Recently we had flown to Tbilisi via Kiev, upon arrival in Kiev I had immediately put on an orange scarf. But in the end I sat there alone in an orange scarf. (1)

Today Ukraine betrayed not only herself but us, Russian democrats as well. We also did a lot here back in 2004. We were wearing orange scarfs and distributing agitation leaflets on Tverskaya ( Moscow Street), we were on CNN and the Kremlin outlawed us. We had not betrayed Yushchenko. Yuschenko was betrayed by Ukrainians on whose behalf he worked, whom he attempted to bring into NATO and the EU, and tried to establish historical truth. (2)

Now the Russian government is happy about Yanukovych's victory. Russian government's first steps towards the new government will go as far as Ukrainians will allow. Moscow comes where there exist a national vacuum, where people are unsure where to go, where they don't know their own language. If you decided not to go to Maidan, Moscow will make sure it will get to that place which you didn't go to. (3)

Just now, under the auspices of Moscow, Ukraine voted for a man who cannot be called an adherent of national ideas. Demoting of Yulia Timoshenko went quite smoothly through the parliament, without coalition scandals. (4) Some members of the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc were even bought, how else can such strange behaviour be explained?

Moscow already cut off two pieces from Georgia. For some time now a map with a green line separating Eastern and Western Ukraine hanged in the offices of Moscow's generals. They are planning, if not annexation of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, an establishment of a future protectorate, which will dance to Moscow's tune and play second violin next to her. (5)

Of course Yanukovych will try to seize something in relationship with the West as well as in relationship with Moscow. Most probably he will not behave that stupidly as the president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. I mean, he will not try to establish a dictatorship. He will hardly attempt to kill Viktor Yushchenko, the way some were killed in Belarus. He will hardly attempt to take away the flag and anthem from Ukraine as Lukashenko did in Belarus. The westerners (6) will not allow it.

But he will disunite Ukraine will the help of European charter on languages. He will immortalise the Russian language as regional for Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a unified, nation state, fully independent, in order to save the link binding to imperial Russia. And all will applaud him, including the EU. Also human rights defenders will applaud him. But, this will be your grave.

If one is to talk about Yanukovych's personality, his character, catches, suffice to say that the Russian government also didn't graduate from officer corps high. Putin and Medvedev are also quite mediocre, they are content with Yanukovych's level of development. Putin and Medvedev met Ramzan Kadyrov in trainer pants in Kremlin. (7) Yanukovych fits well in their Kremlin elite (8).

Your president is a common collaborationist, they love such people in Kremlin.

1) Oh you poor thing, out of fashion aren't we?

2) Historical truth? Given that Novodvorskaya is herself Jewish, I simply do not understand her attitude towards Yushchenko's battle for 'historical 'truth.' I guess ends (having a pro-Western leader in power) justify the means (having a Nazi pro-Western leader in power).

3) Maidan is the central square in Kiev which in 2004 was the scene of the Orange charade. I think Novodvorskaya expected a repetition this time.

4) 'без скандалов, коалиций' WTF? Is it just me or does this construction look awkward?

5) To play second violin simply means: to be rendered a second-rate satrapy.

6) Meaning Western Ukrainians most probably.

7) I love when Russian liberals talk about class.

8) The actual word used here is малину

Some closing remarks

Does anyone have any questions about why the Russian liberals are such a marginal group lacking any influence? Also notice how this, so called human rights defender does not view the rights of Russians as legitimate.

The alliance called off its support for the 2,500-strong Kosovo Security Force following the appearance of an armed honor guard at a parade on Friday marking the 12th anniversary of the killing of the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian rebel force that fought Serbia in 1998-99.

The parade appearance was 'inconsistent with (its) non-military status,' NATO said in a statement. Kosovo's force was set up last year with a role limited to civil emergencies as part of a plan that allowed Kosovo to secede from Serbia. It replaced a similar force made up mostly of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

and

NATO also protested the display of its flag at the parade. NATO says it is neutral to Kosovo's independence.

Hat tip goes out to Michael Averko

As answer to US, in case the US Congress passes the resolution recognising Armenian genocide, Turkey prepared a plan of retaliatory measures in the political, strategic, economic and military-technological spheres which in turn suggests a more active cooperation with Russia.

As Newsru.com, with a reference to the Turkish newspaper Sabah, reports that the plans prepared by Ankara in the political sphere look at possible cancellation of Minister of State Zafer Çağlayan's and also participation of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan in the upcoming summit focusing on nuclear security, scheduled for 11-14 April. These questions are expected to be discussed on Monday 8 March.

In the economic sphere, Turkey might in reaction to passing of the resolution by Congress, will reconsider cooperation with the US in importing aviation technology, machinery, chemical and food industry production and agriculture.

