Claim: 'Kyiv is the mother of all Russian Cities'

recedite wrote: »

Are you joking? You do realise that when Georgia started the war in South Ossetia they were fully trained, funded, equipped and advised by the US.

Three is no agreement over who started the conflict in South Ossettia - from my understanding of what happened, it seems most likely that one or other of the ongoing low-level skirmishes (initiated by both sides, btw) got out of hand and triggered the wider conflict that both sides appeared to wish for - Russia for an opportunity to enforce its regional hegemony by destabilizing Georgia and delivering two-fingers to "the west", and Georgia, with what it incorrectly believed was political support from NATO, to recover the province of South Ossettia which Russia had de-facto annexed some years before. Georgia obviously got its ass kicked and lost both South Ossettia (which I haven't visited) and Abkhazia (which I have), with both regions now turning into "frozen conflicts", a twilight state which is likely to last for decades.

recedite wrote: »

In Maidan, there were street kiosks in which people could sign up their names and receive US$25 in cash to protest. More if they got into any fighting. There are numerous foreign gunmen walking around there openly, believed to be American "private contractors".

Well, during my six days in Kiev watching the Maidan protests turn from peaceful to violent from February 13th to 18th, I saw no kiosks where people could sign up to anything. Which isn't to say that they weren't there, or that people weren't being paid to protest -- I just didn't see any. There were plenty of money collection boxes and these were taking in quite a lot of cash - finger in the air, I'd have said a few hundred euro a day per box at the few boxes that I'd pass by regularly. Following up back here at home on this persistent "paid-to-protest" meme, I'm afraid that I couldn't find any convincing evidence of any payments being made at all - friends of friends who were protesting where there either because they were unemployed and had nothing better to do, else they were students taking time off from university or college. Ukrainians here in Dublin also denied that any US payments were being made and pointed out that they were paying significant amounts of cash (several hundred euro per month) themselves. Neither have I been able to locate any evidence of any significant level of EU or US state-level funding to any group, moderate or otherwise. I would be most interested if you could provide any evidence of this yourself that does not come, directly or indirectly, from a source funded by the Russian government (RT.com, informationclearinghouse, globalresearch.ca etc). The only encouragement to stay out and protest that I could see was (a) a great sense of cameraderie; (b) the sense that something really good might come out of all of this and (c) the large amount of food that was prepared and which seemed to be handed out free of charge to anybody - I didn't have any myself though it smelled and looked fine in a "prepared on the street in a huge tub" kind of way.

I did not see "numerous foreign gunmen", American or otherwise. On the contrary, there were very few non-slavic foreigners at Maidan - foreigners are easily identifiable in slavic countries and during my six days there, and ignoring the Irish pub, I heard English being spoken once when I gave directions to small group of lost US students close to the MacDonalds on Maidan. Neither did I hear anybody speaking non-native level Russian (I speak mid-level Russian myself and I feel confident enough that I can identify the majority of non-native speakers from accent). And as for "gunmen", well, in six days I once saw two guys and one girl with a single pellet gun shooting cans just beyond the south-western tip of the Maidan perimeter on Kreshatik. When the protests turned violent on Ulitsa Institutska, I heard gunshots on several occasions near where I was standing, but could not see who was shooting, nor could I identify what was being shot (pellets, blanks or live rounds), nor in what direction (I have videos of this which I took myself). I did see one protestor being shot with a rubber bullet on Institutska, where multiple protests were shot in the hours after I left, and some were killed. I also saw a number of men with bloody headwounds walking into the Trades' Union building overlooking Maidan, the same building that was burned out later that evening, most likely by riot police who broke into it.

tl;dr - I'm afraid that on the evidence of my own eyes, ears and friends I can't really accept any of your claims. Also, I can't help but notice that they appear similar or identical to unsupported claims repeatedly made by the Russian government and used by it to justify the invasion and annexation of Crimea and a possible future invasion and annexation of East Ukraine.

BTW, just to include a link to it, in terms of the sequence of events, especially with repsect to the first events in Crimea following Yanokovich's departure and the conditions under which the "referendum" were held, the UK government's response to Putin's self-congratulatory speech last week is accurate and illuminating. Also worth noting that a few weeks before the "referendum", only 41% supported joining Russia and not the 97% that the Russian government expects people to believe.

recedite wrote: »

Without going over the whole thing again, the Crimeans, in refusing to accept the authority of Kiev, had already seceded. The Russians for the most part were already there (by longstanding agreement with Ukraine to have 25,000 troops stationed in Crimea)

Again, you are producing, almost verbatim, a series of standard RT propaganda points. Just to reject these untrue false -- and frankly, quite irritating -- claims again:

Late in the night of the 26th of February, the Crimean parliament was seized by Russian-supporting gunmen, who forced parliamentarians to vote to remove Anatoly Mogilyov, the prime minster at the time. The gunmen then forced the parliament to appoint Sergei Aksyonov, head of the Russian Unity party, as prime minster. Aksyonov is widely suspected of having multiple links to organized crime. He called a "referendum" which was boycotted by substantial portions of the population; which was carried out with no time for debate; in which most popular Ukrainian media were banned; where his own media radicalized the debate well past dangerous extremes; and which was carried out in the presence of a marauding foreign army.

