of their most famous productions, and a tribute to Russian literary heroes like Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Olympic flag was lowered and given to representatives of Pyeongchang, South Korea, the host city for the Winter Olympics in four years.

 

Parts of an analysis of what happens in the Ukraine that was sent to us by  a friend – Jay Hauben of Columbia University – and is based on a blog -
vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-geopolitics-of-ukrainian-conflict.html

We sanitized somewhat what we took from that analysis – simply because we could not accept some basic prejudices of the writer – though we find good value in his basic analysis – let us start with a look at the various actors, as he sees them – one by one.

Yes, we know that some of the Western Ukraine Nationalism comes from old Nazi co-conspirators trying to revive Ruthenian Neo-Nazism, just like some in the Syrian insurgency come from the most extreme elements of Nazi-style Neo-Islamism. These are the hang-ons – the barnacles – when some truly popular movement is formed. Not to recognize that truly non-beligerant color revolutions are possible is nothing less then denying that the Berlin Wall came down thanks to people using hammers and crow-bars. Yes – it happens that people have had enough after centuries of Russian oppression from czars and their Soviet and Russian followers – and what every analyst tells you – the present Czar Putin is dreaming off these days as well.  Nevertheless – let us proceed and get some value from the basic analysis of the actors.

The dissatisfied Ukrainian people:

There can be absolutely no doubt that a large segment of the Ukrainian population is deeply unhappy with the regime in power, Yanukovich himself, and what has been going on in the Ukraine for many years.  As I have written many times before, the Ukraine is essentially in the hands of various oligarchs, just like Russia in the 1990s, but only worse.  The vast majority the Ukrainian politicians are for sale to the highest bidder, this is true for the members of Parliament, the Presidential Administration, the regional governors, the government and, of course, of Yanukovich himself.  Collectively, these oligarchs also own the media, the courts, the police, banks and everything else. As a direct result of that, the Ukrainian economy has been going down the tubes for years and currently is pretty much in ruins.

It should therefore surprise nobody that most Ukrainians are unhappy and what they want is prosperity, safety, the rule of law, business opportunities, the means for personal, social, professional and spiritual development.  Basically, they want what every human being wants: decent living condition.  Some of them see the EU as the best hope of achieving this goal, others see a participation in an economic union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan as a much better option. The exact ratio really does not matter for a simple and mostly overlooked reason: the people of the Ukraine don’t matter at all in this conflict, they are just pawns used by all sides.

The main Ukrainian politicians:

Well, in theory, Yanukovich, Timoshenko, Klitchko and Iatseniuk all want different things, but in reality they all have exactly the same agenda: to please their puppet-masters while making a career in politics.  The case of Tiagnibok might be a little different.  He has some very real chances of becoming a really powerful figure in the western Ukraine.  He is smart enough to realize that neither the USA nor the EU really want him around, but that he commands a much more powerful force (both politically and in terms of violent power) than any other Ukrainian politician.  Regardless, the leaders of the opposition or the pro-regime politicians are all puppets in the hands of much more powerful forces and if Tiagnibok is an exception to this rule, then he does not matter much either since his true ambitions are really local, limited to the western Ukraine.

Having rapidly looked at the locals, let us now turn to the folks that do matter:

The Ukrainian oligarchs:

Most of them believe that as long as the Ukraine maintains an anti-Russian stance the EU will let them do whatever the hell they want inside the Ukraine.  They are correct.  For them, signing an otherwise meaningless agreement with the EU is basically accepting the following deal: they become the faithful servants of their EU overlords in exchange for what the EU overlords will let them continue to pillage the Ukraine in pretty much any way they want.

There is a smaller group of oligarchs who still stands to lose more than win if the Russian-Ukrainian relations sour and if Russia introduces barriers to trade with the Ukraine (which Russia would have to do if the Ukraine signs a free trade agreement with the EU). These oligarchs believe that more money can be made from Russia than form the EU and they are the folks who convinced Yanukovich to make his infamous “zag” from the EU towards Russia.  Thus, there is a split inside the Ukrainian oligarchy whose representatives can be found on both sides of the current struggle.

