Putin is Fully Americanized. My Word Salad Rant.
So here is proof from the HRW of the laws passed to genocide (to use the words of our western MSM) non-ukrainians. Also note that there was very much (not known here in the US, to my knowledge) that the original coup was with many far-right and pro-nazi types. Now, places like the LRB that make note of this downplay it, and I'm not sure why. It's a bfd, if you ask me.
Here and here on the far right:
But it makes no mention of reports to oversee whether U.S weapons go to white supremacists like the Azov Battalion, a unit in the Ukrainian National Guard with ties to the country’s far-right, ultranationalist National Corps party and Azov movement. Last year, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to label the Azov Battalion a foreign terrorist organization, saying it “uses the internet to recruit new members and then radicalizes them to use violence to pursue its white identity political agenda.”
So too are the laws passed against Russians. Some laws, from what I've heard form Russian sources and not outright denied by our MSM, ban any images of Lenin, while not doing the same for Hitler. [2]
Again, not to deny that Putin's essay and view of Ukraine's existence are bs, but he is being too "American foreign policy mimicry" for my tastes. To that end, claiming a nation barely exists is beyond dumb. Especially in a place like Eastern Europe [3] (oh and this is also a good overview [4] of the history of Ukraine) where many nations are new (and are we saying only old civilizations are allowed to be a nation state? Again this is an excuse that the West usually uses, and is no better in Putin's mouth).
Then again are our courtier class really worth it, when they're listening to these folks:
I mean, okay, but wtf kind of troll by our serious adults in charge is this? Are you trying to be like Trump?
Also, note that the West is fine with the oligarchs who raided Russia, part N:
Russian oligarchs with $ all over the West. Better seize it, right? Naw.
And oil is rising. Nordstream 2 has been cancelled, and I wonder who wins? Yup the US pulls the EU closer. Now, with Putin's announcement of going into Eastern Ukraine (was this in doubt? Actually thought they were already in there. all the MSM screams were about him taking Kyiv, which I'll still put in the very unlikely realm of things) is what precipitated this and I think it's not good for him (better to have that pipeline than not for him), but that many lefties thought this was about the Nordstream 2 and America not wanting the EU to be too close to Russia and less reliant on us. And once again, to me, this all points to great power geopolitics, that I am not a fan of. Not a fan of either side, either set of oligarchs, but the one sidedness of our media is something to behold. And when I hear "just like Hitler", when the Nazis are specifically on one side, and a whole host of other one-sided takes, I'm always in awe at how many people fall in line. Same thing happened after Bolivian coup. Very few naysayers and when I said as much liberals jumped on me as they tried to hand wave the coup (by right wing nutters).
So very similar feeling of manufacturing consent and calling anyone who raises a question "Putin apologists". just like all our other wars.
Doesn't mean I think this is on the same level, or that what Putin has done hasn't taken away any support he may have had from many Ukrainians, or made NATO seem like a better deal for people of Eastern Europe.
And I have yet to hear what's happening in Eastern Ukraine. Lately we're only hearing about the Russian side hitting the other and possible false flags. But has there been anything else? I shared a peace group video with Russians pointing out the laws (pro-nazi, anti-commie aka Russian [5]) passed in Ukraine and also ceasefire being broken by the likes of Ukraine. There was only silence in the west, [6] so I'm not sure.
So I'll leave you with some musings from the LRB blog. This one too.
I asked Anatoly what he thought of Putin. ‘He’s a madman,’ he said. ‘In the 21st century, he wants to fight a war in central Europe. It’s the Last Judgment.’Not wrong, tbf. Whatever the ills of NATO (and even if we would do the same as him if missiles were on our border, that makes us just as wrong).
