Here’s another useful summary of things from Cathy Young (Ekaterina Jung).
(While I don’t always agree with her liberatarian-leaning political positions, she is a respectable journalist. I share it only because the Russian state media, i.e., propaganda, narratives are still so pervasive.)
As Ukraine is preparing for its presidential election, historian William Risch is sharing this view from the ground in Slavyansk, epicenter of the pro-Russian Donetsk separatist movement. Very interesting.
Ukraine Conflict, an online archive of materials related to the recent events in Ukraine, is a very useful source for those searching through the full range of online materials on specific topics. The site’s description reads as follows:
“This collection seeks to document conflict in Ukraine as it progresses. Contributions to this collection were made by the Archive-It team and subject matter experts in the fields of Investigative Journalism, Russian, and Eurasian studies, and include news outlets, social media, blogs, and government websites. Sites are written in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages.”
I’ve added a link to it in the right-hand sidebar of the UKR-TAZ main page.
Developments in eastern Ukraine have been taking some interesting turns.
Among the themes I’ve been seeing in the coverage are more detailed profiles of the pro-Russian separatists, who are looking ever more like a motley bunch. As noted on this blog before, many have links to far-right groups in Russia. (Some of those groups — like Russkaia Pravda, with its bizarre conspiracy tales of how the Jewish-Masonic “Kiev junta” is planning to massively resettle Hasidic Jews from Manhattan into eastern Ukraine — are pretty outlandish.)
University of Manitoba historian Myroslav Shkandrij‘s account of the Russian mercenearies in Donbas details the criminal and/or neo-Nazi backgrounds of about a dozen of the most prominent pro-Russian separatist figures, including Strelkov/Girkin, “Babai”/Mozhaev, “Dingo”/Ponomarev, and several others. Collectively, their prospects seem to be declining.
Another theme is that left-wing eastern Ukrainians — from coal miners and steel workers to national-communists and anarcho-syndicalists — have either begun to clearly distance themselves from the separatists, or have been doing that all along (if less noticeably).
An example is this interview with Mykola Tsikhno, co-ordinator of the National Communist Front, which models itself on the national communists who were prominent in Ukraine in the 1920s (before getting squashed by Stalinism). Another is this interview with Mykola Volynko, head of the Trade Union of Donbas Miners.
I’ve been away from blogging on this site for over a week now (and was somewhat irregular for the previous little while as well). I’ll try to catch up over the coming days.
In the meantime, an offer I had extended to some colleagues in Ukrainian studies still holds: if you have your fingers in the worlds of Ukrainian and/or Russian media and would like to contribute to this blog — the goals of which are expressed here — please write me.
I drafted an op-ed piece a few weeks ago that I failed to oversee to publication, because it was quickly overtaken by events that I didn’t manage to incorporate into the piece.
I’m sharing it here for what it’s worth, as it includes some useful links to materials I have not posted to this blog. It’s more opinionated than my posts have usually been, but that’s the nature of an op-ed. The general idea remains quite relevant (as my “Right Sector vs. United Russia” post shows). A brief update follows.
Manufacturing reality: The Russian infowar over Ukraine
The short answer to the question “Where is the left in Ukraine today?” is that it’s weak and divided. Weak because 70 years of Soviet rule discredited it for many and 22 years of oligarchy marginalized it. Divided because while many leftists in central and western Ukraine support the interim government, much of the southern and eastern left is ambivalent or fights on either side.
The Ukrainian workers’ movement Left Opposition has tried to steer the divide by calling for a national workers’ movement that would focus on shared economic goals as against the pro-EU orientation of the Maidan and interim government, but also against the pro-Russia positions of the separatists.
In a statement from last week, they discuss how other groups have been drawn into the growing divide — socialist union “Borot’ba” on the pro-Russian side, anarchists and anti-fascists on the pro-Maidan side — and call for unity among Leftists.
Survey results carried out by Public.ru for the month of April show the number of mentions in Russian media of Ukrainian far-right grouping “Right Sector” — whose leader, Dmytro Yarosh, has 0.7% support according to the latest poll results — was second among all Russian or Ukrainian political organizations.
The only group that was mentioned more frequently was the Russian party in power, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia. That party received 19,050 points according to the methodology used, compared to Right Sector’s 18,900. Both were well ahead of others. (See results below.) The survey covers television, radio, print and electronic media in the Russian Federation.
Given that Right Sector is (a) not a party, (b) not in Russia, and (c) has miniscule support in the country where it does exist, this data tells us something very interesting about Russian media. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the best blogs on current Ukrainian affairs (despite its home page) is Current Politics in Ukraine, run out of the University of Alberta’s Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine. (You can always get to it from the link in the right-hand sidebar of this blog’s homepage.)
One of its recent articles, by Stasiuk Center director David Marples, analyzes the five major grievances of the pro-Russia separatists and assesses them for their credibility and actuality.
As both Russia and Ukraine prepare to mark Victory Day (May 9), the capitulation of Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union in the Second World War, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group continues to monitor the spread of fascist and neo-Nazi groups and ideas in eastern Ukraine.
Contrary to official Russian propaganda, the most visible neo-Nazis are Russians whose connections to the pro-Russian eastern Ukrainian separatists are incontrovertible. See Halya Coynash’s “Neo-Nazis in Moscow’s service,” as well as the links at the bottom of that article. Like Aleksandr Dugin (whom I’ve posted about before), Aleksandr Barkashov is well known to those who monitor fascism in the former Soviet Union.