Crisis Oekraïne - Rusland #159

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Op donderdag 27 november 2014 23:31 schreef Smack10 het volgende:

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Om de één of andere reden schijnen Canada en Australië zich tegenwoordig overal mee te bemoeien, als de V.S. even niet het vuurtje kan opstoken.

Waarom zeg ik Australië, omdat die iets soortgelijks gaan doen.

Canada en Australië, ik bedoel komaan.

Australie en Canada doen mee met allerlei NAVO en VN aangelegenheden (wat hebben deze landen te maken met Afganistan, zelfde verhaal). Canada is NAVO lid vanaf de oprichting en Australie heeft een nauwe samenwerking (Australia joining NATO must be carefully considered)

En verder:

Australie: MH17 slachtoffers
Canada: Canada–Ukraine relations

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The relationship between the two countries is built on the legacy of mass Ukrainian immigration to Canada. The migration took place in four distinct waves, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing to the present day.

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Chrystia Freeland

On 27 January 2014, Freeland wrote an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, in which she excoriated the government of Viktor Yanukovich, who later was ousted as during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.[30] She is a proponent of personal asset seizures and travel bans as part of programmes of economic sanctions.[27]

Later, at the beginning of March, Freeland visited Ukraine on behalf of the Liberal Party, and tweeted her progress in meeting community leaders and members of the government in Kyiv. She lunched with the chief rabbi of Kyiv, met with Mustafa Dzhemilev, leader of the Crimean Tatars and an MP, and with Vitaly Klitchko, who is leader of the Udar Party, and with Ukrainian MP Petro Poroshenko, who is known as the Chocolate King because of his billion-Hryvnia candy empire, was a cabinet member in the Yanukovych government,[26] and a Ukrainian presidential candidate in the May 2014 elections.

Freeland was one of thirteen Canadians banned from traveling to Russia under retaliatory sanctions imposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2014.[31] She replied through her official Twitter feed, "Love Russ lang/culture, loved my yrs in Moscow; but it's an honour to be on Putin's sanction list, esp in company of friends Cotler & Grod."[31]

[ Bericht 4% gewijzigd door deelnemer op 28-11-2014 01:25:16 ]

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Op vrijdag 28 november 2014 02:01 schreef meth1745 het volgende:
"There may be, in certain sections of the Ukrainian government, an interest in colluding with the Russians and instrumentalising to a certain extent the EU," he added.

De corruptie van de politieke elite in Oekraine is het thema van de Maidan beweging. Die hebben lustration wetgeving gepushed, maar dat zie ik ook niet leiden naar een oplossing.

twitter:

StateOfUkraine twitterde op donderdag 27-11-2014 om 21:41:34 #Ukraine has a newly convened parliament but the system is still deeply corrupt & ineffectual and it isn't clear the govt wants to change it reageer retweet

Men praat wel over een Kiev coup door het westen, die zich mengt in het politieke proces in Oekraine, Maar bij de onafhankelijkheid was het bestuur, leger en veiligheidsdiensten in Oekraine vervlochten met de Russische en Rusland bepaalde daar in hoge mate het beleid.

Het wordt dus interessant of het nieuwe parlement de corruptie gaat terugdringen. Maar het staat stijf van de vriendjespolitiek. In Rusland is dat niet anders. Ik kan me voorstellen dat de bevolking geen vertrouwen heeft in een toekomst gekoppeld aan Rusland, want dan gaat het weer op de oude voet verder.

De ontvlechting, waarin Oekraine baas wordt in eigen land, is een onafhankelijksheidstrijd. Daarna kan onder druk van de bevolking de corruptie worden teruggedrongen. Ook de steun van het IMF is gekoppeld aan resultaten mbt corruptiebestrijding.

The New York Times
A Tilt Toward NATO in Ukraine as Parliament Meets

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Moldovan Court Bars Pro-Russian Party From Elections

CHISINAU, Moldova — Moldova's Appeals Court has ruled that a pro-Russian party cannot compete in Sunday's parliamentary elections on the grounds it is illegally funded from abroad.

The court ruled Thursday against Patria, led by Renato Usatii, who does business with Russia's state railways. The ruling can be contested at the Supreme Court.

This week, recordings emerged in which Usatii appeared to say he represented Russia's business interests in Moldova.

Usatii, who opposes Moldova joining the European Union and accuses the government of corruption, confirmed the tape was authentic but said he was game-playing in the conversation. He denies he receives funding from abroad and says the case is politically motivated.

His party is polling up to 13 percent in surveys. Pro-European parties are ahead of parties that favor closer links to Russia.

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East-West divisions define Moldova's elections

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — A wealthy pro-Russian candidate who had hoped to be Moldova's next prime minister fled the country before dawn Friday, a dramatic development two days before elections in a country that is deeply torn over whether to move closer to Russia or the West.

The candidate, Renato Usatii, a Rolls Royce-driving businessman who has done business with Russian Railways, said he feared arrest by Moldova's pro-European authorities. This week a court banned his Patria party from running, saying that it can't compete because it receives money from abroad. Border police said he caught an early flight to Moscow.

