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On December 17 2013 07:20 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2013 07:06 zeo wrote: The point is everybody should take off their rose-tinted glasses and mind their own buisness Serbians wanting the rest of the world to not look too closely at what a nation does to its people and its neighbours.
Says the guy, whose country is responsible for one of the most terrible crimes against humanty (colonialism).
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As did pretty much any dominant country at the time?
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On December 17 2013 22:00 Velr wrote: As did pretty much any dominant country at the time? Maybe he should have said 'lets go see who the English have been oppressing in their neighborhood'. I'm sure the Irish would have a few stories to tell. And don't forget, disregard what anyone from the UK ever says because of it. Team Liquid circle-jerk logic 101
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On December 17 2013 22:00 Velr wrote: As did pretty much any dominant country at the time?
british empire tops them all
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On December 17 2013 22:11 mdb wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2013 22:00 Velr wrote: As did pretty much any dominant country at the time? british empire tops them all pff, we Dutch created apartheid. that has to count for something!
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You are way off track now. In 380 they were just splitting up the Roman Empire into East and West. The Huns appeared in the following decades but there were no mentions Magyars or Avars for centuries, although their progenitors could have been living under Hun rule, but this cannot be proven.
The settlement of the Magyars in the Carpathian basin in the 8th century and their subsequent wars with the Germans is effectively the beginning of their national history, everything prior to that is pre-historic, and forms a part of the Magyar homeland debate which has been going on for a century and a half. Demographically, the catastrophic event in Hungarian history was the Mongol invasion, which probably reduced the Magyar population by over a quarter.
Yes, Russia is imperialist and in that sense, evil but don't pretend the bullshit that the USA is not driven by very similar values in that respect.
The sclerotic vision of post-colonial thinking, that Empire is somehow associated with political or at least moral backwardness, is projected too loosely unto Russian history. Russian entry into the sphere of European Civilisation coincided with the expansion of the Russian Empire. Empire has been both a catalyst and consequence of Russian modernisation since the 17th century. The annexation of the Baltic coast from Sweden in 1721, and the subsequent removal of the Russian capitol to St. Petersburg were milestones, opening Russia up to Europeanisation.
The reason that Estonia is not the Ukraine is because, properly speaking, Russian Estland remained a nation of German burghers and Finnic peasantry up until the end of the Russian Empire. The Baltic burghers on the other hand, played an auspicious role in the modernisation process of the Russian Empire: Baltic Germans such as Sergei Witte were drawn into the nucleus of the Russian bureaucracy to modernise the Russian state apparatus and infrastructure. By the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Riga had boomed into a cosmopolitan town, the 5th largest in the Empire, and the main commercial outlet between the Russian hinterland and the Baltic. Odessa in the Ukraine was playing a similar role for Russian commerce in the black sea, hence Mark Twain's remark in Innocents Abroad that the Black Sea port towns bore remarkably resemblance to an American city.
It is useless to treat the historical Russian Empire as some kind of monolithic idea-state, imposing the values and destiny of its ethnic core unto the extreme outer reaches of her political power. The development of the Russian Empire was non-linear and non-uniform. Both the geographical and vertical cleavages were extreme. In Siberia, you had a highly individualistic frontier society, until the Trans-Siberian civilised the Far East. In Urals, booming industrial towns, in St. Petersburg, a francophone aristocracy and intelligentsia, in Finland, a more or less democratic society with high standards of education and social participation by women. The historical continuity of peoples and lands transcend their political destinies. As far as Europe goes though, there is no doubt, that but for her historical expansion into Europe, Russia would today be far more backward, and militarily less imposing. The long-term consequence of establishing a depth of buffer states between Germany and Russia will be the erection of an additional layer of cultural and political buffers in the intercourse between Russia and the West.
Concerning the historical relationship between the Ukraine and Russia:
The first major modern Ukrainian national uprising was not against Russia, but against Poland, in 1648 when the Cossacks under Khmelnytsky revolted against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Cossack Hetmanate was established and placed under Russian protection. The result of the subsequent Russo-Polish war split the Hetmanate between Russia and Poland, and it was the anti-Polish policy of the Hetmanate which led them to their disastrous alliance with Sweden in the Great Northern War, at the conclusion of which the Cossacks became effectively annexed to Russia.
In distilling the history of Ukrainian relations with Russia, it’s important to avoid erroneous projections of colonial models upon a historically unique relationship. In the first place, the nationalities problem was not a decisive point of sensitivity for the Russian Empire up to 1917. National consciousness was not a cardinal problem in the Russian Empire, with the obvious exception of the Poles. Although the core ethnicity of Russia was Great Russian, they cannot be said to have dominated the Empire on terms of ethnic privilege until the late-19th century. Since the acquisition of the Ukraine, the idea of the Russian Empire was built upon the claims of the Tsar to rule over a united Rus.
