Category Archives: Ukraine

Putin’s Nixon strategy is just beginning and it’s going to get uglier

Mark Ames writes: It goes without saying that Putin didn’t plan this crisis to happen — he already had his man in power in Kyiv. But Putin did exploit the situation, turning a major humiliating defeat in February into a massive political victory within Russia by doing what the Silent Majority would’ve wanted Putin to do: Redress grievances, air out resentments nonstop against the West and against west Ukraine fascists, and screw whatever the West thinks.

There’s not much comfort here for any side in the West when you frame Putin’s actions through local politics. Here, in our proxy war way of framing Ukraine, either Putin’s a crazy evil empire-r looking to reestablish his empire, meaning we better stop him now; or Putin’s merely reacting defensively to our aggression (or, according to the faulty thinking of a lot of people sick of American interventionism, Putin is heroically defying the US Empire, acting as a counterweight).

What he’s doing is shoring up his new political base while tightening the screws on whatever remained of liberal freedom in Russia, taking control of the Internet, seizing control of the handful of opposition online media sites, and ramping up the culture war against liberals, gays, the decadent West… The fact that we, the US and EU and a few billionaires, funded violent regime change groups in bed with west Ukraine fascists and Russophobes has only made Putin’s domestic job easier. You can see it in the aftermath of the Odessa fire massacre that killed over 40 pro-Russian separatists: It shut up even Navalny.

The liberal-yuppie elites’ momentum is over. Putin’s popularity among the rest of the country has never been higher.

So if Putin is neither the defiant counterweight hero or the neo-Stalinist imperialist, but rather playing a Russian version of vicious Nixon politics, what should the West do?

That’s easy: Stay the Hell out of Russia’s way for awhile, its version of Nixon politics is just beginning, and it’s going to get uglier. Russia has a history of turning inward in ways that will strike us as feral and alien, something the abandoned Silent Majority will welcome, but no one else will. (Our sanctions only helped speed up that process of inward isolationism.)

America’s Silent Majority was crazy enough in the Nixon years: the Silent Majority cheered Nixon on when college students were gunned down on campuses; 80% of Americans sided with Lt. William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine civil war fears mount as volunteer units take up arms

The Guardian reports: The men, dressed in irregular fatigues and with balaclavas pulled over their heads, fingered their Kalashnikovs nervously and jumped at every unusual sound. Eager to aid their country’s military struggle, the so-called Donbas volunteer battalion was ready to fight, but appeared to be short on training.

The battalion commander, Semyon Semenchenko, a 40-year-old from Donetsk with a degree in film-making, insisted that he and all his men had combat experience, from the Ukrainian or Soviet armies. They are all volunteers, receiving zero salary from either the state or oligarchs, he said, claiming they live off their own savings and donations from patriotic Ukrainians, who transfer them money after reading about them on social media.

“Our state needs defending, and we decided that if the army could not do it, we should do it ourselves,” said Semenchenko, during a meeting with the Guardian outside the town of Mariupol, where his men were based and offering support to regular units of the Ukrainian army in their fight against armed separatists in the region.

With military operations inside Ukraine’s borders an unappealing prospect for many of the country’s professional soldiers, irregular units are springing up as Kiev struggles to wrest back control of Donetsk and Luhansk regions from the grip of pro-Russia fighters. They have been given semi-legitimacy by the Ukrainian authorities, grateful for any help they can get in their fight in the east. [Continue reading…]

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Local media silenced in eastern Ukraine

AFP reports: Fiddling angrily with the radio in his car, Donetsk resident Oleksandr exclaims: “This is unbelievable! There used to be a Ukrainian radio station on this frequency, now it’s Russian!”

In Ukraine’s restive eastern region of Donetsk, where separatists are in control of several areas and have declared a “People’s Republic”, local media are being shut down, taken over and intimidated.

The pattern is always the same, said Sergei Garmash, who runs the local news website Ostrov: “Armed men have gone to the headquarters of media outlets — including ours — and demanded that programming be coordinated with them.”

And if the outlet refuses? The men threaten to “shut it down”, Garmash said.

Here in Donetsk the wider information war between pro-Moscow and pro-Kiev media over coverage of Ukraine’s crisis is playing out at the local level.