The EU:

The EU is in a deep, systemic, economic, social and political crisis and it is absolutely desperate for new opportunities to rescue itself from its slow-motion collapse.  For the EU, the Ukraine is first and foremost a market to sells its goods and services.  The Ukraine is also a way to make the EU look bigger, more powerful, more relevant.  Some believe that the Ukraine can also provide cheap labor for the EU, but I don’t believe that this is a major consideration for the following reasons: the EU already has way too many immigrants, and the there has already been a steady stream of Ukrainians (and Balts) leaving their country for a better life in the West.  Thus, what the EU really wants is a way to benefit from the Ukraine but without suffering too many negative consequences from any agreement.  Hence the 1500 pages of the proposed agreement with the EU.

The USA:

The goals of the USA in the Ukraine are completely different from the goals of the EU, hence the very real tensions between their diplomats so well expressed by the “fuck the EU!” of Madam Nuland.  Furthermore, and unlike the bankrupt EU, the US has spent over $5 Billion  to achieve its goals in the Ukraine.  But so what are these goals really?

This is were it gets *really* interesting.

First, we have to go back to the crucial statement made by Hillary Clinton in early December of 2012:

    There is a move to re-Sovietise the region, (…)  It.s not going to be called that. It.s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,   (…) But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it..

Now, it is absolutely irrelevant to argue about whether Hillary was right or wrong in her interpretation of what the Eurasian Union is supposed to become, what matters is that she, and her political allies, believe, and they really believe, is that Putin wants to re-create the Soviet Union.  No matter how stupid this notion is, we have to always keep in mind that this is what the likes of Hillary sincerely believe.

Next, we need to recall another crucial statement, made by Zbigniew Brzezinski who wrote:

    Without Ukraine Russia ceases to be empire, while with Ukraine – bought off first and subdued afterwards, it automatically turns into empire.According to him, the new world order under the hegemony of the United States is created against Russia and on the fragments of Russia. Ukraine is the Western outpost to prevent the recreation of the Soviet Union.

Again, it does not matter at all whether Zbig is right or wrong. What matters is that Zbig and Hillary jointly provide us with the key to the current US policy in the Ukraine: to prevent Russia from becoming a superpower.  For them, and unlike the Europeans, its not about “getting the Ukraine,” its about “not letting the Russians get the Ukraine”.  And this is absolutely crucial: from the US point of view, chaos, mayhem and even a full-scale civil war in the Ukraine is much, much, preferable to any, and I mean any, form of economic or political union between Russia and the Ukraine.  For the Americans, this is a zero-sum game: the bigger the loss for Russia, the bigger the win for the Anglo Empire.

Russia:

Here he writes for no clear reason that he feels like completely switching his point of view -  no matter how counter-intuitive this might seem to be – regardless of the extreme closeness between Russian and Ukrainian languages and cultures, regardless of a long common history, regardless of the fact that both Russians and Ukrainians jointly defeated Nazi Germany, regardless of the fact that the Ukraine is a big neighbor of Russia and regardless of the fact that the two countries have close economic ties, Russia does not need the Ukraine.

Hillary and Zbig are simply plain wrong.  Furthermore, Russia has absolutely no intention of re-creating the Soviet Union or, even less so, becoming an Empire.  This is all absolute nonsense, stupid propaganda to feed to the western masses, Cold War cliches which are absolutely inapplicable to the current realities.  Furthermore, Russia is already a superpower, quite capable of challenging the EU and the USA together (as the example of the war in Syria has so dramatically illustrated).  In fact, Russia has had its most spectacular growth precisely at a time when the Ukraine was occupied by Poland (14th-17th century):

Growth of Russia by years
Why would modern Russia need the Ukraine?  The Ukrainian economy is in ruins, the country is plagued by immense social and political tensions, and there are no natural resources in the Ukraine which Russia would want.  As for the “being a superpower”, the Ukraine’s military is a farce, and the Russian military would have little need to the so-called “strategic depth” offered by the Ukraine: this is 19-20th century military logic, modern wars are though throughout the depth of the enemy’s territory, with long-range strike weapons and Russia is quite capable of closing the Ukrainian airspace without any form of economic or political union with it.

