On Tuesday the crowds were still filing into Kiev's Independence Square and the surrounding streets where most of the killings took place. Many of them carried flowers to place at the scores of shrines.
They were a quiet, serious, absorbed crowd. There was no hint of celebration or victory. A mother took a picture of her two young daughters as they added to the piles of flowers.
No-one doubts that this is a historical moment for this nation of 46 million people. But the future remains very uncertain.
In Tuesday's afternoon chill, I watched an argument between two civil defence units that, for the moment, stand for law and order.
It was not serious, but it underlined the fragility of this upheaval and the need for a credible government.
Fragile is possibly an understatement. I wonder how many different factions there are in all this, all vying for at least some sort of say in what happens.
if the Russians decide to take Crimea back who is going to stop them? If I were Putin I would do it in a heartbeat.
That would seem likely to ensure that the remainder of Ukraine then joined NATO -- including parts of Ukraine that are so close to Moscow that targeting with short-range weapons is feasible.
Published on 27 Feb 2014
Ukrainian Road Police stops Russian Armored Vehicles Entering
the Crimea near Simferopol
0 Replies
izzythepush
1
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Thu 27 Feb, 2014 05:44 am
@Lordyaswas,
I've just heard a bit on the radio about the far right. Many of them believe that they put the most effort into the protests and should reap some of the benefits. Apparently quite a few swastikas have been painted on walls in Kiev, which will concern the Russian speakers even more.
Russian investigators have asked a court to put opposition leader Alexei Navalny under house arrest.
Officials say he has repeatedly travelled outside Moscow, in breach of an undertaking not to do so.
He is already serving a five-year suspended sentence for the alleged theft of 16 million roubles ($450,000; £270,000) from a timber firm in 2009.
Critics of Russia's President Vladimir Putin accuse the Kremlin of stepping up pressure on dissent in recent weeks.
Navalny is also a defendant in an embezzlement and money laundering case, known as the Yves Rocher case.
The campaigner and anti-corruption blogger insists his legal difficulties are Kremlin reprisals for his opposition, including helping to lead a series of anti-government protests in 2011 and 2012.
I've just heard a bit on the radio about the far right. Many of them believe that they put the most effort into the protests and should reap some of the benefits. Apparently quite a few swastikas have been painted on walls in Kiev, which will concern the Russian speakers even more.
Why oh why do idiots do this sort of thing? It must be a lack of brain cells, or the inability to think two or three moves ahead. What the hell do they think will happen as a result of this sort of nonsense, other than a bad outcome?
The other protestors, hopefully, will be stamping it out as quockly as possible. Merkel's old boss just needs one teeny weeny excuse.....
No, Walter. Pre Wall 'downing'. Wasn't Putin the unofficial overlord there in those final years?
Just tweaking you, to see if there was anything in the rumours flying around a few years ago that our Angela was a good party member back then. Obviously not, as you would have no doubt supplied a link.
However, they were both young, good looking and a bit groovy. Surely they must have crossed paths along the way....Local Disco..... Potato Harvest Gala.... that sort of thing. No?
Why oh why do idiots do this sort of thing? It must be a lack of brain cells, or the inability to think two or three moves ahead.
There's a long history of extreme right-wings/Nazis in the Ukraine.
Am I right in thinking that they formed their own Einsatz wotsit Stormtrooper regiment, when Barbarossa was under way?
0 Replies
Setanta
3
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Thu 27 Feb, 2014 07:35 am
After crushing the Swedes at Poltava in the Ukraine, Petr Alexeevitch invaded the Turkish empire in 1710--it was a disaster. He was forced to give up the lands in the southern Ukraine which he had taken in 1697, and the Turk negotiated on behalf of Charles XII, that he be allowed to leave under a sage conduct. But Petr went from strength to strength. He defeated the remnant Swedish garrisons and took Ingria, Livonia and Courland (modern Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) and thereby secured his new capital of St. Petersburg, which he had founded in 1703 at the mouth of the Neva River. When he had first travelled to the west, he had visited Venice, and left young Russian noblemen there to study ship-building. After crushing the Swedish navy with the ships built at Kornstadt, his new naval base at St. Petersburg, he built a fleet of galleys to overrun Finland. The galleys could go in shallow waters on the rocky coastline, where the Swedish frigates could not follow. He then began raiding the coast of Sweden with those galley, which would rush over from Finland and drop off Russian cavalry. They even raided to the walls of Stockholm. Charles XII had destroyed his army in Poland, Saxony and the Ukraine, and he was powerless to stop the destruction.