For the time being, everyone’s carrying on calmly, although everyone’s worried,’ said the owner of a supermarket, who didn’t want to give her name. No one was panic-buying; no one was leaving. ‘Where would we go?’ she said. The border is only six miles away. Ovruch natives speak a triple variety of Surzhyk: Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian all mixed together. People used to come over the border to do their shopping all the time. ‘They have higher salaries, and we have cheaper goods.’ There aren’t many people crossing the border now.
and:
I began getting snippets from the Russian president’s address to the nation. I got back to my hotel room in time to catch the end. Perhaps he was reading from a prepared speech, but it seemed he was writing the text in his head from a stew of grievances, untruths, delusions and bitterly cherished slights that had been bubbling away for decades. The level of undisguised hatred for his western interlocutors and contempt for Ukraine was remarkable. He was addressing the Russian people, but addressing the Russian people like a man in a bar insisting to a slightly frightened friend that he was in the right and she was in the wrong, via every thing she’d ever done he didn’t like. The sighs; the righteous jaw lift; the pauses to show that, even now, he can’t believe this or that wickedness was done to him.
And that's why I'm saying: Putin is now fully Americanized. I don't like it, and think the world needs to move from this thinking, but our elites screaming like it's the next Hitler is beyond nauseating (while they starve Afghanistan and bomb other sovereign nations [7]
That being said, if they are pulled from SWIFT, wonder if this forces them and China to create a proper alternative.
[1] Wonder if there is a denial for this anywhere in the Western MSM.
[2] This is usually hand waved by saying the current Ukrainian leader is Jewish (and tbf, these right wingers are hardcore anti-semites). I mean, even if true, no one seems to tackle the issues at hand. That being said, things like this are troubling, but not entirely uncalled for:
Then again, you can see a long hatred for the Russians in many of the Ukrainian Right:
It was in the 1990s that Korchynsky learned the advantage of mixing religion and politics when he fought in the Caucasus region alongside Muslims, who were battling Russia for independence.
Korchynsky points approvingly to Lebanon. There, Hezbollah participates in government as a political party, while its paramilitary wing wages war independent of the state (and is thus considered, by the United States and the European Union, a terrorist organization). Korchynsky believes that sort of dual structure would be beneficial for Ukraine. He sees himself as the head of an informal “revolutionary community” that can carry out “higher order tasks” that are beyond the formal control of government.
That’s the theory. In practice, Korchynsky wants the war in eastern Ukraine to be a religious war. In his view, you have to take advantage of the situation: Many people in Ukraine are dissatisfied with the new government, its broken institutions and endemic corruption. This can only be solved, he believes, by creating a national elite composed of people determined to wage a sort of Ukrainian jihad against the Russians.
“We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” he told me. “The Ukrainian state has no chance in a war with Russia, but the Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.
ORCHYNSKY WAS BORN to fight Russia.
He is the descendent of a noble Polish family that, in the late 18th century, fought in the Kosciuszko Uprising, which was a doomed attempt to liberate Poland from the Russian empire. The Poles lost, and Korchynsky’s family moved to what was called the Kresy, or borderlands, in what is today Ukraine. As a Ukrainian, Korchynsky is continuing his family’s war against the Russian empire.
In the early 1990s, he was one of the founders and leaders of a right-wing, nationalist organization known, somewhat awkwardly, as the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian People’s Self Defense. When an uprising erupted in late 2013 against Ukraine’s corrupt president, Korchynsky immediately joined the fight, which was centered on the main square in Kiev, known as the Maidan.
On Dec. 1, 2013, Korchynsky led his newly formed paramilitary unit, the Jesus Christ Hundred, as it stormed the presidential administration buildings. He was photographed on a bulldozer as demonstrators tried to break through a police cordon on Bankovskaya Street.
Not everyone supported Korchynsky and his fighters. Opposition politicians, including Vitali Klitschko, who is now the mayor of Kiev, tried to stop them. Amid the melee, Korchynsky’s detractors shouted that he was trying to provoke violence. At the time, there were rumors he was a Russian agent trying to create a pretext for a crackdown. Korchynsky’s response: “In Ukraine, you can say four things about any more or less well known figure: that he is an agent of Moscow, he is homosexual, a Jew, or that he stole money.”
Again, this is a brutal civil war:
When the fighting first started, he saw supporters of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic bullying young girls on Ukrainian Independence Day simply because they wore traditional Ukrainian embroidery. One time, he says, the separatists brutally punished a woman for wearing the embroidery. They drove nails into her feet and forced her to walk through the street. It was pure evil, he explains,
also this about a person who died fighting for Ukraine:
He came from a family of ethnic Germans living in Russia. He was a citizen of Russia and had no Ukrainian passport, but fought on the side of Ukraine out of personal conviction. He was buried with honors in Kiev.