No, what Russia needs first and foremost has stability and prosperity in the Ukraine.  Not only does a non trivial-part of the Russian economy have ties with the Ukraine, but a total collapse of such a big neighbor is bound to affect the Russian economy too (which, by the way, is pretty close to getting into a recession for the first time in a long while).  Furthermore, millions of Russians live in the Ukraine and millions of Ukrainians live in Russia.  Most Russian families have ties with the Ukraine.  So the last thing Russia wants is a civil war in which it would almost inevitably be drawn in.

Even in Crimea, all Russia really needs is a status quo: peace, prosperity, a good tourism infrastructure to host Russian tourists, and stable basing right for the Black Sea Fleet.  For that Russia does not need to occupy or annex Crimea.  However, should the Crimean Peninsula be attacked by the Ukrainian neo-Nazis there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the Black Sea Fleet will intervene to protect the local population with which it has many family ties.   It is important to remember that the Black Sea Fleet is infinitely better trained and equipped that the Ukrainian military and that it includes a very powerful Naval Infantry force (one Brigade and one Battalion, the latter specialized in counter-terrorism operations).  It is one thing to beat up and burn riot cops and quite another to deal with battle hardened (Chechnia, Georgia) and highly trained elite forces armed to the teeth with the latest and best military equipment.

As for the big scheme of things, Russia sees its future in the North and the East, not at all in its southwest.  The Arctic, Siberia, the Far East, China and the Pacific, these are the direction towards which Russian strategists are looking for the future of Russia, not the dying and decaying EU or the ruined and unstable lands of the Ukraine!

So what is likely to happen next?

I think that the EU is most unlikely to achieve its objectives in the Ukraine for a very simple reason: the Ukrainian nationalists and the so-called “opposition” (i.e. the armed insurgency) are all bought and paid for by the US.  The EU bureaucrats can continue visiting the Ukraine and make loud statements, they really don’t matter.  So its really the US vs Russia and here I have to say that the US goals are far easier to achieve than the Russian ones: all the USA needs chaos, something easy to achieve, and relatively cheap to finance, while Russia needs stability and prosperity and that, at the very least, means to provide is cardiac resuscitation to the basically ruined Ukrainian economy, and to jump-start some kind of much needed reforms. The latter probably cannot be done without breaking the backs of the Ukrainian oligarchs.  Does Russia have the means to achieve this?       I very much doubt it.  Not with its current signs of upcoming economic problems and not with a spineless and corrupt clown like Yanukovich in power.  So then what?

Well, if rescuing the Ukraine is not an option, then protecting Russia from the inevitable chaos and mayhem is the only option left.  That, and making darn sure that Crimea is safe.  Russia could, for instance, provide direct assistance to the eastern Ukraine, especially to region like Kharkov which are governed by competent and determined people. Beyond that, the only option left for Russia is to hunker down and wait for either a viable force to take power in Kiev or for the Ukraine to break-up in pieces.

So what about the Ukrainian people he asks?   The writer’s stand becomes clear here – he is for the Ukrainians accepting Russian hegemony for reasons known only to him. He may have had a good description of the actors but is doomed to fail because of some hidden goals he has.

I think that where I stand on this issue is clear from the above.  The EU needs them as slaves, the US needs them as pawns, and the only party which needs them prosperous is Russia.  That is simply a fact of geo-strategy.  If the Ukrainians are too stupid and too blinded by their rabid nationalism to understand that, then let them pay the price for their folly.  If they are smart enough to realize it, then let them find the courage to act on it and make it possible for Russia to help them.  If not, then at the very least I would advise them to stop hallucinating about some kind of invasion of “Moskal Spetsnaz forces” to invade and occupy the “independent Ukraine”.  Moscow has better things to do and is already busy elsewhere.

signed The Saker – The Vineyard Saker that is – whoever he is.

