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2nd December 2013, 04:50 AM | #1 |
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Ukraine erupts in riots and general strike.
Things seemed to be going peachy with the EU negotiations. Ukrainian leaders boasted that they could sell Russian gas to Europe cheaper than the Russians.
But Putin put his boot down. Take the EU carrot, get the Russian stick. So the Ukrainian leaders backed out. Now people are furious and demanding early elections. The Ukrainian economy is in the doldrums and the EU is a prestigious club to belong too. Russia has a long history of brutality with Ukraine. Like when the communists deliberately engineered a famine-genocide. People resorted to cannibalism. They remember that stuff. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25173719 |
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2nd December 2013, 05:37 AM | #2 |
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Ukraine has a problem in the form of a substantial Russian minority in the east and south. A very large percentage of those people would prefer a union with Russia or Russia-serving Ukraine. It's an offshoot of Soviet colonialism, which offers no good solutions. I hope for the best, but fear the worst.
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2nd December 2013, 07:01 AM | #3 |
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2nd December 2013, 07:10 AM | #4 |
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2nd December 2013, 06:18 PM | #5 |
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The capitalist czar regime also brutally persecuted and suppressed the cossacks. Your point? Russia sucks no matter what regime gets in power. Stop amounting this to communism. This is a cultural problem for Russia.
From a Russian prospective I can see why they don't want the EU and NATO in their backyard. That would be a very stupid move. Plus Ukraine is very split over EU/Russia. The best thing that could happen to Ukraine is that Russia has a massive shift in political power. Which won't happen. |
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2nd December 2013, 11:17 PM | #6 |
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"They say the right things. They ‘speak truth to power’, ‘transgress boundaries’, and all the rest of it. But you will have noticed that they are careful only to challenge religions that won’t hurt them (Christianity) and governments that won’t arrest them (democracies)." - Nick Cohen. |
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3rd December 2013, 01:21 AM | #7 |
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The Czars also had Renaissance technology. I'm sure if they had machine guns, tanks, and armored equipment that they would've killed just as many people. Point being that Russia manages to kill off tens of millions of its citizens every century. It's something endemic to their culture.
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3rd December 2013, 02:17 AM | #8 |
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"They say the right things. They ‘speak truth to power’, ‘transgress boundaries’, and all the rest of it. But you will have noticed that they are careful only to challenge religions that won’t hurt them (Christianity) and governments that won’t arrest them (democracies)." - Nick Cohen. |
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3rd December 2013, 06:11 AM | #9 |
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5th December 2013, 04:20 AM | #10 |
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That's very true. Communists were like they were to a considerable extent because they came to power in Russia. There is a bit of a cause and effect question here obviously, because such people couldn't and didn't come to power almost anywhere else in Europe, barring extreme circumstances (major war).
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I hope Ukrainians will be smart enough to see Russia is on the loosing side of history again. Who knows, maybe a shift away from Russia would herald change in Russia as well, empower the opposition and whatnot. McHrozni |
5th December 2013, 06:02 AM | #11 |
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8th December 2013, 10:53 AM | #12 |
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Here are two articles about the German influence on those developments. The first takes a look at the whole opposition movement with focus on the ultra-right neo-nazi elements.
Originally Posted by German Foreign Policy
Those groups aren't openly supported, of course, but will also profit from the vast amount of money the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and others let flow to support this "revolution", organizing busses, propaganda material etc. Berlin's man in the Ukraine is Vitali Klitschko, as this May 2012 article describes in detail.
Originally Posted by German Foreign Policy
Klitschko has called for "over a million people" to come to the protests today, which must have failed miserably as DER SPIEGEL speaks of 200 thousand, which means it may have been a fourth of that. The same article (German) also says that Klitschko isn't deemed fit yet for his task and will need some further training, rethorically and politically. Seems that was it for this time. Found an interesting pic on twitter, btw, from Dec 1. Go to any "western" mass demonstration and try to find a scene like that. |
8th December 2013, 11:23 AM | #13 |
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8th December 2013, 12:02 PM | #14 |
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8th December 2013, 01:13 PM | #15 |
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What machinery, to be exact? What hi-tech gadgets did the Cheka use that the Okhrana didn't have? We're talking about an organization that existed from the 1860s right up to 1917. By early 1918, the October revolution body count had surpassed that of the entire Okhrana history.