In the strategic sphere 'Turkey will continue the process of rapprochement with Russia' 'Ministry of Foreign affairs and the Ministry for Energy together analysed the alternatives in energy policy. Opening the doors to new cooperation with Russia in the sphere of energy, Ankara invites Russia to increase its influence on Yerevan,' Sabah writes.

Counter-reassures in the military-technological spheres are planned for the last phase - depending on how the process of passing the resolution in congress will go. The Turks are not thinking of pulling their troops out of Afghanistan or cutting off support for US, but are thinking of reconsidering common military projects and limiting the use of its airspace by US Air force and the use of Turkish bases by NATO.

To prevent the resolution about Armenian genocide from being passed, Turkey turned to the leading military-technological partners, Boeing, United Technologies and Lockheed Martin to lobby among American congressmen. 

***

Interesting, as far as I know Russia acknowledges the atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subjects in its latter days. I also think that the issue needs to be resolved between Armenians and Turks, and preferably this debate should be between professional historians, and as much away from politics as possible. Russia as a mediator would be just as effective as the US is in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Anyway the resolution was passed and Turkey called off its ambasador. Hillary is on a damage control mission. I still wonder, why the Turks make so much noise, I think it is just the resolution on a now almost century old event but other problems that had gathered up more recently that are at play here.

Hat tip goes out to to Barak Obmana

A while ago, I got engaged in a discussion underneath a post on Streetwise Professor, where he recounts his meeting with Oleg Kozlovsky, I admit I was trolling a bit with La Russophobe. This trolling was necessary because in it La Russophobe disclosed that their's (hers, his... hell knows) blog was instrumental in bringing Oleg to the attention of Western audience...

LR has translated dozens of articles from the Russian press that would never have seen the light of day and our blog is primarily responsible for bringing Oleg Kozlovsky to the attention of the Western press. This is the first mass-audience piece written about him:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/kozlovsky/

By LR’s founder, of course. From it came Oleg’s WaPo coverage and Op-ed, and from that his human rights award and entry into mainstream Western consciousness.

So La Russophobe regularly translates Oleg's articles and promotes him in the West, in fact takes credit for being the main media outlet responsible for rising Oleg's star in the Occident. I have very ambiguous feelings about it for which I am unable to finds words. Simply, I'm speechless. I could dismiss this as psychotic ramblings of a deranged individual (individuals?) that hides behind the nick La Russophobe but this would be so if I didn't read this from Oleg himself, on what he thinks about La Russophobe...

As for LR, they are quite odd, of course. Their comments on Russian sports, culture etc. are laughable; their opinions on Russian politics are sometimes exaggerated. But they really are one of the few English-language sources of alternative information from Russia. They have a lot of exclusive translations and they also collect other Russia-related stuff, all in one place. So I find them a useful site, of course if you read it along with the others and can critically assess the information. I don’t know who is behind this project although I have some guesses.

Laughable, exaggerated? How about, condemnable and racist? I will return to condemnation of racism later in my post but let me first deconstruct other claims made by Oleg. Oleg wrote that 'Les Russophobes' are one of the few English-language sources of 'alternative' information from Russia. As we already heard from Les Russophobes themselves Pravda on the Potomac (aka. The Washington Post), a major US paper whose dismal coverage is consistently dismantled by the Ivanov Report (a true source of alternative views from Russia), is all but ready to publish Oleg's articles. The Wall Street Journal, another major US publication, features Kasparov on regular basis. Despite the fact that Kozlovsky and Kasparov are political nobodies on the Russian scene, they get a lot of space in Western media, yet Oleg's comment implies that the media in the West are all repeating the official Kremlin line. Interesting reasoning indeed.

Furthermore Oleg claims he suspects certain people of being behind behind La Russophobe. How did he come to know them, in the first place? This brings us to the issue of Oleg's potential condemnation and dissociation from La Russophobe. I think, given Oleg's situation, that dissociating from La Russophobe through condemnation would be politically expedient. Oleg is a leader of a movement which wants to bring a substantial number of Russians into the streets and through these mass protests achieve the fall of Putin. Oleg and his organisation called Oborona are fighting for influence among Russians, yet they he is happy to have a friend that calls Russians subhuman, Russian culture deficient and all in all is just as hostile towards Russians as it is towards Putin. It's like Martin Luther King getting support from the KKK, does Oleg honestly think the civil rights movement would get anywhere if word spread that they are being supported by clansmen?

But unfortunately dissociating from La Russophobe through condemnation doesn't look like an easy task. Oleg is after all familiar with the circles that produce it, or so he claims. It should be noted that the websites that regularly give room to Oleg, such as that of the Streetwise Professor, Ed Lucas and Robert Amsterdam all link to La Russophobe. Any harsh words in this direction would cause him some enemies and probably lessen his standing in the Western Russophobic press and Neo-liberal think tanks. No more op-eds, no more lectures, no more awards and no more money. Yes money, that's what it all boils down to.

