In “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.
The 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. [. . .]
In “‘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 »
While 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 »
While 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.
Articles 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 »
In “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. [. . .]
One 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.”
The political anthropology blog Anthropoliteia, subtitled “Critical perspectives on police, security, crime, law and punishment around the world,” has been running an ongoing forum called “What’s Going On in Ukraine?”
One of the recent posts was a “Ukraine Roundtable” (part 1) organized in collaboration with Allegra: A Virtual Lab of Legal Anthropology, which has been running its own series of commentaries on Ukraine. The first part of the roundtable featured comments from five observers conducting research in Ukraine and/or Russia. (It is found on Allegra here.)
The Anthropoliteia series is archived here.
Russian-born UC Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, author of the celebrated study Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, has written a fascinating account of the unnamed armed forces that appeared in Crimea before its referendum. It is entitled “Little green men: Russia, Ukraine, and post-Soviet sovereignty.”
A few excerpts:
“What we witnessed in Crimea is a curious new political technology — a military occupation that is staged as a non-occupation. These curious troops were designed to fulfill two contradictory things at once – to be anonymous and yet recognized by all, to be polite and yet frightening, to be identified as the Russian Army and yet, be different from the Russian Army. They were designed to be a pure, naked military force – a force without a state, without a face, without identity, without a clearly articulated goal. [. . .]