=========================

from the goals of the assembly -

“The Arctic Circle is nonprofit and nonpartisan. Organizations,  forums, think tanks, corporations and public associations around the world are invited to hold meetings within the Arctic Circle platform to advance their own missions and the broader goal of increasing collaborative decision-making without surrendering their institutional independence.

The Arctic Circle is designed to increase participation in Arctic dialogue and strengthen the international focus on the future of the Arctic. Participating organizations will maintain their full institutional independence, identity and decision-making abilities. To this end, the Arctic Circle aims to create opportunities for everyone to attend different meetings, conduct their own networking and engage in one-on-one informal discussions. Organizations will be able to decide their own agendas and convene their own meetings.”

The Reykjavik 20013 meeting was the Assembly’s Inaugural – to be followed by a 20014 Assembly in a location that was to be decided at a closed meeting following immediately the open 2013 meeting. We post this now because the 2014 meeting was set already – it wil be held at the same place in Reykjavik September 5-7, 2014. Then in 2015 it will move to Anchorage, Alaska, USA.

“Following the meeting, participating organizations will be invited to a brainstorming session to contribute ideas for the 2014 Arctic Circle assembly.”

it said – Eventually – date and location – will be posted on - www.arcus.org/events/arctic-calen…
and   www.state.gov/documents/organizat…

NOW THE NEW MATERIAL CAN BE FOUND WITH THE HELP OF INFORMATION WE JUST RECEIVED:

As someone who attended the inaugural Arctic Circle Assembly, held October 12-14, 2013, in Reykjavík, Iceland, you might like to see our latest brief, which summarizes the event and describes the mission and structure of the Arctic Circle.

The Assembly attracted more than 1,200 attendees from more than 40 countries and proved to be the most diverse international gathering of its kind.

You can download the brief at ArcticCircle.org. We encourage you to share it with interested colleagues and with other individuals and organizations in your network to promote participation at the second annual Assembly.

Thank you for participating in the Arctic Circle
and helping advance the dialogue on  these crucial issues.
We look forward to reconvening with you September 5-7, 2014, in Reykjavík.

As protests again turn violent between Ukraine government forces and opposition protesters, the strain of the conflict is being felt by Ukrainian athletes in Sochi. Reuters reported that some of the Ukrainian Olympic team had chosen to return home.

“I believe some of them have decided to return home and [Ukraine Olympic Committee President] Sergey Bubka has said he absolutely respects every individual’s right to make their own decision,” said IOC spokesman Mark Adams.

A Ukraine team official said Alpine skier Bogdana Matsotska and her father, who is also her coach, Oleg Matsotskyy, had pulled out. There was no information on whether they were actually departing the Black Sea resort, or if additional Ukrainian athletes had opted to pull out.

Ukraine team officials and some athletes held a minute’s silence in memory of the victims and black ribbons were added to Ukraine flags hanging on the balconies of their building in the athletes’ village.

Matsotska told the Associated Press that she was leaving out of protest for what was happening in her home country.

“I don’t want to participate when in my country people die,” [she said].

The 24-year-old skier is refusing to ski in Friday’s slalom, her third and best event at the Sochi Olympics.

Matsotska says Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych “has to be jailed, and for a long time … for all the lives that he took.”

She says “I hope that I will be heard by the world.”

In Sochi, the 43-athlete contingent from Ukraine attempted to find ways to show their support before returning home, some were more successful than others. The Ukrainian athletes were entered into nine sports: biathlon (11), cross country (8), figure skating (6), luge (6 ) freestyle skiing (6 ), alpine skiing (2), snowboarding (2), nordic combined and short track (1). From the AP on Wednesday:

Ukraine’s Olympic Committee asked that its athletes be allowed to wear black armbands honoring those who died in the protest, saying on its website that it wants to “share deep pain over the loss of fellow countrymen” by displaying them as an “expression of sorrow and sympathy.”

Then also: “Ukraine women’s team provides good news.”