The progressive Russification of the Empire during and after the reign of Alexander III was modelled upon the European ideal of the cohesive nation-state, but this was not a real source of political tension, due to the natural conservatism of the Ukrainian population in both Russia and Austrian Galicia prior to the revolution.
The experience of the First World War and its aftermath produced the most striking cleavages: there was a multi-pronged civil war between the Reds and Whites, the West and East, Germans, Romanians, Poles, Russians, and the Western Allies were drawn in. In a manner reminescent of the collapse of authority in Central Europe, local councils and bands appeared out of thin air and declared their own forms of government. The Russian Civil War was also a watershed in the sense that the Bolsheviks occupied the core of the Russian Empire, whereas forces opposing the Reds collected about the extremeties. In the Ukraine, two distinct forces may be view as representing the Ukrainian national awakening. These were the Whites forces, under general Alekseev and Denikin, and in collusion with the self-declared Ataman of the Don Coassacks, and the Ukrainian revolutionaries under Petlyura.
In a way, it was Tsarist Russia's backwardness which protected the cultural autonomy of her non-Russian subjects. Russification of the Baltics under Alexander III was a deliberate attempt to reform Russia upon European lines by drawing a uniform bureaucracy from the educated middle-classes. It was not the national-linguistic divide, but the problems of uneven modernisation which was the key to Russia’s political problems in the late-Tsarist era. The latent contrasts between urban and rural, between the cosmopolitan elites, the nationalist intelligentsia and the dark, unwashed peasantry was a contributing cause to her later political instability.
For these reasons among others, it is probably fatuous to pronounce Russia's paternalistic-authoritarian tendencies as evidence of her backwardness vis-à-vis the West. In the past, westernisation in Tsarist Russia has had a top-down tendency. The relative democratisation of Russian society, i.e. the extermination of Russia's Westernised elite after 1917, but also the democratic pressures of post-Soviet society, were events which have retarded the Westernisation process of Russia.
A panoramic view of late-19th century Russian society shows that the eccentricities of Russia's society could not be simply addressed by the magic wand of Westernisation. This is partially because all schools of Russian thought, including the pan-slavic/nationalist ones, were dependent intellectually on Western models. In foreign policy, the Conservative cosmopolitanism of a Gorchakov or Giers would in the late-19th century brush up against the aggressive nationalism of the newly-branded intelligentsia, under the control of politically inexperienced agitators suddenly in possession of great motivating power. The politically conscious middle-classes in late-19th century Russia coalesced into a nationalistic, pan-slavic pressure group in St. Petersburg and Moscow, hostile to Britain as well as Russia's traditional Germanic allies.
The initial cause of Russian expansion was security in a region with no natural defenses. Later there was access to the sea and the opening up of the fur frontier in Siberia, and cotton in Central Asia. Eventually, as she waxed into maturity, there was no real difference in the rationale of Empire between Russia and the West. All of Russia’s motivating ideas up to the end of the Tsarist era: the pan-slavic school, the orthodox school, the oriental school, the conservative-monarchist school, the sense of a civilising mission, the guardian of Orthodox Christianity in the Near East, were borrowed from the West, and applied in a unique context.
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As always straight on topic
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Dang MoltkeWarding, that is a deep analysis and it does address several of the small detour discussions in this thread very well! I don't know enough about the issues being analyzed to say much about it but what I know is consistent with the provided analysis.
In other news, Russia throws Ukraina a bone of 15 billion dollars. CU doesn't seem to have been discussed yet. The more specific details are not public:
Russia threw Ukraine an economic lifeline on Tuesday, agreeing to buy $15 billion (£9.23 billion) of Ukrainian debt...
"I want to draw your attention to the fact that this is not tied to any conditions ... I want to calm you down - we have not discussed the issue of Ukraine's accession to the customs union at all today." source
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not only a credit line, but a very aggressive discount for gas as well (410USD to 268,5USD per 1m3). That's just a simple buyout.
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On December 18 2013 01:54 radiatoren wrote:Dang MoltkeWarding, that is a deep analysis and it does address several of the small detour discussions in this thread very well! I don't know enough about the issues being analyzed to say much about it but what I know is consistent with the provided analysis. In other news, Russia throws Ukraina a bone of 15 billion dollars. CU doesn't seem to have been discussed yet. The more specific details are not public: Show nested quote +Russia threw Ukraine an economic lifeline on Tuesday, agreeing to buy $15 billion (£9.23 billion) of Ukrainian debt...