And a Ukrainian position:
To the northeast are the separatists. To the southwest, it’s still Ukraine, but the residents living in in the small villages on the way to Mariupol are strongly pro-Russian. So the fighters are in essence surrounded on all sides, and expect attacks from every direction. In Mariupol itself, the residents speak Russian, not Ukrainian, and many support the separatists, preferring to live in Russia, where the state at least pays salaries and pensions.
[3] The source of the conflict largely stems from whether Ukrainians are a distinct people and whether they have legitimacy over the territory they control. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians all trace their origins back to the medieval Kyivan Rus where an old version of their contemporary languages was spoken. Russians tend to identify Kyivan Rus as exclusively Russian while any sort of nationhood and identity didn't exist in the medieval period.Over the following centuries after the collapse of the Rus, the lands of parts of contemporary Ukraine and Russia were controlled by different states. For Ukrainians, the 17th century Cossack revolt against Poland led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky was seen as the first proto-Ukrainian state which would get incorporated into the Russian empire by the 18th century.
By the 19th century Russian as well as Ukrainian culture and identity emerged as literary languages were formulated. The status of Ukrainian though proved contentious among Russian intellectuals who often considered Ukrainian a mere dialect. Nonetheless, the Ukrainian language was heavily censored or even banned within the Russian Empire.
In the 20th century, the political idea of Ukraine as a distinct political state separate from Russia began to emerge and a series of short-lived states even existed around the time of the Russian revolution. The ethnic composition of what is Ukraine was at the time complicated. Typically ethnic Ukrainians dominated the countryside while the cities tended to be a mix of Russians, Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians who were typically in the minority. With the Soviet Union, and in particular WW2 this changed as the Jewish population was annihilated and the Polish population in the west was forcibly relocated. Hence the cities, especially in the East and South of Ukraine, became dominantly Russian speaking either from Ukrainians assimilating or from ethnic Russians that moved from Russia to work in the booming Ukrainian factories/mines/ports.
Ukraine achieved independence in 1991 in a referendum where over 80% in every region, except Crimea where it was 55%, voted for independence from the USSR. Despite this, the direction and identity of the country were deeply split between the East and West of the country with the west being more nationalist and wanting to associate with Europe and the east desiring closer relations with Russia.
Russians make various claims about the status of Ukraine today. At the most extreme there's the complete denial of Ukrainian identity. Another view is that certain parts of Ukraine aren't really Ukrainian and are only a part of Ukraine due to an accident of history. Crimea and the Donbas are the principal Russian examples, but the claims can extend further to include Kharkiv, Odesa, or even Kyiv as being genuinely Russian. Russian nationalists even claim there's a cultural genocide being committed against ethnic Russians in the east for which Russia must intervene to save.
Ukrainian identity after the Maidan revolution and the war in Donbas has intensified throughout the country. Even many of those who are primarily Russian speakers and live in the east still identify as Ukrainian and have no desire for Russia to save them from 'genocide'. The Russian language continues to be freely spoken and is still even the dominant language in Kyiv.
Putin perhaps believes he could easily take large swathes of the country with little resistance and assimilate it into Russia. Whether this would occur is hard to really tell and would be a real test of the strength of Ukrainian identity.
And a shortish article for a bit more context. https://theconversation.com/why-putin-has-such-a-hard-time-accepting-ukrainian-sovereignty-174029
[4] Putin's speech from what I have followed of it, isn't so much a sin of commission as a sin of omission.
Which is to say, on very narrow terms he is correct: the first Ukrainian state to cover all of present day Ukraine is a state originally created by the Bolsheviks in 1917, and that was separate from Russia by virtue of Lenin's ideas on nationality policy (ie that nominally independent republics should be united under the Bolshevik Party in a Union) winning out over Stalin (who wanted all these areas integrated into a single unified state more like how the Russian Empire had been set up).