After taking over local media, the well-armed rebels have dismissed journalists, blocked access to offices and cut signals to Ukrainian stations — which are quickly replaced by Russian ones.

There have also been reports of abductions, equipment seizures and break-ins as the separatists seek to silence opposition to their efforts to bring eastern Ukraine into Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine favors Europe over Russia, new CNN poll finds

CNN reports: Ukrainians are a lot less pro-Russian than separatists there would like the world to believe, even in regions along the border with Russia which are supposedly voting overwhelmingly to declare independence from Ukraine, a new poll for CNN suggests.

The people of Ukraine feel much more loyal to Europe than to Russia, and a clear majority back economic sanctions against Russia, according to the poll of 1,000 people across the country conducted in the past week.

Two out of three (67%) people in Ukraine approve of economic sanctions against Russia, while one out of three (29%) disapproves, the poll by ComRes for CNN found.

Ukrainians tend to see Russian President Vladimir Putin as dangerous and a strong leader, while they consider U.S. President Barack Obama friendly.

More than half (56%) said they felt a stronger sense of loyalty to Europe than to Russia, while 19% said they felt more loyal to Russia and 22% said neither. Three percent said they didn’t know. [Continue reading…]

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Biden’s son, Kerry family friend join Ukrainian gas producer’s board

The Wall Street Journal reports: Vice President Joe Biden’s son and a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson have joined the board of a Ukrainian gas producer controlled by a former top security and energy official for deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.

The move has attracted attention given Messrs. Biden’s and Kerry’s public roles in diplomacy toward Ukraine, where the U.S. expressed support for pro-Western demonstrators who toppled Mr. Yanukovych’s Kremlin-backed government in February. The uprising provoked a pro-Russia backlash that has plunged the post-Soviet republic into conflict and brought it to the brink of civil war.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training and the younger of the vice president’s two sons, joined the board of directors of Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings Ltd. this month and took on responsibility for the company’s legal unit, according to a statement issued by the closely held gas producer.

His appointment came a few weeks after Devon Archer —college roommate of the secretary of state’s stepson, H.J. Heinz Co. ketchup heir Christopher Heinz —joined the board to help the gas firm attract U.S. investors, improve its corporate governance and expand its operations. A State Department spokesman declined to comment. [Continue reading…]

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Fascism returns to Ukraine

Timothy Snyder writes: We easily forget how fascism works: as a bright and shining alternative to the mundane duties of everyday life, as a celebration of the obviously and totally irrational against good sense and experience. Fascism features armed forces that do not look like armed forces, indifference to the laws of war in theirapplication to people deemed inferior, the celebration of “empire” after counterproductive land grabs. Fascism means the celebration of the nude male form, the obsession with homosexuality, simultaneously criminalized and imitated. Fascism rejects liberalism and democracy as sham forms of individualism, insists on the collective will over the individual choice, and fetishizes the glorious deed. Because the deed is everything and the word is nothing, words are only there to make deeds possible, and then to make myths of them. Truth cannot exist, and so history is nothing more than a political resource. Hitler could speak of St. Paul as his enemy,Mussolini could summon the Roman emperors. Seventy years after the end of World War II, we forgot how appealing all this once was to Europeans, and indeed that only defeat in war discredited it. Today these ideas are on the rise in Russia, a country that organizes its historical politics around the Soviet victory in that war, and the Russian siren song has a strange appeal in Germany, the defeated country that was supposed to have learned from it.

The pluralist revolution in Ukraine came as a shocking defeat to Moscow, and Moscow has delivered in return an assault on European history. Even as Europeans follow with alarm or fascination the spread of Russian special forces from Crimea through Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin’s propagandists seek to draw Europeans into an alternative reality, an account of history rather different from what most Ukrainians think, or indeed what the evidence can bear. Ukraine has never existed in history, goes the claim, or if it has, only as part of a Russian empire. Ukrainians do not exist as a people; at most they are Little Russians. But if Ukraine and Ukrainians do not exist, then neither does Europe or Europeans. If Ukraine disappears from history, then so does the site of the greatest crimes of both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. If Ukraine has no past, then Hitler never tried to make an empire, and Stalin never exercised terror by hunger.