From left, Ukraine’s relay team Vita Semerenko, Juliya Dzhyma, Olena Pidhrushna and Valj Semerenko pose with an Ukraine’s flag, after winning the gold medal in the women’s biathlon 4x6k relay at the 2014 Winter Olympics, Friday, Feb. 21, 2014, in Krasnaya Polyana, Russia. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

THE UKRAINIANS WON THE GOLD WITH THE RUSSIANS GETTING THE SILVER – or UKRAINE BEATS RUSSIA. NORWAY GOT THIRD PLACE.

—————————–

AND LATEST NEWS FROM KIEV AS REPORTED BY THE EUobserver:

Embattled President Viktor Yanukovych and the leaders of the three opposition parties agreed on Friday (21 February) to a number of demands in a wider effort to stabilise the country, which has been gripped by three months of unrest.

The deal calls for constitutional reforms, a coalition and national unity government, a law to restore the 2004 constitution, presidential elections by December, an independent investigation into the violence, and a promise not to impose a state of emergency.

The parliament has already voted to restore the 2004 constitution which weakens presidential powers.

Yanukovych has himself declared his intention to initiate early presidential elections.

Foreign ministers from Germany, France and Poland helped broker the agreement in Kiev.

All three released a joint statement commending “the parties for their courage and commitment to the agreement and call for an immediate end to all violence and confrontation in Ukraine.”

US ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt congratulated the three foreign ministers.

from: ‘New’ Russia in Sochi: Same old Russia in Ukraine

By Frida Ghit, cNN opinion, February 20, 2014.

At the heart of the battle in Kiev lies a fundamental question: Is Ukraine a free nation or is it a piece of Moscow — a piece on Putin’s chessboard? The more immediate question is how far the Moscow-backed regime will go to put down opposition protests.

As it happens, both Sochi and Ukraine play a large role in Putin’s strategy. To Putin, staging a successful Olympics is a way to consolidate power, to build up his image for domestic and international audiences, and to show a resurgent, self-assured and powerful Russia under his rule.

What happens in Ukraine is part of the same larger objective, but it is far more important.

Ukraine has experienced much bloodshed throughout its history, with foreign powers inflicting unspeakable devastation. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has struggled to get back on its feet, with little success.

A decade ago, pro-Western demonstrators managed to depose a Moscow-allied president, Viktor Yanukovich, and replace him with a new leader who wanted closer ties to the West. That uprising, known as the Orange Revolution, was part of a wave of “color revolutions” along Russia’s borders, and it inspired protests in Russia, which Putin swiftly put down.

The most recent crisis burst on the scene in November when Yanukovich (once again in power after his 1995 defeat) decided not to sign a trade deal with the European Union, an agreement that would have increased links with the West and was fiercely opposed by Moscow. Russia wants the former Soviet republics to join a Moscow-centered customs union.

The decision to turn away from Europe enraged the opposition, bringing hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.

Protesters were incensed by what they saw, quite correctly, as acquiescence to Russian bullying. In August, when Ukrainian officials were negotiating the EU’s Eastern Partnership agreement, Moscow made it clear it would not tolerate a turn to the West.

Russia, Ukraine’s principal trading partner, suddenly imposed crippling sanctions against Ukrainian imports. Putin’s top economic adviser explained it as “preventive measures” in case Ukraine decided to “take the suicidal step” of signing an agreement with the EU.

Moscow has used similar bullying tactics with other former USSR members. Armenia had spent years working on a deal to join the EU Eastern Partnership. Then abruptly in September, while pressure was coming down on Ukraine, the Armenian president met with Putin in Moscow and announced the end of the talks with Europe, triggering protests in the Armenian capital.

For Ukrainians, the EU deal symbolized a new future, the chance of economic and political modernization and rule of law. Europe required reforms as part of the deal. The Russian customs union cements the status quo.

Putin offered Yanukovich $15 billion in loans to help the country through its economic crisis. He also persuaded him to take a much harder line against protesters. The Ukrainian president had repeatedly pledged not to use force against protesters. According to The New York Times, he changed his mind after meeting with Putin in Sochi.

Ukrainians have long been divided between easterners, who favor close ties with Russia, and westerners, who feel more European. But persistent economic stagnation and the ability to travel abroad and compare conditions have brought new impetus to calls for reform.