But this ignores a lot. A Ukrainian national cultural tradition had developed as such in the Ukrainian National Revival of the late 18th century and 19th century. This was especially prominent in Left Right Bank Ukraine (west of the Dnipro) and especially in Austrian Galicia. The Ukrainian SSR was also preceded by a number of short-lived governments in the turmoil of 1917 and its aftermath, especially the Ukrainian People's Republic based in Kyiv and the West Ukrainian People's Republic based in Lviv. So it's definitely misleading to think that the creation of a Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian political institutions was solely the result of Lenin's nationality policy, as Putin appears to be doing. If anything Lenin's policies were a concession to undercut support for the Ukrainian People's Republic, which was fighting with the Bolsheviks through 1920 (this fight merged into the Polish-Soviet War).
Anyway, this isn't the first time Putin has made such claims. In 2014 he made a similar claim about Kazakhstan, namely that "Kazakhs never had a state" until 1991. This is similarly misleading in that it ignores that there was a Kazakh Khanate and independent Kazakh Hordes, as well as Alash Orda, a Kazakh nationalist movement prominent in the early 20th century. It's a deliberate attempt to confuse "there was never an internationally-recognized nation state for this ethnic group" with "this ethnic group never had a national identity", which is arguably very similar to attempts to downplay the existence of Palestinian nationalism (there hasn't ever been an internationally recognized Palestinian state and Palestinian national identity is fairly modern, but that's not the same as there not being such a thing as a Palestinian people, as some would have it).
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Vespuczin 214 points 22 hours ago
This was especially prominent in Left Bank Ukraine (west of the Dnipro) and especially in Austrian Galicia
If I may have a follow up question.
I've came across a claim that Ukrainian National Revival in Galicia was supported by Austrian officials who according to old Roman "divide et impera" principle sought to counter the Polish influences in the region. Is that true or is it another exaggeration aimed at undermining Ukrainian sense of national identity?
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 262 points 21 hours ago*
I would say - it's complicated (surprise, surprise). The landowning gentry in Galicia were Polish speakers, and the serfs (freed after 1848) spoke a dialect that would now be called Ukrainian. The Greek Catholic Church in the region mostly used Polish, but a number of priests based in the Lviv Theological Seminary, such as Yakiv Holovatsky, Markiyan Shashkevych and Ivan Vahylevych were instrumental in collecting Ukrainian folklore, publishing Ukrainian literature, and teaching Ukrainian language and philology.
It gets complicated because not only were these Galician figures priests in a still-nominally Polish using Greek Catholic Church, and were generally from Polish-speaking families, but their movement was generally speaking Russophile - it looked to Russia as a Pan-Slavist protector for the development of the movement.
So I guess I would say that the Austrian government provided some tactical support for Ukrainians in Galicia in the early 19th century, but only to a limit (it never really threatened the Polish gentry), and much of the Ukrainian National Revival figures there ultimately ran afoul of Austrian authorities for supporting a Russia-based Pan-Slavism (which wasn't the same thing as considering themselves ethnic Russians, I should clarify).
ETA if people are interested in additional reading, I would strongly recommend The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy. It's probably the best thing one can find to an up-to-date, comprehensive history of Ukraine that is also generally pretty open to historic points of view from various sides. Timothy Snyder's Reconstruction of Nations also has some useful parts in relation to Ukraine but Snyder's focus is on Poland so much of the history is specifically through the lens of Polish-Ukrainian relations.
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 134 points 19 hours ago
I'd actually like to follow up on my response to that follow up question, because I don't want to give the impression that the Ukrainian National Revival was somehow only based in Galicia or Right-Bank Ukraine. Quite a few figures were from the area around Kyiv (to its south and east), like Ivan Kotliarevsky (considered the first modern Ukrainian writer), Oleksii Pavlovsky (the author of the first Ukrainian grammar), and Mykola Tsertselev (who published the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs). This region (which was the historic Zaporizhian Cossack Host/Hetmanate) was also relatively unique in that the landowners and elites tended to speak the same language as the peasants, unlike areas to the east and south that were Russified, and areas to the west that had Polish gentry. Kyiv itself had a university that ended up being a hotbed for Ukrainian intellectual activity, including employing the national poet Taras Shevchenko as a drawing instructor (where he got involved in conspiratorial politics). Kharkiv, further east, likewise had a prominent university that was also considered the birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism, and which also published cultural, literary and historic texts on Ukraine and/or in Ukrainian.