Ukraine does of course have a history. The territory of today’s Ukraine can very easily be placed within every major epoch of the European past. Kiev’s history of east Slavic statehood begins in Kiev a millennium ago. Its encounter with Moscow came after centuries of rule from places like Vilnius and Warsaw, and the incorporation of Ukrainian lands into the Soviet Union came only after military and political struggles convinced the Bolsheviks themselves that Ukraine had to be treated as a distinct political unit. After Kiev was occupied a dozen times, the Red Army was victorious, and a Soviet Ukraine was established as part of the new Soviet Union in 1922. [Continue reading…]

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Meet the Cossack ‘Wolves’ doing Russia’s dirty work in Ukraine

Time reports: The Wolves’ Hundred, a Russian paramilitary force with a dark history, is carrying on the fight in eastern Ukraine in the place of Russian soldiers. TIME interviewed its commander and his men about their motives and links to the Russian state
Co-chairman of the Presidium of the People’s Republic of Donetsk Boris Litvinov, left, Insurgent leader head of the elections commission of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic Denis Pushilin, and vote-counter Roman Lyagin, right, show documents with the results of Sunday’s referendum at a news conference in Donetsk, May 12, 2014.

About a month ago, soon after arriving in eastern Ukraine, a group of Russian paramilitaries known as the Wolves’ Hundred seized an old truck from a local police station and used some spray paint to give it a makeover. They did not remove the blue siren from the roof, as it seemed to lend them an air of authority as they drove around the towns that they control. But on the hood of the black, Russian-made Hunter SUV, they drew their insignia — the snarling head of a wolf in profile.

For weeks, the central government in Kiev, along with its allies in the U.S. and Europe, have been trying to find solid evidence of Russian boots on the ground in eastern Ukraine. They need look no further than the men of the Wolves’ Hundred. In separate interviews with TIME over the past three weeks, four of its heavily armed fighters have admitted that they came from the southern Russian region of Kuban. They are part of the Cossack militias that have been in the service of Russian President Vladimir Putin for almost a decade, and they say they will not go home until they conquer Ukraine or die trying.

Their links to the Russian state are, however, just tenuous enough for Putin to deny having sent them, and these fighters in turn deny being paid, equipped or deployed by the Kremlin. They say they are volunteers driven by the ideals of their Cossack brotherhood — Russian imperialism, service to the sovereign and the heavenly mandate of the Russian Orthodox Church. [Continue reading…]

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Donetsk steams through another Soviet-style vote, so now what?

Christopher Miller writes: The people have spoken. But what exactly they said is a question and whether anyone in power in Ukraine or Russia take their wishes into account is yet another one.

Will it mean the breakup of Ukraine? Or finally a fierce response from the West and the central government in Kyiv? Will Donetsk and Luhansk become stand-alone states within Ukraine or be absorbed into Vladimir Putin’s growing empire, just as the Russian president took Crimea in March?

On the morning after the May 11 vote, no one seemed to know the fate of the two oblasts that collectively make up 15 percent of Ukraine’s population.

Separatist election officials reported 89 percent for seceding and 10 percent against doing so in Donetsk Oblast. Preliminary results in neighboring Luhansk Oblast were not immediately released, but de facto election officials from the separatist camp there reported a 79 percent turnout and a similar result is expected.

Some of the uncertainly was due to the vaguely worded ballot, which asked: “Do you support the act of self-rule of the Donetsk People’s Republic?” The only answers available were “yes” and “no.”

But the votes needed not to be tallied to know the result. It was clear from the beginning and made even more apparent throughout the day, as Soviet-style tactics of ballot stuffing, manipulation and intimidation were observed at polling stations across the regions: the referenda in the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk would pass.

Still, some weren’t quite sure what that meant. [Continue reading…]

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Separatists prepare for voting in eastern Ukraine while 100,000 ‘yes’ ballots for referendum intercepted

The New York Times reports: A day before snap elections to try to legitimize two self-declared new countries in eastern Ukraine, the preparations seemed as ad hoc as the votes themselves.