His departure still leaves two other pro-Russian parties in a parliamentary race whose outcome will determine whether the former Soviet republic will stick to its current course of pro-European reforms or move decisively back into Russia's orbit.

Given Russia's aggression in Ukraine and reassertion of influence in Georgia, Moldova's decision carries geopolitical importance that far outweighs its size and economic weight. The poor nation of less than 4 million people is wedged between Ukraine and European Union member Romania; it has a breakaway region, Trans-Dniester, which longs to join Russia. Moscow keeps more than 1,000 troops there.

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Oorlogstaal van de Kyiv Post

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Are The West's Priorities Backward When It Comes To Ukraine

Kyiv Post is running a fascinating editorial, entitled "Not Enough," which argues that Western leaders continue to fail to support Ukraine. What's interesting, though, is the angle which the editorial takes. Essentially, it points out that some in the West are weary of supporting Ukraine because of its legacy of corruption. Perhaps this is why the West has been pushing reform instead of supplying Ukraine with arms.

But Kyiv Post warns that corruption is still present, oligarchs may still be expanding control of the country, and perhaps a better solution is to forgo giving Ukraine loans to fix its economy and instead give it weapons to fight the Russians

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Not enough

Ukraine has had several influential visitors this year. But, unfortunately, most of them still do not get it - that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war has put Ukraine on the brink of survival and has been a frontal assault on the international order that needs to be stopped.

Two in the last week underscore what emerging markets analyst Timothy Ash call the West’s “sleepwalking” on Ukraine.

On Nov. 26, NATO Gen. Philip Breedlove said that he still sees a diplomatic solution possible with Putin, but he gave no basis for his opinion. There is none, in our view. Putin needs to be stopped. We are sick of hearing Western leaders, especially an American general who should know better, say that “there is no military solution” to this conflict. Putin certainly thinks there is a military solution, otherwise he wouldn’t be waging war.

On Nov. 21, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden appeared to glide through Kyiv without answering questions from anybody. Even in his private meeting with members of parliament and civic leaders, participants said he brushed off a question from Mustafa Nayyem about the ties of his son, Hunter Biden, to an energy firm linked to supporters of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.

Probably the best part of Biden’s visit, if true, was his reported warnings to President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk that corruption as usual may cost Ukraine its support from the West. This is a message that Ukraine’s new leaders need to hear again and again.

There are too many signs that the oligarchs who have strangled Ukraine’s development are still holding too much sway over Ukraine’s government and economy, and that Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, while talking a good game in English about change, have no intention of uprooting the oligarchy.

The West has stepped on the rake of Ukrainian corruption one too many times to be fooled again. Ukraine should not get more billions in loans or millions more in aid until it changes.

A good start would be with the war effort. As Joseph LeGasse, a security analyst and featured speaker at the Nov. 19 Tiger Conference said, Ukraine needs to have more “skin in the game.” As retired Lt. General Mark Hertling, who also spoke at the conference said, defense spending by Ukraine of 0.8 percent of gross domestic product in war does not inspire the West to contribute.

This war should be declared and the entire population mobilized with a war tax, war bonds, draft of fighting-age men and reallocation of resources. While deep structural changes are needed everywhere, this bloody war dictates that the security and defense sectors need to be the first to change.

A new Ostpolitik

OVER the past year, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has become the West’s diplomatic shield against Russia’s Vladimir Putin. That is partly because America’s Barack Obama is distracted and weakened by his midterm elections. It is also because nobody else in the European Union has the same clout with Russia as Germany’s cool, self-controlled chancellor. So it matters when Mrs Merkel loses her temper. After some 40 conversations with Mr Putin over the Ukraine crisis, and a particularly frustrating four hours of talks at the recent G20 summit in Brisbane, Mrs Merkel was at last ready to call things by their proper name.

Mr Putin “tramples with his feet on international law”, she told an Australian think-tank. His thinking on spheres of influence seems atavistic. Will Mr Putin next claim Moldova? The Balkans? His actions and his deceitful methods violate European values. She worries about a “wider conflagration” (the German term literally means “spreading fire”). It was the first time she had spoken so clearly, so publicly.

But Mrs Merkel’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, appeared to contradict her when he warned against escalating the language used in the Western conflict with Russia. On a visit to Moscow he was invited to meet Mr Putin (who had left the G20 summit early). The result was a storm inside Germany itself.

Was Mr Steinmeier splitting away from his chancellor? “Absolute nonsense,” said his spokeswoman. Mrs Merkel and Mr Steinmeier have studied the failures of diplomacy that led to the first world war 100 years ago. Both want to keep communicating with Russia, but they also want to stand up for principles.

Yet they hail from different parties and traditions. Mrs Merkel leads the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Mr Steinmeier belongs to the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). The two parties are now in a “grand coalition”. But the CDU has, since its first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, sided firmly with the West. The SPD has, ever since its first chancellor in 1969, Willy Brandt, instead pursued Ostpolitik (Eastern policy), which focused more on rapprochement with the east, and especially with Russia.