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 29 points 5 hours ago
Good morning everyone, back for some additional info.
One thing I would like to very briefly sketch out as an add on to this answer from yesterday is around the absolute confusion in what is now Ukraine from 1917 to 1921, because how one reads this history feeds a lot into interpretations of the current politics.
Early 1917: After the February 1917 Revolution, the Central Council (or Central Rada) is formed in Kyiv and chaired by Mykhailo Hrushevsky. It forms the Ukrainian People's Republic (or Ukrainian National Republic, these are both translations of the same term), which throughout 1917 works to build national Ukrainian institutions but is still technically autonomous in Russia. It claims most of modern-day Ukraine, not interestingly enough Crimea or parts of eastern Ukraine, but effectively controls central Ukraine.
November 1917: the Bolsheviks overthrow the Provisional Government and gain power in Russia. They want to station Red Guards in Ukraine, and the Central Rada says no, so the Bolsheviks invade in December (and reach Kyiv by January 1918).
January 1918: all this time World War I is still going on, and Russia (and Ukraine) are still fighting. Negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers at Brest Litovsk break down and an offensive is launched, with most of Ukraine now occupied by the Central Powers. The Central Rada declares independence and enters into relations with Germany and Austia-Hungary, but the latter basically occupy most of the country. Bolshevik control persists in the east around Kharkhiv.
April 1918: A coup is launched against the Central Rada and Pavlo Skoropadsky gains control as Hetman, with German and Austrian support. This government is pretty unpopular.
November 1918: With the First World War armistice, German and Austrian troops withdraw from Ukraine. The Directory overthrows Skoropadsky and the Hetmanate, and the Ukrainian People's Republic is back, first under Volodymyr Vynnychenko, then Symon Petliura. But Bolshevik troops also use the opportunity to advance from Kharkhiv, and seize Kyiv again in February 1919. The Republic bases itself in Vinnitsya.Meanwhile the Ukrainians in Galicia declare the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and pretty much immediately begin fighting with Poles - Lviv is Polish-held and besieged by Ukrainians, until the French-led Blue Army arrives and tilts the balance in favor of Poland in March 1919.
1919-1920 Most of Ukraine is consumed by the Russian Civil War, which also sees White Russian Armies moving across, as well as Bolsheviks, French interventionist forces, and Nestor Makhno's Anarchists. This is a giant bloody mess. Pretty much everyone occupies Kyiv at some point.
April 1920: the Ukrainian People's Republic joins an alliance with Poland and a joint campaign is launched, capturing Kyiv. This is defeated and a Bolshevik offensive reaches Warsaw, which is also defeated at the least minute. A ceasefire is signed in October 1920 and the Treaty of Riga in March 1921. Basically Poland gets Galicia and Volhynia and the Bolsheviks get the rest, and what's left of the Ukrainian People's Republic is interned and disarmed in Poland.
Some maps by Arthur Andersen to help demonstrate the situation on the ground:
Ukraine, March - November 1918
Ukraine, November 1918 - March 1919
Ukraine, August 1920 - March 1921
[5] Also note that I shared an article some time ago showing that the people in the East were rightfully scared by the nazis during the coup and by the anti-Russian rumblings and so had their fight, but any movement towards their own collective movements were crushed by Russia. One set of oligarchs against another, yet again.
[6] This crime of omission by our media is common and doesn't mean it's always wrong or wrong in this case, it just makes me wonder. For example, at the start of 2014 there were articles by correspondents about the EU trying to pull some IMF debt BS in Ukraine. And so when that corrupt prez went with a deal with Russia, the coup was started (and these articles very much seem like it was a non-grassroots one at the time). Said articles are now gone forever and the writer too. Weird af, to me. Of course anti-vaxxers say the same about covid so I sense it's not the right instinct to have. It is a dumb thing to do, ofc.
[7] Oh, so when Russia and China make a deal it's an Axis (no bias in that name). Well,, whatever, but at least they joined forces to fight CC. Maybe they won't but NATO is only here for energy securing (its new statement post Cold War, btw). If fighting CC is a moral imperative, well you know exactly what that means for the future and who is right.
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