Ballots for the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk were created on copiers. Voting booths in one city were thrown together Saturday with red drapes stapled to wooden frames, and an election organizer in Donetsk said he was sure the vote would count because there was no rule for a minimum turnout. [Continue reading…]

The Kyiv Post reports: A group of armed Kremlin-backed rebels in possession of a 100,000 ballots already marked with a ‘yes’ vote for the May 11 referendum in Donetsk Oblast were captured and the ballots seized during the Ukrainian government’s anti-terrorist operation near the rebel-occupied city of Sloviansk on May 10.

In addition, a Kalashnikov rifle, Makarov pistol, plus ammunition were seized, Obezrevatel reported. Earlier, Ukrainska Pravada reported that the separatists had seized 80 schools in Donetsk city to carry out their referendum.

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Ukraine’s small Sovietized underfunded and poorly trained army

Linda Kinstler writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin is celebrating Victory Day in Simferopol today, admiring the Crimean peninsula that he so winningly stole from Ukraine this spring. Not too far away, in the city of Mariupol, Ukrainian police began the holiday with a deadly gun battle with separatists. Over 100 people have died in Ukraine since May 2, and despite reports that Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” was successfully driving out separatists in the east, it does not look like the fighting will stop anytime soon. Victory Day celebrations in Ukraine must carry an ironic tone today, as the conflict has revealed the extent to which its armed forces were systemically mismanaged since the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving Ukraine almost entirely helpless to stave off the Russian invasion. Here are a few reasons why: [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine: siege mentality pushes south-eastern region to precipice of civil war

The Guardian reports: After a week in which dozens of people died in clashes between the separatists and the Ukrainian army, the region is standing at the precipice of full-blown civil war. On Thursday the separatists insisted they would go ahead with a referendum on independence planned for Sunday, despite Russian president Vladimir Putin’s surprise call to postpone it.

Konstantinovka, a town of about 75,000 people 40 miles away from the regional centre of Donetsk, has, like most towns in the area, been engulfed by the uprising that swept the region following the February revolution in Kiev, which led to President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine and the formation of an interim government that Moscow has labelled as “neo-fascist”.

The town hall was seized 10 days ago and is now surrounded by several barricades and occupied by a motley assortment of Kalashnikov-wielding rebels. The police have melted away; some of them have even joined the opposition. Roadblocks have been set up around the town, a siege mentality has taken hold, and dissident voices have either been violently silenced or melted away in fear. “A month ago, nobody could ever have imagined this would happen,” says [Mayor Sergei] Chertkov, shaking his head in disbelief. [Continue reading…]

Harriet Salem adds: “If we don’t have a referendum on the 11th then we will lose the trust of the people,” said a spokesman for the fledgling Donetsk People’s Republic at a packed press conference this morning.

“The referendum is not just a referendum. For the people of the southeast and Donbas it is a symbol of victory over fascism which can be compared to placing the flag of the great Soviet army on top of the Reichstag,” he added.

Kiev’s new government and its western allies have accused Moscow of orchestrating the unrest that has rocked eastern Ukraine. With the Kremlin constantly threatening to “intervene” if Russian speakers in the country’s east were under threat, many feared that an invasion was imminent.

Seizures of state administration and security buildings in the Donbas region by armed pro-Russia rebels — which began in earnest last month — followed closely on the heels of a Putin-backed putsch that resulted in the March annexation of Crimea by Russia. The Kremlin vigorously denied the allegations of interference initially, before admitting last week that they had “lost control” of the rebels in the east.

But many analysts believe this is a case of chaos by design.

“Putin has always had a plan A and a plan B,” says Moscow-based analyst Aleksandr Morozov. “The current situation may leave eastern Ukraine beyond Russia’s full control but the established rebel presence leaves the Kremlin with “powerful tools to put pressure on Kiev,” he adds. [Continue reading…]

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The Ukraine/Crimea crisis: ramifications for the Middle East

Yossi Alpher writes: Israel’s approximately one million Russian speakers maintain close relations with Russia. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, in the past sought (unsuccessfully) to develop a closer relationship with Russia and its “near abroad” as a counter to Israel’s strategic reliance on the US. Israel’s decision to absent itself from the recent UN General Assembly vote condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea rather than vote as usual with the US presumably reflects Lieberman’s policy input.