The point isn't that the Okhrana was somehow a benign organization, it wasn't. It's just that for all its flaws, it never practiced outright terror the way Lenin and his comrades did. |
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8th December 2013, 05:31 PM | #16 |
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8th December 2013, 08:19 PM | #17 |
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Well, the mob in Ukraine certainly voted on their view of Lenin today.
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8th December 2013, 09:45 PM | #18 |
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I saw that statue over the summer, and thought, "I'm a bit surprised that that's still there..."
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8th December 2013, 11:25 PM | #19 |
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I've been to Crimea in 2005, and Lenin statues were abundant. All in lovely, clean city squares, usually the nicest parts of towns. Things are probably still like that down there.
One was reaching his hand out to the sea initially, but there was a McDonalds' in the way by then McHrozni |
9th December 2013, 12:41 AM | #20 |
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Genocide doesn't require some great leap in advanced technology. The Cambodian communists butchered ten percent of the population with machetes and sledgehammers.
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9th December 2013, 01:22 AM | #21 |
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The actual method of killing is largely irrelevant. Its the kind of problem that you can throw manpower at to solve.
Its the logistics and communications that present a challenge. Sure you can send out a message on horseback to kill all of ethnic group X but that takes time and you risk losing horses to be people who unaccountably don't want to kill their next door neighbours. Radio is something of a game-changer in that respect. As a result genocides prior to that time tended to be farmers vs nomadic peoples since you don't need to tell farmers to kill nomadic people just just need to fail to tell them not to. |
9th December 2013, 12:47 PM | #22 |
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9th December 2013, 06:48 PM | #23 |
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It has always been Russia's plan to reintegrate Ukraine and Belarus. In all honesty, Russia's reintegration of these two countries is perhaps the best of all nations involved. Nothing constructive can come of western incursions on Russian borders, pretty sure it will result in the annihilation of humanity.
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10th December 2013, 12:26 AM | #24 |
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Not so much Russophilic as outright Russian. They colonized the area with Russians when the Crimean Tatars "left for Siberia on their own free will" if you know what I mean.
That said, there weren't any Lenin statues in Lviv either. It's one of the problems Ukraine has - a substantial Russian minority, who apparently favors servitude to Russia by a substantial margin. Add in a few billion carrots from Kremlin, plus it's hard stick, and you have yourself a major problem. McHrozni |
10th December 2013, 01:30 AM | #25 |
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10th December 2013, 01:42 AM | #26 |
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I don't know why Ukraine joining the EU would annihilate humanity.
If the people there want their country economically and politically orientated towards Western Europe rather than the Ex-KGB oligarchs in the Kremlin then it's their right to do so. I understand that they're pissed when they anticipated that it was going to happen. |
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"They say the right things. They ‘speak truth to power’, ‘transgress boundaries’, and all the rest of it. But you will have noticed that they are careful only to challenge religions that won’t hurt them (Christianity) and governments that won’t arrest them (democracies)." - Nick Cohen. |
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10th December 2013, 01:47 AM | #27 |
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How is Ukraine, a nation and a state separate from Russia, exercising it's sovereignty in external politics, a western incursion on Russian borders?
If anything, incursion is what Russia is doing to Ukraine. How is Ukraine served by being a Russian colony? How is that better than independence? McHrozni |
10th December 2013, 02:23 AM | #28 | |||
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Yesterday George Clooney sent a supporter video to the Klitschkos and they published it on twitter.