The Ukrainian economy is mired in deep corruption, with Russia-style oligarchs making enormous fortunes in shady deals — such as those allegedly made ahead of the Sochi Olympics — while the economy fails to offer better prospects. Transparency International ranks Ukraine as one of the world’s most corrupt countries.

Next door in Poland, for example, which is now part of the EU, per capita income has grown steadily, now topping $18,000, up about 50% in the last decade. Ukraine, meanwhile, has per capita gross domestic product of $6,300, even lower than it was five years ago.

Perhaps nothing rankles Ukrainians more than Putin’s attitude toward their country. In 2008, when then-President Viktor Yushchenko tried to join NATO, Putin warned the West to keep its hands off Ukraine, calling it “Little Russia,” a term dating back to the days when Imperial Russia’s czars ruled parts of Ukraine. A Russian newspaper reported that Putin told then-U.S. President George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a state.”

What started as protests over a trade deal has moved far beyond. Demonstrators demand constitutional reform. Demonstrations aim at ending the authoritarianism of the Yanukovich regime, empowering parliament and laying the groundwork for political and economic progress.

Unfortunately, the protests have attracted a segment of thuggish extreme right-wing groups. Estimates vary on their size and strength within the opposition. But their presence has given the regime and its Russian backers an excuse to label the protesters as fascists and neo-Nazis.

In predictable fashion, Russia has also blamed the United States for the turmoil, accusing Washington of trying to impose the “Western vector” of development and of telling “a sovereign state what they should do next.”

The United States is, in fact, expressing support for the protesters, but it is proposing a power-sharing government until the next elections. If anything, Washington and the EU have failed to offer as much backing as they should. Their disagreements have been aired publicly in embarrassing leaked recordings — although they are not verified.

Their reluctance to challenge Putin’s geopolitical claim to controlling Ukraine is a source of profound frustration for Ukrainians who say they are being sacrificed to appease Putin.

Opposition leaders have met with Western officials to request more support.

What is most striking about the protests has been their perseverance through the brutal Ukrainian winter. Three months into the crisis, with the intensity of the violence and the bloodshed increasing, Putin has reason to worry about how this will end.

Just as he wants the Sochi Olympics to show what his Russia is capable of accomplishing, he knows the Russian people are keeping an eye on what exactly Ukrainian protesters can achieve. The raging flames of Kiev now matter more than the carefully tended fire in Sochi.

==========================

Natasha Lysova told The Associated Press earlier Saturday that Tymoshenko had been released from the prison where she is serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of office.

But she later said that she meant only that a decision taken by parliament meant she must be freed immediately.

Tymoshenko is the arch-rival of beleaguered President Viktor Yanukovych.

=================================

LATEST NEWS AS PER CNN:              Ukraine’s Parliament voted unanimously today to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office.

Earlier, the President insisted in an interview aired on Ukrainian TV that he is not resigning and not leaving the country. It came after his absence from the capital, Kiev.

On Friday, he signed a landmark peace deal with the opposition to end days of bloody protests.

——

Finally – Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko has been released from prison, her party spokesperson said.

Tymoshenko, who is a former Prime Minister, lost the 2010 presidential election to Viktor Yanukovych.

The following year, she was sentenced to seven years in prison after being convicted of abuse of authority over a natural gas deal negotiated with Russia in 2009.

She repeatedly called the trial a farce. The United States and Europe saw the punishment as politically motivated.

In 2012, after Tymoshenko was allegedly beaten unconscious by guards, she went on a hunger strike to draw attention to “violence and lack of rights” in her country.

She is known as a hero of the country’s 2004 revolution.

——-

So ten years later, with Sochi in the World Public’s eye – THE UKRAINE WIN THE GOLD OF SPEAKING UP FOR THEMSELVES.

Ukrainian Skier and Coach Withdraw to Protest Kiev Violence

By SAM BORDEN

Bogdana Matsotska, an Alpine skier, and her father and coach, Oleg Matsotskyy, say they are leaving Sochi to show solidarity with protesters in the capital city of Kiev.