Israeli strategic thinkers are well attuned to Russian logic regarding the need to invoke extreme measures against Islamist terrorism – one of the rationales for a beefed-up Russian presence in Crimea. Some Israeli Middle East experts find Russian expertise regarding the region more compelling and less likely to confuse ideology with interests than that of the US.

Further, precisely because the Putin government in Moscow does not pressure Jerusalem over the Palestinian issue, Russia’s assertiveness in Crimea – by ostensibly highlighting US, NATO and EU weakness there – is likely to strengthen the hand of the Israeli political right in rebuffing western peace-process-related pressures and boycott/sanction threats. In the same context the Netanyahu government, having watched how the 1994 western commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity was rendered meaningless by Russia, now has an additional rationale for refusing to buy into US and other security guarantees regarding the West Bank and Jordan Valley. On the other hand, Israeli governments since 1967 are themselves no strangers to the concept of unilateral annexation of neighbouring territory. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine crisis proves cyber conflict is a reality of modern warfare

Jarno Limnéll writes: A hundred years ago, World War I moved warfare into the skies. Today no nation regards its security as complete without an air force, and no serious future conflict will lack a cyber aspect, either.

Russia and Ukraine apparently traded cyber attacks during the referendum on Crimea. Media reports indicate NATO and Ukrainian media websites suffered DDoS (denial of service) assaults during the vote, and that servers in Moscow took apparently retaliatory – and bigger – strikes afterward.

Observers tend to miss, though, that these are relatively modest skirmishes in cyber space. They routinely break out among competing states, even without concurrent political or military hostilities. Angling to hobble an opponent’s web resources by clogging networks with junk traffic? Another day at the office.

I see three distinct levels or “rings” to contemporary cyber conflicts. Only the first is clearly apparent in the Ukraine crisis. Full-blown cyber war is not yet occurring. The prospect of escalation, however, is real and worrisome. The West should watch carefully, because developments in Ukraine offer a model for contemporary conflicts worldwide – which will henceforth have integral cyber elements for all but the least developed nations.

By observing Ukraine we can deduce not only the capabilities of cyber weapons, but the goals and policies behind their use. [Continue reading…]

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Putin keeps Russians, West guessing with Ukraine shift

Reuters reports: One of Vladimir Putin’s most influential supporters was up early on Thursday explaining to puzzled Russians why the president has softened his stance on Ukraine.

Vladimir Solovyov, the outspoken host of a popular radio call-in, enthusiastically portrayed Putin’s unexpected appeal to separatists in east Ukraine to suspend a planned autonomy referendum as a masterstroke.

“This is a very clever and strong move in the game of chess over Ukraine,” he told listeners. “Putin has again become peacemaker number one.”

Dismissing a caller’s concerns that it might seen be as a sign of weakness, he said: “Putin has forced the Ukrainian authorities into a dialogue … He’s massively raised his support in Europe.”

When another listener dissented, the acid-tongued host told him he was listening to the wrong channel and, inventing a name, told him to “go and listen to ‘Voice of the Enemy’.”

If ever Putin needed supporters like Solovyov, it may be now. [Continue reading…]

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New poll shows eastern Ukraine’s separatists are wrong

The Washington Post: Separatists in eastern Ukraine are pressing ahead with their plan to hold a referendum on secession from Kiev, despite even the stated wishes of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The move may signal a dangerous escalation of an already deadly conflict. On Thursday, Denis Pushilin, the self-proclaimed chairman of the Donetsk People’s Republic, insisted at a news conference that there was a popular will for the vote.

“People want the referendum,” he said. “And it’s not just a few people; it’s millions of people who want the referendum, who need to give this vote for their ideals.”

But according to a new poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a vast majority of those living in Ukraine — both in the restive east and more nationalist west — want the country’s borders to remain the same, despite the many political and social tensions that have come to the surface in recent months.

Only 18 percent of those surveyed in eastern Ukraine think the country’s regions should be allowed to secede — a statistic that serves as something of a rebuke to Pushilin and his fellow separatists. [Continue reading…]

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Trying to ‘win’ Ukraine could lead to its collapse

James Goldgeier and Andrew S. Weiss write: With the Ukraine crisis now entering its sixth month, policymakers ought to step back from the daily torrent of bad news and ask whether the West’s current approach is yielding positive results.