Oops, no that wasn't the one. Should be easy to find though. He calls Timoshenko a "political prisoner" in it. |
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10th December 2013, 08:09 AM | #29 |
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heck even I would rather join the EU than Putinstan
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10th December 2013, 12:32 PM | #30 |
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They'll lob nukes at us guaranteed. It's not worth the risk for such a small country. Russia has made it very clear that they are against westerners approaching their boarders. I'm more for letting Russia retake them, and slowly culturally engineering Russia and its new union to the point of integration. That seems like a much better option.
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10th December 2013, 12:35 PM | #31 |
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10th December 2013, 12:37 PM | #32 |
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10th December 2013, 12:38 PM | #33 |
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10th December 2013, 12:48 PM | #34 |
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11th December 2013, 12:25 AM | #35 |
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First of all, it's not Russia's business to "retaliate" against anyone who only exercises their own sovereignty, nor does it have any right whatsoever to demand allegiance from anyone outside of it's borders. Furthermore, given their history with Ukraine, any suggestion it has some special rights over Ukraine are outright disgusting. Retaliation suggests all of that, please use "strike first" instead.
Secondly, Estonia is a member of EU, Eurozone, NATO and less than 200km from Russia's second largest city and former capital. Latvia to the south also shares a border and is a member of EU and NATO. Lithuania and Poland border Kaliningrad oblast' and are also members of EU and NATO. Finland is a member of EU and Eurozone and borders Russian North, Norway is a member of NATO and shares a tiny bit of border with Russia in the far north, but not far from Murmansk, the main base of the Russian North Sea fleet. Ukraine having trade deals with EU changes nothing in that regard. McHrozni |
11th December 2013, 12:27 AM | #36 |
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12th December 2013, 01:15 AM | #37 |
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Russia already regrets that it lost its hold on the countries mentioned above. Russians are extremely determined not to see a repeat of this occur, especially not with a nation it considers a strong ally and friend. I'm sure that Ukrainians don't feel the same. However it's clear that eastern Ukrainians in part do want a reintegration with Russia. Whereas western Ukrainians want a permanent divorce.
The truth is that a much better option is to allow the Russians to absorb the Ukrainians and culturally absorb the Russians over a time span of decades. Keep in mind that it took less than 20 years of planning to force the Soviet Union to collapse. I highly doubt that a plan to create deeper ties between and east Slav federation would take anything longer than 30-40 years. I consider that a reasonable wait. There are more pros than cons to slow integration. We've allowed dictators to expand several times, many of them sponsored by the United States government. I'm not saying allow for Russia to aggressively expand. In fact, we've done a good job of quarantining them already. They've lost their prized possessions in eastern Europe. However, I somehow have a hunch that having the capability to assault Russia's western border won't be perceived very well by the Russian people. Russia hasn't been attacked and lost tens of millions of people to western aggression in the last 200 years. Nope, it never happened. Again, we've engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union in 20 years. I fail to see why we can't slowly engineer their slow integration over 30 or 40 years. |
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12th December 2013, 01:36 AM | #38 |
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So, um, you're advocating trampling the rights and wishes of the people of western Ukraine to the wishes of Russian minority in eastern Ukraine, because ...?
If east Slav federation were possible, it would happen by now. Russia had two shots at it, one was about 200 year stint under Russian empire, the other was a 70 year one under USSR. The present situation proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, they failed miserably twice. Why do you think it is now suddenly possible in a sixth of that time. Why do you think it's even desirable? Why does Russia deserve another shot?
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12th December 2013, 07:40 AM | #39 |
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U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nuland arrives at opposition rally in Kyiv
Originally Posted by Interfax
We all know which side has cookies, don't we? |
13th December 2013, 01:04 PM | #40 |
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1938. We have been there already... it applies to your all points including about "being attacked". We don't forget or forgive that easy as you. (1968) And we were never under direct and complete control by Russian.
So then people of Ukraine know much better what pros(if any) and cons of their decisions and how much they love Russia... |
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