In “Maidan or anti-Maidan? The Ukraine situation requires more nuance,” sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko attempts to carve out a progressive socialist position on the Ukraine conflict, one that would “support progressive wings of both Maidan and anti-Maidan, and try to unite them against the Ukrainian ruling class and against all nationalisms and imperialisms on shared demands for social justice.”
Russian media bloopers
14 04 2014Economist Paul Gregory has been keeping track of some very funny Russian media bloopers — funny except for the fact that they are intended to be true and serious.
Here he recounts three stories told by three Russian media outlets — Rossiya 1, NTV, and the National Independent News of Crimea — each about a very different character: an “ordinary citizen” protesting the Ukrainian “neo-Nazi government,” a German EU spy who hired a group of 50 European mercenaries (!), and a pediatric surgeon tending the victims of neo-Nazi gunmen.
The catch is that each is clearly the same guy lying (in both senses of the word) in the same hospital bed. These “news stories” are played by the same actor. The videos are below.
Comments : 25 Comments »
Categories : Media war, Russian propaganda, Uncategorized
Wynnyckyj: Russia’s threat to Ukraine
14 04 2014In “The Permanent Threat to Ukraine’s Existence,” political sociologist Mykhailo Wynnyckyj provides a provocative analysis of the current situation in Ukraine vis-a-vis its Russian neighbor. (Since the Kyiv Post enforces an article limit for non-subscribers, I’ll quote liberally from the article below.)
While Wynnyckyj’s larger argument about Ukraine’s “existential threat” may be overdrawn, he articulates the perspective of a Maidan insider very well.
Comments : 13 Comments »
Categories : Uncategorized
Barnes on Russia’s plans
11 04 2014The London Review of Books’ Hugh Barnes is posting some interesting observations from Donetsk.
Among other things, Barnes writes:
“Most informed sources in Ukraine and Russia believe that the annexation of Crimea was planned and carried out by the siloviki (former KGB and security service officials close to Putin), and not by the foreign policy elite (including the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and defence minister, Sergei Shoigu), whose influence has been waning since Putin veered to the right in the wake of the 2011-12 anti-government protests. [. . .]
Comments : 7 Comments »
Categories : Uncategorized
Phillips: “Things are just beginning for us…”
7 04 2014In “‘Things are just beginning for us’: Ukrainian perspectives,” anthropologist Sarah Phillips, author of Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine and Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine, reports on a recent informal survey she launched on Facebook to collect Ukrainians’ perspectives and concerns.
She notes the following overarching trends: Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: Odessa
Categories : Uncategorized
Russian media
6 04 2014While the source of this analysis, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, could be expected to be somewhat critical of Russia, the critique offered in “The World Through the Eyes of Russian State Television” is supported by several lengthy video segments from Russian state controlled news Channel 1.
As can be seen there, the news provided on Channel 1 is wildly at variance — frighteningly so — with what the rest of the world sees and knows about Ukraine. Either one state-controlled media industry (and a handful of western outlets) is correct and everyone else is in the dark, or there is a great deal of consent being manufactured here (as Noam Chomsky would likely say, if he lived there).
That does not mean there are no alternative views available in Russia. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 6 Comments »
Categories : Media war, Russian propaganda, Uncategorized
Neef: Akhmetov, Firtash, & the revolution
3 04 2014While Christian Neef’s article “Yanukovych’s Fall: The Power of Ukraine’s Billionaires” was published over a month ago, I had neglected to mention it at the time.
The article provides useful context for understanding the role of two of the most powerful oligarchic backers of the Yanukovych regime, Rinat Akhmetov and Dmitry Firtash, in the fall of Yanukovych and the transition to the current interim government.
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: oligarchs
Categories : Uncategorized
Foreign Affairs on Dugin & Putin
3 04 2014Articles posted on this blog have refererred repeatedly to Eurasianist ideologue and “conservative revolutionary” Aleksandr Dugin and his connection to Vladimir Putin’s expansionist strategy in Crimea. This article in the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs puts the Putin-Dugin relationship into some historical and political context.
While the article doesn’t discuss this in any detail, the Dugin-led Eurasianist Youth Movement has been influential in fueling opposition to Ukraine’s interim government in areas of southern and eastern Ukraine.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: Dugin, Fascism, Russian nationalism
Categories : Putin, Uncategorized
Žižek: What Europe should learn from Ukraine
2 04 2014In “What Europe Should Learn from Ukraine,” leftist cultural theorist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that the “Europe” Ukraine’s Euromaidan activists were aiming for was not an illusion, so much as it was a Europe that (EU member) Europeans themselves should be aiming to create.
Žižek writes:
“Predictably, many Leftists reacted to the news about the massive protests with their usual racist patronizing of the poor Ukrainians: how deluded they are, still idealizing Europe, not being able to see that Europe is in decline, and that joining European Union will just made Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe sooner or later pushed into the position of Greece… What these Leftists ignore is that Ukrainians were far from blind about the reality of the European Union: they were fully aware of its troubles and disparities, their message was simply that their own situation is much worse. [. . .]
Comments : 19 Comments »
Tags: Žižek
Categories : Left politics, Uncategorized, Western media
PolitiFact: Did U.S. spend $5 billion on Ukraine?
1 04 2014One of the memes circulating in the information war over Ukraine and Crimea is the claim that the U.S. has spent $5 billion on regime change in Ukraine.
In a report published today, the nonprofit-owned Tampa Bay Times‘ Pulitzer Prize winning PolitiFact.com, a fact-checking site with a long record of nonpartisan evaluation of claims from all sides of the political spectrum, gave this claim its worst judgment, “Pants on Fire.”
Comments : 51 Comments »
Tags: U.S.
Categories : Geopolitics, Western media