Show nested quote +"I want to draw your attention to the fact that this is not tied to any conditions ... I want to calm you down - we have not discussed the issue of Ukraine's accession to the customs union at all today." source
Not only the 15 billion, but also 1/3 cheaper natural gas and additional petrol supplies (thats what I heard on the news tonight).
edit: somehow I missed flyingdrone`s post.
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United States41386 Posts
Well at least we know how much it costs to buy Ukraine. That'll be handy in future negotiations.
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well shit. You can say a lot of things now, but Ukraine was put in a position with these delicious conditions when they couldn't say no. Now the thing is that a) there is an economic crisis in Russia already now (economy stopped growing in mid-2012) which raises a lot of questions to these "gifts" and b) you need to be mind-blocked not to understand that this wasn't really a "gift" I don't know what to say.
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On December 17 2013 07:06 zeo wrote: The point is everybody should take off their rose-tinted glasses and mind their own buisness your point is more like "everybody should take off their rose-tinted glasses and put on mine". But I guess it can be used both ways. The thing is if someone's opinion is slightly wrong and someone else's is entirely wrong that doesn't mean they can't be compared, and that we can't argue and should just except all the wrong in the world because that's the way it is and everyone is a bastard anyway so they don't have a moral right to argue against it...
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On December 18 2013 03:28 fLyiNgDroNe wrote: well shit. You can say a lot of things now, but Ukraine was put in a position with these delicious conditions when they couldn't say no. Now the thing is that a) there is an economic crisis in Russia already now (economy stopped growing in mid-2012) which raises a lot of questions to these "gifts" and b) you need to be mind-blocked not to understand that this wasn't really a "gift" I don't know what to say.
Clearly there was an agreement behind it but whatever it is it would be hard for Russia to enforce, as any real movement towards Russia will be met with even stronger protests against Yanukovich and may potentially even remove him from power. This is basically a bribe not to lose Ukraine right here right now. The Russian policy of recent strongarming has failed. If previously they were willing to pay to get Ukraine into CU, now they are willing to pay to have us neutral.
This buys Yanukovich some time untill at least the next round of negotiations with EU. Clearly Ukraine will now have a harder choice. If previously Russia's position was "if you go EU we will destroy you economically", now it's "if you go EU we'll stop paying you, and destroy you economically". Most likely there will be no agreement with EU up untill the presidential elections 2015. And that will be a brutal fight of EU vs Russia. Most importantly Russia buys itself some time to improve it's deteriorating image among Ukrainians, while Yanukovich has time to prepare and organize some massive vote frauds.
From the EU perspective this is unfortunate, but they didn't want to ingage in a bidding war with Russia and they didn't. Somebody had to pay to keep Ukraine solvent and it was Russia (without gaining much besides it's lost reputation in Ukraine in recent years), so it's a win in a way. EU can't allow themselves to finance Ukraine both because of corrupt government and because they don't want to improve Yanukovich chances for 2015 reelections.
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On December 18 2013 04:36 Cheerio wrote:Show nested quote +On December 18 2013 03:28 fLyiNgDroNe wrote: well shit. You can say a lot of things now, but Ukraine was put in a position with these delicious conditions when they couldn't say no. Now the thing is that a) there is an economic crisis in Russia already now (economy stopped growing in mid-2012) which raises a lot of questions to these "gifts" and b) you need to be mind-blocked not to understand that this wasn't really a "gift" I don't know what to say.
Clearly there was an agreement behind but whatever it is it would be hard for Russia to enforce it, as any real movement towards Russia will be met with even stronger protests against Yanukovich and may potentially even remove him from power. This is basically a bribe not to lose Ukraine right here right now. The Russian policy of recent strongarming has failed. If later they were willing to pay to get Ukraine into CU, now they are willing to pay to have us neutral. This buys Yanukovich some time untill at least the next round of negotiations with EU. Clearly Ukraine will now have a harder choice. If later the Russia's position was "if you go EU we will destroy you economically", now it's "if you go EU we'll stop paying you". Most likely there will be no agreement with EU up untill the presidential elections 2015. And it will be a brutal fight of EU vs Russia. Most importantly Russia buys itself some time to improve it's deteriorating image among Ukrainians, while Yanukovich has time to prepare the country for the massive vote frauds.
Im afraid its not that easy. My guess is that we don't know all the details behind this "deal" and when we find out, the larget and more brutal protests in Ukraine will be imminent. Thats why i cant say i'm happy.