Oleg lives a relatively good life by being popular in some influential Western circles and having relativelly no influence in Russia. Imagine, he gets his monthly dose of adrenalin on unsanctioned demonstrations, confronting the OMON, while he gets paid by the press and think-tanks in the West. Why care about being a genuine political leader? I might be thinking on behalf of Oleg too much here, but I could not come with another answer to his downplaying of La Russophobe's racism.    

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) today published a new report on Estonia, examining racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance in this country. ECRI’s Chair, Nils Muiznieks acknowledged that there had been improvements, but also expressed concern about the large number of stateless persons, the limited contact between Russian speakers and Estonians, high unemployment among minority groups and discrimination against Roma.

and...

The Estonian Integration Strategy 2008-2013 contains a number of valuable goals to address issues of concern to Russian-speaking minorities and stateless persons. These include providing Estonian language lessons, combating inequalities between Russians and Estonians in the employment sector, reducing the number of stateless persons as well as preserving the culture and identity of ethnic minorities.

Read the rest of the press release on COE website. The report is also available there.

Hat tip goes out to Barack Obmana's blog.

The illustration is from St. Petersburg Dissenter March that took place in 2007. I thought the orange fog and the punk were somehow fitting. The sign reads: 'Berezovsky, we are with you!'

Borya the 'democract' is getting angry that his investment backfired :-), take a look...

I am addressing you, 'peripheral nation', to all of you without exception who supported Yanukovych.

You elected a gangster as your hetman (1) and a younger brother of his older brother. (2)

I am convinced not for long.

However I can't understand how many mega-liters of sycophantic (3) blood must flow through the veins of each one of you (You don't read Chekhov!), that you...in the internet age, the age of a Large Hadron Collider, the age of genetic engineering could fall for such ugliness?

'...' (4) Settle firm in the stinkiest 'yawning heights' (5) of the bygone days. Your gene pool survived worse genocides. But in your ignorant flight don't forget that as long as your hetman is a gangster you will live on the margins and not in Ukraine. (6)

PS: (7) I want to personally address the leader of the democratic world, US President Barack Obama and the ideologue of the contemporary Russian ignorance Vladimir Zhirinovsky, even though they didn't have direct influence in the election, but were the first to congratulate Yanukovych for his victory. 

Gentlemen, I don't see a shred of coincidence in your sympathetic decision to acknowledge gangster as a leader of great European country.

In the Fall of 2004, according to reports of Fox News and CNN, US political elite found out with surprise about the existence, in the center of Europe, of an independent, nearly 50 000 000 country, but I still get the felling that democratic Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow more important than democratic Ukraine.

You Mr. Zhirinovsky, never acknowledged Ukraine as independent.

I want you Mr. Obama and you Mr. Zhirinovsky to remember a quote from the French writer de La Rochefoucauld: 'A politician's ability to look forward is dependant on how much he can look back.' And then there will be no illusions about a 'restart' (8) nor will there be any illusion that the future is behind the Ukrainian and not the marginal nation.

It is not advisable that you gentlemen, such wise politicians, ignore history.

-Boris Berezovsky, 17 February 2010, London for Ukrainska Pravda

Original is here.

1) пахана - гетманом -a poetic wordplay I was not able to express in English. Speaking of comparisons of saviours with gangsters, I remember seeing it at one other place where... :-))

2) The older brother probably lives in Moscow

3) рабской - literally meaning 'slave blood'

4) Перо в вам в ж... -Feather in your WTF? If somebody knows how to translate this so it captures the meaning please tell me.

5) A reference to Alexander Zinoviev's book of the same name in which the author criticises the Soviet system. I recall seeing Novodvorskaya on Ekho Moskvy saying that 'the Ukrainians elected Soviet trash.' Somehow this whole argument also reminds me of Yul'ka's elitist article.

6) на окраине, а не в Украине - a poetic play on words, it basically means that 'You, Ukrainians will be marginalized because you made a decision without considering what our opinions are.' It was kind of hard to cut through Borya's prose but that's what it essentially means.

7) Post scriptum is a longer string of bollocks than the scriptum itself.

8) перезагрузки - restart in American-Russian relation that came out as overload. I wonder which of the countries is more overloaded with debt and foreign policy engagements, including military.

Hat tip goes to Alxandre Lasta

Update: Kyiv Post also has an English translation

'You irritate us, International relations are not about values; they are about power!'

