Crisis Oekraïne - Rusland #159

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.