Now the two parties are instinctively taking up their old positions. On the SPD side, two former chancellors, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder, have expressed surprising sympathy for Mr Putin. Matthias Platzeck, a former leader of the SPD and state premier who now runs the German-Russian forum, a conference grouping, suggested that Russia’s “annexation of Crimea be retroactively recognised by international law, so that it be acceptable for all.” He has back-pedalled, but only partially. This prompted Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria and leader of the CSU, the CDU’s sister party in the state, to warn that it would be “flammably dangerous” if Mr Steinmeier’s diplomacy conflicted with Mrs Merkel’s.

Mr Putin, who was a KGB officer in Dresden when the Berlin Wall fell, is aware of Germany’s internal fissures and seeks to exploit them. This month RT, a state-run television channel formerly called Russia Today, launched an online German version; it will add a German television channel next year. An editor at its video agency, Ruptly, has been talking up Russia on German talk shows. So did Mr Putin, in an interview for German television watched by 6m viewers. But his strategy may backfire: Russia’s blatant propaganda may drive some to back Mrs Merkel’s tougher line.

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Op vrijdag 28 november 2014 20:56 schreef JCats het volgende:
Could an American 'Pussy Riot' perform a song called 'Fuck Obama, the US and the EU' in the lobby of JP Morgan Chase on Wall Street?

Het is zeer de vraag of het regime dat accepteert.

http://gawker.com/here-ar(...)t-of-ceci-1572470447

Dat soort protesten zijn er wel geweest en dat leidt tot een arrestatie. Een paar dagen later staan ze weer op straat.

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Op vrijdag 28 november 2014 21:26 schreef crashbangboom het volgende:

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Een 'arrestatie' in de USA is toch gewoon standrechtelijke exuctie als je het verkeerde kleurtje hebt? Het schot valt al ergens tussen 'handen' en 'omhoog'.

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Op vrijdag 28 november 2014 21:34 schreef JCats het volgende:

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84-jarige non in de US tot 4 jaar veroordeeld voor protest-actie, maar dat lees je dan nergens

For a tiny illustration of the bias, we may consider the media treatment of the Pussy Riot band, jailed after an action in a major Moscow church and made into virtual saints in the US media. They feature the badness of Putin and his Russia. The New York Times had 23 articles featuring the Pussy Riot band from January 1, 2014 through March 31, a number of them with pictures of the band visiting various places in New York. They met with the Times editorial board and were honored by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others. They are not good musicians and often do things that would land them in jail in the United States.

One of them, Maria Alyokhina, was even given op-ed space in the paper (“Sochi Under Siege,” February 21). Two interesting contrasts: John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist and author of several important books on foreign affairs, wrote an op-ed column “Getting Ukraine Wrong,” published on March 14 in the International New York Times, but not in the US print edition. His message was too strong for the main NYT vehicle as he argued that “The taproot of the current crisis is NATO’s expansion…and is motivated by the same geo-political considerations that influence all great powers, including the United States.” This is not opinion and analysis fit to print.

Another interesting comparison is this: in February 2014, while the trials and opinions of Pussy Riot were hot news, 84-year-old nun, Sister Megan Rice, was sentenced to 4 years in prison for having entered a nuclear weapons site in July 2012 and carried out a symbolic action there. The New York Times gave this news a tiny mention in its National Briefing under the title “Tennessee. Nun is Sentenced for Peace Protest.” Rice was not invited to visit the Times editorial board or write an opinion column. Her sentencing was news barely fit to marginalize.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk(...)e-former-kgb-colonel

Als je wilt beoordelen welk land zich beter gedraagt en welk slechter, zul je eerst criteria moeten hebben op grond waarvan je dat beoordeeld. Als je deze criteria hebt, kun je ook voorbij gaan dat vergelijk tussen landen, en altijd tegen de zaken zijn die niet voldoen aan je eigen criteria, waar ze ook gebeuren.

Mensen in twee kampen verdelen, waarbij je eigen kamp altijd moet verdedigen en het andere kamp de grond in moet praten, is een vorm strijd. Door mensen in dat strijdmodel te duwen, beroof je ze van de mogelijkheid een eigen oordeel te hebben. Zo moeten mensen het goedkeuren als de VS veel te veel mensen opsluit, of een oorlog begint in Irak, als ze uit het Westen komen.

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Op vrijdag 28 november 2014 22:25 schreef crashbangboom het volgende:
Wel heel grappig dat jij dat zo zegt, deelnemer Spiegeltje, spiegeltje.

Mijn posten zijn partijdig omdat ik geleidelijk tot een conclusie gekomen ben; de conclusie dat Rusland de agressor is. Deze partijdigheid berust niet op het feit dat ik behoor tot de EU en daarom in dit conflict per definitie tegen Rusland ben.

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Op zaterdag 29 november 2014 00:03 schreef crashbangboom het volgende:
Het is echter ook wel vrij duidelijk uit je posts dat je vooringenomen bent.

Dat betekent dat ik, naar jou oordeel, niet op een goede wijze tot een conclusie gekomen ben. Dat is een indirecte manier van zeggen dat je zelf tot een andere conclusie gekomen bent. En omdat het jou conclusie is, zul je vast vinden dat hij beter is. Dus verwijt je mij vooringenomenheid.