The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has released its third Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine.
The full 58-page report can be read here.
A brief overview can be read here.
UN report on human rights in Ukraine
19 06 2014Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: human rights, UN report
Categories : Uncategorized
Maidan & the Left: “Libertarian in spirit”
16 06 2014In a report on the recent conference “The Left and the Maidan,” held in Kyiv in April, Russian trade unionist Kirill Buketov (of the Global Labour Institute and the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers) provides a detailed overview of the role of the political left in the Maidan movement.
Buketov argues that while the Maidan cannot be adequately described as either left-wing or right-wing in its political character — according to polls, “93% of the Maidan participants were distant from politics” and only 7% “had a political position and belonged to one political group or another” — in spirit it was “left-wing” and “libertarian.”
“Driven by protest against corruption and tyranny, against humiliation and oppression, by masses of people who felt their dignity had been offended by their rulers’ lies,”
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Categories : Ukrainian Left politics
Poroshenko’s inaugural speech
8 06 2014The inaugural speech of Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, can be read in its entirety in English translation here.
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Tags: Poroshenko
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More media war techniques
5 06 2014While this web site is in Russian, the videos and images don’t require much translation. It’s a catalogue of examples of Russian state media “recycling” of images from other times and places — dead bodies, mutilated children, bombings, downed UN planes, et al. — in order to discredit Ukraine’s (former) opposition or its (current) interim government.
The sources include Syria’s current civil war (several images), Belgrade in the 1990s, Mexico’s drug war, the African Congo (that UN plane), and even a fire from Quebec’s Lac Megantic train derailment. All are presented as if these depict victims of “Kiev’s fascist junta” or on-the-ground images from eastern Ukraine.
Then there is the army of internet trolls. Media studies dissertations can be written about this stuff.
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Categories : Media war, Russian propaganda, Uncategorized
More views from the left
2 06 2014In “Eastern Ukraine: Popular Uprising, Conspiracy, or Civil War?” leftish cultural-political magazine n+1 presents a very interesting and diverse collection of interviews with left-wing activists in Ukraine and Russia on the events of the last few months.
And Observer Ukraine presents an interview with Left Opposition activist and lawyer Vitaliy Dudin.
An earlier interview with Zakhar Popovych (also included in the n+1 article) has been translated here.
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Categories : Left politics, Ukrainian Left politics, Uncategorized
Where next in Russia’s propaganda offensive?
29 05 2014In the Moscow Times article “Russia’s Propaganda War Will Backfire,” Mark Lawrence Schrad, author of Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy and the Secret History of the Russian State, argues that the Putin regime’s media offensive against the Maidan revolution and the interim Ukrainian government will backfire on Russian-Ukrainian relations for years to come.
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Categories : Media war, Russian propaganda, Uncategorized
PBS vs. Vice
28 05 2014How is it that PBS’s respected public affairs show Frontline could produce a sensationalistic portrayal of Ukraine as a divided, bloody, chaotic mess — airing two days after an election that produced the clearest majority ever in a Ukrainian presidential election — while the internet-based Vice News could produce this comparatively sensible portrait of a country that showed courage and a very clear consensus in its belief that the political process is far preferable to warfare?
It is good to know that there are extremists on both sides, and PBS is right to show that. But we’ve been seeing that for months now.
Comments : 3 Comments »
Categories : Uncategorized, Western media
Bojcun: Poroshenko’s sticky wicket
27 05 2014In “The Chocolate King Walks Onto a Sticky Wicket,” left-wing Ukraine analyst Marko Bojcun provides an excellent overview of the prospects facing post-presidential election Ukraine: deteriorating socio-economic conditions, a fragile state, chaos in the eastern provinces, and so on.
The article is well worth reading.
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Tags: Poroshenko
Categories : Left politics, Uncategorized
On the presidential election
27 05 2014
Every serious newspaper in the world announced something yesterday about the winner of Sunday’s Ukrainian presidential election, Petro Poroshenko.
Canadian journalist (and Liberal Party politician) Chrystia Freeland’s piece in the center-left Toronto Star encompassed more of the meaning of the election for Ukrainians than most other reports. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Poroshenko
Categories : Uncategorized
Velychenko: Prelude to the present
25 05 2014In “Ukrainian Marxists and Russian Imperialism 1918-1923: Prelude to the Present in Eastern Europe’s Ireland,” historian Stephen Velychenko provides some interesting background to the debate about what happened to the Ukrainian left. The article is long, but worth reading, as it covers an important historical episode in the relations between the Ukrainian left and the Russian left that, Velychenko suggests, is echoed in debates among leftists today.
Velychenko writes:
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Categories : History, Ukrainian Left politics