——————————————————————

SOCHI, Russia — ON Feb. 7, the opening day of the Olympics, several people walked out onto Red Square in Moscow. When they attempted to sing the Russian national anthem, all were arrested and taken to the nearest police station. “We were holding small rainbow flags to show support for the L.G.B.T. community,” wrote my protester friend, who found herself taken into custody for the first time in her life.

The following day, the police arrested a group that had gathered in Manezhnaya Square, in Moscow. The arrests came immediately after about 60 people unfurled umbrellas in support of Russia’s only independent television channel, Dozhd. The channel was recently dropped by all major cable operators under pressure from the government, which appeared to have been exacting revenge for a viewer poll question it didn’t like.

The question was: “Would it have been better to surrender Leningrad to the Nazis during World War II in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives?” One question — deemed “unpatriotic” — and the channel is on the verge of closing. Simply because President Vladimir V. Putin knows best how one should love one’s country.

This week in Sochi, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, another member of Pussy Riot, and I were detained three times and then, on Wednesday, assaulted by Cossack militiamen with whips and pepper spray. Mr. Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.

More than $50 billion was sunk into the construction of Olympic venues — giant, meaningless, alien objects whose purpose is to feed the ego of the country’s president, elevating him to the rank of a pharaoh or emperor. The host city of Sochi has essentially become a closed military facility. Access to the city is restricted and will remain so for another month after the Olympics end.

Environmentalists’ concerns about illegal construction, enabled by corrupt business dealings, are well founded. Mr. Putin has turned the wartime siege of Leningrad into a sacrosanct event, all while imposing a new siege on Sochi.

Can a pharaoh shut down a city, can he declare a blockade in time of peace? Yes, if he lives and rules in Russia. This is how Dozhd came to be denounced by the government — for posing a question about a siege during a siege.

The face of these Olympics is deceptive, as is the entire authoritarian regime. At first, the authorities do not strike out at you directly. Rather, they systematically force you to adopt the only stance they deem proper, which is to move passively, apolitically, through the entire chain of post-Soviet institutions, from primary school to the grave.

Nikolai Zabolotsky, a Russian avant-garde poet who was repressed under Stalin and spent eight years in exile, compared progressing through life’s stages to being transferred through the gulag’s series of transit prisons. The realities of the Stalin era made the voicing of a direct metaphor like this necessary, even at the cost of losing one’s freedom.

The reality of contemporary Russia, and Mr. Putin’s goal, is to kill such metaphors — by force, if necessary — and to kill the reflection, analysis and criticism they carry. The quasi-fascist direction of this regime over the past 13 years depends on this deadening of the intellect. For as soon as obliviousness ends, so does Mr. Putin’s power.

Those who are writing about the Olympics and who are currently present at the Games should not fall into this forgetfulness, because it is fatal. When you talk about the Olympics — whether you like it or not — you are talking about Russia. For this is a country where people are arrested for waving umbrellas and little flags, where they are sent to penal colonies, like the environmental activist Yevgeny Vitishko, for writing a slogan like “the forest is for everybody” on a governor’s fence, and where they may be sentenced to five or six years in prison for voicing their dissent against the status quo.

Because of their dissent, the most honest people in our country are currently in jail as defendants in the Bolotnaya Square case. They came to the Moscow square on May 6, 2012, to join a protest against fraud in the presidential elections, and they chanted, “Putin, get out!” They were beaten with truncheons by riot police officers, arrested, jailed and put on trial.

For the past year and a half, they have had to make repeated appearances in a kangaroo court, where, day after day, they are being silently tortured as part of Mr. Putin’s broader policy. On Feb. 5, they made their final pleas; their verdicts are due on Feb. 21.

This story is bigger than the Olympic venues, bigger even than the Olympics. This is a story about the real Russia of today. It exists, and the price of its existence is prison sentences for innocent people who speak out.

Maria Alyokhina is a member of Pussy Riot. This article was translated by Anna Kadysheva from the Russian.

Europe has learned nothing from its history!

EU unsure who to blacklist in Ukraine.

20.02.14

By Andrew Rettman