So, in 1716-17, Petr revisited the west. After seeing old friends in the Netherlands, he visited France. He was impressed by many of their civic systems and the mint, but thought Paris was nasty and dirty. He did recruit French architects and artists to go to his new city of St. Petersburg. Leaving Paris, he stopped in Rheims and was shown the treasures of the cathedral. This included an ancient missal on which the Kings of France swore their coronation oath, but no one in France could read it, or even identify the language in which it was written, nor the characters in which it was written. To the amazement and chagrin of the Bishop and the priests assembled. Peter laughed, and taking up the missal, began to read aloud from it.
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A thousand years ago, Kyiv was the greatest city of eastern Europe, and the Rus of the Ukraine were wealthy and powerful. In the Ukraine, the steppes were a vast sea of grass and farmers found it easy to produce an abundance of grain and livestock. One branch of the Silk Road ran to Kyiv, where the traders brought silk, mother of pearl, pearls and semi-precicious stones to trade for the furs of the northern forests, so highly-valued in China. The Rus bent the knee to no one, and acknowledged no authority other than the emperor at Constantinople. The Kremlin at that time was log stockade and Moscow, what there was of it, was a huddle of mud and wood hovels clinging to muddy trails through the forests. The Rus of the Ukraine were proud and rich.
In the 11th century, a princess of the Rus, Anna Yaroslavna, went to France to marry Louis I. She must have thought she had been exiled to the ends of the earth--living in a malodorous stockade in the forest surrounded by semi-barbarians. She took her missal with her, and in Rheims, in 1717, Petr was reading aloud from her missal, written in Old Church Slavonic, a language still in use in the Russian Orthodox church. The Mongol invasion of the 13th century, bringing the Tatars in its train, destroyed or drove out the Rus, who retreated to those northern forests which would soon become known as Russia. It has been almost 900 years since the end of the glory days of the Rus in the Ukraine.
0 Replies
Walter Hinteler
1
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Thu 27 Feb, 2014 07:37 am
@Lordyaswas,
Lordyaswas wrote:
No, Walter. Pre Wall 'downing'. Wasn't Putin the unofficial overlord there in those final years?
No. He was a KGB-officer in Dresden. Merkel studied in Leipzig.
She had never been a party member, neither of the SED nor of any of the so-called "block parties".
Those rumours seem to be completely wrong - there are a lot of known facts which are totally contrary - known facts even before 1990.
I'm certainly not a Merkle-fan, but you can't condemn/judge 17 million Germans because they live(d) in what you think is the wrong country.
I agree in that situation it would have been useful to have a gun to use against the riot police, however, more than likely, the riot police would have just got bigger weapons. Guns would do little good against Russian tanks, unless of course you advocate everyone should have the right the bear tanks or whatever else is used. My point being is this situation seems a little beyond a simple right to defend yourself with guns argument.
I've always liked her, in a weird sort of way, as her presence stops the surrounding men at various conferences from facing up to one another unneccesarily, as alpha males tend to do.
She obviously has Germany as her priority when dealing with the EU, and obviously knows that she carries the most political weight at negotiations, and I just wish that spineless Cameron could be a little bit more like her.
PS..... She's just been talking in the UK House of Commons, and telling our naughty boys off for being all bolshy with regards to the perceived EU power grabbing.
I'm sure if she had told all our MP's to go to bed without any supper, they would've!
PS..... She's just been talking in the UK House of Commons, and telling our naughty boys off for being all bolshy with regards to the perceived EU power grabbing.