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On December 18 2013 04:45 fLyiNgDroNe wrote:Show nested quote +On December 18 2013 04:36 Cheerio wrote:On December 18 2013 03:28 fLyiNgDroNe wrote: well shit. You can say a lot of things now, but Ukraine was put in a position with these delicious conditions when they couldn't say no. Now the thing is that a) there is an economic crisis in Russia already now (economy stopped growing in mid-2012) which raises a lot of questions to these "gifts" and b) you need to be mind-blocked not to understand that this wasn't really a "gift" I don't know what to say.
Clearly there was an agreement behind but whatever it is it would be hard for Russia to enforce it, as any real movement towards Russia will be met with even stronger protests against Yanukovich and may potentially even remove him from power. This is basically a bribe not to lose Ukraine right here right now. The Russian policy of recent strongarming has failed. If later they were willing to pay to get Ukraine into CU, now they are willing to pay to have us neutral. This buys Yanukovich some time untill at least the next round of negotiations with EU. Clearly Ukraine will now have a harder choice. If later the Russia's position was "if you go EU we will destroy you economically", now it's "if you go EU we'll stop paying you". Most likely there will be no agreement with EU up untill the presidential elections 2015. And it will be a brutal fight of EU vs Russia. Most importantly Russia buys itself some time to improve it's deteriorating image among Ukrainians, while Yanukovich has time to prepare the country for the massive vote frauds. Im afraid its not that easy. My guess is that we don't know all the details behind this "deal" and when we find out, the larget and more brutal protests in Ukraine will be imminent. Thats why i cant say i'm happy. The situation can change of course, but right now it's Russia paying for Ukraine's neutrality, and for Yanukovich remaining in office.
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On December 18 2013 04:55 Cheerio wrote:Show nested quote +On December 18 2013 04:45 fLyiNgDroNe wrote:On December 18 2013 04:36 Cheerio wrote:On December 18 2013 03:28 fLyiNgDroNe wrote: well shit. You can say a lot of things now, but Ukraine was put in a position with these delicious conditions when they couldn't say no. Now the thing is that a) there is an economic crisis in Russia already now (economy stopped growing in mid-2012) which raises a lot of questions to these "gifts" and b) you need to be mind-blocked not to understand that this wasn't really a "gift" I don't know what to say.
Clearly there was an agreement behind but whatever it is it would be hard for Russia to enforce it, as any real movement towards Russia will be met with even stronger protests against Yanukovich and may potentially even remove him from power. This is basically a bribe not to lose Ukraine right here right now. The Russian policy of recent strongarming has failed. If later they were willing to pay to get Ukraine into CU, now they are willing to pay to have us neutral. This buys Yanukovich some time untill at least the next round of negotiations with EU. Clearly Ukraine will now have a harder choice. If later the Russia's position was "if you go EU we will destroy you economically", now it's "if you go EU we'll stop paying you". Most likely there will be no agreement with EU up untill the presidential elections 2015. And it will be a brutal fight of EU vs Russia. Most importantly Russia buys itself some time to improve it's deteriorating image among Ukrainians, while Yanukovich has time to prepare the country for the massive vote frauds. Im afraid its not that easy. My guess is that we don't know all the details behind this "deal" and when we find out, the larget and more brutal protests in Ukraine will be imminent. Thats why i cant say i'm happy. The situation can change of course, but right now it's Russia paying for Ukraine's neutrality, and for Yanukovich remaining in office.
Is it only neutrality? One can't trust Russia's gifts. I'm pretty sure they want more than that. It's never so simple.
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Keep an eye on upcoming changes. None will suffer this any more.
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Road Control activist Volodymyr Maralov was shot and wounded and his car set on fire, according to the watchdog organization that monitors the work of traffic police.
wiki
On 21 December, Volodymyr Maralov, a member of the activist anti-corruption group Road Control was shot and his car burned at approximately 11 p.m. on Shevchenko Square in Kiev while being attacked by two men and one accomplice. According to the surgeon who removed the bullet, it was within 6 inches of his heart.[315] The group claims the attack was part of an ongoing effort by officials to stop the organization's reporting on police corruption. The assailants allegedly demanded Maralov expose the whereabouts of a group member who received political asylum in the United States in November, and for the location of incriminating data. Earlier this month, Road Control journalist Andriy Dzyndzya and his lawyer Viktor Smaliy were remanded into custody for two months; Dzyndzya is accused of stealing keys to a front-end loader that was used on the 1 December riots, his lawyer is accused of attacking a judge.[316]
http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv/latest-attack-on-police-watchdog-seen-as-attempt-to-exterminate-group-334125.html
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