The honest answer has to be: not really.

The tragic loss of life in Odessa on May 2 and the stepped-up fighting in and around separatist strongholds in eastern Ukraine appear to be setting in motion precisely the series of events that the West has sought to avoid: full-scale armed conflict between Moscow and Kiev and the prospect of Ukraine’s collapse as a unitary state.

Ever since the dramatic overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovich government in late February, U.S. and EU leaders have failed to come to terms with an unpleasant reality. As former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer put it, Vladimir Putin “cares a whole lot more about losing Ukraine than the West cares about keeping it.”

There are no excuses for the reckless policies Putin has pursued. His annexation of Crimea, and his unapologetic embrace of Russian chauvinism and ultra-nationalist themes are evocative of the worst aspects of European power politics during the first half of the twentieth century. It is deeply disconcerting to see far-right wing European politicians, from Marine Le Pen to Geert Wilders, touting Putin as their ideological soul-mate and comrade-in-arms in the fight against European elites and the soulless EU bureaucracy.

But even if events do not come to a head in coming days, a protracted crisis in Ukraine may, over time, simply exhaust Western capabilities to counter a Russian campaign to destabilize Ukraine or to keep its basket-case economy afloat. What we are looking at now is nothing less than a bigger, messier version of Georgia across a territory the size of France with the potential for a lot more bloodshed.

Rather than developing a new approach to avoid catastrophe, Western leaders are doubling down. President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel announced last week that the derailing of the May 25 presidential elections could be the basis for imposition of so-called sectoral sanctions on Russia. While they and other Western leaders continue to profess their desire to see a diplomatic solution to the crisis, high-level dialogue with the Kremlin amounts to little more than exchanging public statements. Nor are we aware of any serious back-channel diplomatic moves to resolve the crisis. The West has said elections or else, but Moscow shows no sign of acquiescing to a smooth internal political transition. Quite the contrary. [Continue reading…]

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Even Russian human rights body finds Crimean referendum falsified

Khpg.org reports: Vladimir Putin’s own Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights has confirmed that the turnout for the so-called “referendum” on the Crimea’s status was much lower than reported, and the results also far less overwhelmingly in favour of joining Russia. The same results have been reported from other sources, however this report can hardly be dismissed as seditious US propaganda. The confirmation that Russia used falsified figures to justify the annexation comes on the eve of other supposed “referendums” planned for two east Ukrainian oblasts.

The report finds that while the overwhelming majority of residents of Sevastopol voted for joining Russian (turnout of 50-80%), the turnout for all of Crimea was from 30-50% and only 50-60% of those voted for joining Russia.

The authors also noted that Crimean residents voted less for joining Russia, than for what they called an end to corrupt lawlessness and thieving rule of people brought in from Donetsk (where Viktor Yanukovych and most of his people were from). It was only in Sevastopol, they say, that people genuinely voted for joining Russia. They add that the fear of “illegal armed formations” was higher in Sevastopol than in other regions of Crimea. [Continue reading…]

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Ukrainian events a delayed reaction to USSR’s peaceful disintegration in 1991, Vedomosti says

Paul Goble writes: Commentators have long celebrated the fact that the USSR broke up with little violence in 1991 – the conflicts in Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria and Chechnya typically have been treated as exceptions that prove the rule. But now, many of the unresolved issues from 23 years ago are leading to violence as in Ukraine.

In an editorial article in today’s Vedomosti, Nikolay Epple and Maksim Trudolyubov argue that for two decades, Russia and Ukraine sought to avoid the outcome that had occurred in Serbia and Croatia, but that did not mean that “the revolutionary processes” in the two were “overcome but only “put off”.

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine shows more sharply than ever before that Ukrainians cannot avoid facing some critical issues any longer, including “the geopolitical choice between Europe and Russia, real sovereignty or dependence on ‘the elder brother,’ the unification of the country on the basis of a new national self-consciousness or its split via ‘federalization.’”

And “the development of the postponed revolution in Ukraine will inevitably have an impact on Russia as well” because “the exit of Ukraine from the post-Soviet space will confront Russia with the need to reformat its own historical matrix.” [Continue reading…]

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