Sadly she did not disclose the identity of the man behind this groundbreaking quote. I was thinking a bit about it in context of the coloured revolutions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. If these were about projecting Western power into the affected countries then I would not be starting this post as the failure is in this case is debatable. Saakashvili is still in power and is still being propped up by some Western powers. Bakiev in Kyrgyzstan might be playing games typical for Central Asian magnate with the American base in Manas. The fact that Americans are not used to this type of treatment doesn't mean that the Russians have any hand in it and it totally doesn't mean that Bakiev is rushing towards Russian orbit. 

But the coloured revolutions were not sold to us, and even to the people taking direct part in them, as a power projection, as replacement of one set of crooks with another set of crooks more favourable to Western interests. They were marketed to us as 'exporting of liberal-democratic revolution' and proof of superiority of the Western model. As inevitable, apocalyptic events which will usher in the neo-liberal 'End of History.' They were about values as far as the masses are concerned. War and meddling in other countries affairs cannot be argued otherwise than through the lens of the secular religion of human rights and democracy. So I decided to look at whether the countries affected by coloured revolutions live up to the ideal. I decided to briefly look at the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Ukraine.

Kyrgyzstan: Bakiev proved out to be a worse cutthroat than Akayev, the cutthroat before him. And does the US care about it? Of course it doesn't, that would not be geopolitically expedient. I don't think there is anything more to add to it, watch this AlJazeera documentary if you have some time to spare.

Georgia: Due to the Manichean reporting in the Western press of the events of August 2008, in which the democratic Georgians defended themselves against authoritarian Russians, the Georgian regime was able to cultivate the myth of being a beleaguered democracy. But if one scratches the surface of this myth a little he will no doubt arrive at the enlightening discovery that Saakashvili's Georgia is no better to Putin's Russia, which it likes to compare itself against, perhaps worse (1). Even the Voice of America suggests so, there are of course many other sources claiming the same but since VoA is tasked with promoting American values I deem it more authoritative than all the others.

Ukraine: In terms of democracy Ukraine is a success, there are of course points that we could argue with but it is the best of them all. What however is striking is that the villain the Orange revolution was supposed to get rid of was elected president while the so called hero failed epically. This suggests a complete rejection of the ideals of Orange revolutions by close to a half of Ukrainians. Even Timoshenko who was probably the closest remaining symbol of the Orange revolution saved her face by rejecting the hero. Yanukovych seems so far to follow a much more Russia friendly policy than Yushchenko, which will probably result in putting any dreams of NATO membership to a freeze. This was certainly not on the script! The Orange revolution failed in terms of long-term power projection because it failed moraly. Interestingly, as long as the Western man was in power, the West cared little about his radical nationalist views.

...

Now, given that the Russian liberals have no other goal than getting rid of Putin in a coloured revolution fashion it got me thinking. If in case their dreams will come true, will they fail to deliver like the countries above? We all know that they get inspiration and probably other support from certain think tanks over in Washington and want Russia to become part of the West (literally); do they realise than when faced with reality and policy they will have to confront Russian reality and not their Western fantasies?     

1) Frankly I am not a fan of this comparative discussion.

I am going to make two follow-ups to this post! ;-)

Michael Averko sent me this story the other day and I thought it would make a good follow-up to my last post. It looks like getting blessing from the Patriarch of All-Rus (All-Rus meaning Belorus and Malorus i.e. Ukraine as well) means getting a blessing from a foreign denomination and Russian politician. These 'Aryans' are not the only people telling the world that Moscow Patriarchy is a tool of the Russian state, Rue Daru had been saying that for some time and Anglo-American and French media were obediently repeating it.

***

The question of partition of Ukraine was recently raised in a factually and analytically bad article by Ethan Burger. I would say that even pronouncements of the generally hot-headed Ratushnyak as described in my last post are more sensible. Michael adds that the current diversity of Ukraine is better in terms of providing for future security of the region than seeing smaller states emerging out of partition. Such states would be weak and would provide new members for NATO. A while ago much was made from Russian support for Rusyn nationalism. While I cannot verify whether it is true or not it reminds me of this accusation I recently came across. Fables of rapacious, nationalism fomenting Russian secret services are not dissimilar to those about the 'KGB, Moscow Patriarchate' and its expansionist policy abroad. Anyway lets look at what the Ukrainian neo-fascists have to say about Yanukovych getting a visit from Patriarch Kirill...

As a citizen of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych has a right to practice any religion or be an atheist. But getting a blessing for the presidency from the head of a foreign denomination, from a Russian politician, who considers Ukraine part of the 'Russian world' and 'the Ukrainian people - his own people,' openly humiliates the majority of Ukraine's denominations, and wants to return Ukraine under the rule of Moscow, is a disgrace to our state, which Yanukovych is going to lead... Therefore, UNA-UNSO strongly protest against Kirill's intentions to bless Yanukovych's inauguration

Ukraine already is a rightful part of Kirill's ecclesiastical domain, it is good to see Yanukovych acknowledge that.

Illustration and original article are here.