Under Ukrainian law, any region can secede to long as a majority of the votes cast in a suitable referendum of the entire country agrees. A region cannot secede by itself for the same reason that you can't vote to secede from Ireland and expect to have your vote taken seriously. No nation-wide secession referendum obviously took place, so Crimea's vote to secede is illegal. Quite apart from the criminal conditions under which Aksyonov assumed his position.

Yes, there were Russian troops in Crimea and by treaty with Kiev, these were confined to barracks. They were obviously not confined to barracks and roamed the countryside freely, doing what they wanted to in total violation of international law as well as local treaty. Finally, there were multiple treaties between Russia and Ukraine which guarantee Ukraine's territorial integrity and Russia has merrily ignored all of them.

Now, I've no idea, recedite, whether you think that international treaties are important. From your failure to address any of them (are you aware of them?) I'm inclined to think you don't care about them at all. Nor do you appear to be concerned that a nuclear-armed state feels it wise to invade a peaceful neighbour on a false pretext which applies to many other nations. Nor do you appear concerned about the military build up to the east of Ukraine or about the open encouragement of Russian ethnic nationalism on a broad swathe from the Baltics to the Black Sea.

recedite wrote: »

In other words, do the people who live there have the right to self-determination?

They're part of the RF now. They have no right to "self-determination".

recedite wrote: »

Tatars are not being forced out.

Tatars are to be forced off the land they've occupied since they returned from Stalin's exile:

http://en.ria.ru/world/20140319/188544777/Crimean-Tatars-Will-Have-to-Vacate-Land--Official.html

This item comes from RIA(*) and I'm assuming, since the report is politically damaging to Russia, that it's more likely to be true than most of what comes out of RIA/RT.



(*) a state-controlled news outlet, headed up by one of Putin's friends, a guy named Dmitry Kiselyev who rose to prominence recently for reminding everybody that Russia can use nuclear weapons against the USA.

ninja900 wrote: »

Did you see Eamonn McCann's article a few days ago in the Irish Times, pathetic, but not one bit surprising.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/if-we-have-to-pick-a-side-over-crimea-let-it-be-russia-1.1731105

Got a robust response too:

http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/letters/crisis-in-ukraine-1.1733825

Irish Times wrote:

Eamonn McCann’s argument for Ireland supporting Russia over Crimea is a classic instance of half-baked facts and rhetorical tricks being deployed to a bad end (“If we have to pick a side over Crimea, let it be Russia,” Opinion & Analysis, March 20th).

Crimeans should have some say over their political destiny, but the referendum held in Crimea last Sunday fell so far short of even “shifting norms of democratic probity” that it has to be dismissed. The vote was in no sense free or fair. The choice put before Crimea’s citizens was not a choice since it contained no option to remain within Ukraine. The vote was rushed forward so that there could be no campaigning against it, held under the auspices of a Crimean government that lacked any legitimacy and that denied meaningful protest against the referendum, and under conditions of a media blackout of Ukrainian news sources. Not surprisingly, many Crimeans boycotted the poll to deny it any legitimacy. Now that Russia has annexed Crimea and fatally wounded its relations with Ukraine, we will never know what Crimeans actually wanted.

Mr McCann is right to note that Russia has grievances with the post-cold war security architecture in Europe. It is, however, hypocritical of him to argue for the right of Crimeans to make decisions about their political and security futures and deny those rights to east Europeans whose countries joined the EU and Nato after 1989. Nato and EU enlargement may not have been well handled diplomatically, with rash promises that there would be no eastward enlargement of Nato made on several occasions by people who had no right to determine the foreign policy orientations of the new east European democracies. But this does not obviate the right of east Europeans to choose to be part of either Nato or the EU, a right that they exercised.

The rhetorical reason that Mr McCann holds east Europeans’ rights in such low regard is to justify Russian fears of further Nato expansion and to link these to Ukraine’s relationship to the EU. But no such relationship exists. Contrary to Mr McCann’s assertion, there is no mention of “Kiev align(ing) forces with Nato” in the agreements that Ukraine was due to sign with the EU last year. There is talk of co-operation in policing, anti-terrorism and other security areas, and of bringing about alignment between Ukrainian policy and the European Common Foreign and Security Policy. This has nothing to do with Nato and, given the state of European foreign and security policy, is not much of a threat to anyone.

The other argument that Mr McCann proposes, that the West is bad so we should ignore the wickedness of others, is so intellectually lazy that I will not dignify it with a response. – Yours, etc.

Prof NEIL ROBINSON, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick, Limerick.

recedite wrote: »

The standard of debate in this thread is disappointing.

As marienbad pointed out in the post above, you've widened the topic from the illegality of the military invasion of Crimea and the questionable motives and means by which this was achieved -- which you haven't really addressed -- to include a range of other topics, most of which while interesting, are not relevant.