The Ukraine List #470

compiled by Dominique Arel Chair of Ukrainian Studies, U of Ottawa www.ukrainianstudies.uottawa.ca 6 June 2014

------More UKLs in June: some catching up to do!–DA ------

1- Chair Web Site: Dominique Arel, The 14 Maidan Lectures 2- Danyliw Seminar 2014: Maidan, Insurrection(s), Geopolitics (23-25 October)

------Violence in Donbas ------

3- Dominique Arel: The Donbas Insurrection (14 May)(translated from French) 4- CIUS Blog: Oleksandr Melnyk, What the Maidano-Ukrainian Nation is Facing 5- Maciej Bartkowski: Ukraine Needs Nonviolent Resistance To Beat Russia 6- Vice News: The Russian Orthodox Army (4 June) 7- RFE/RL: The Vostok Battalion (31 May) 8- New Yorker: Ukraine Slipping Away to Something Darker (23 May) 9- Emergency Statement of Rinat Akhmetov on the Situation in Donbass (19 May) 10- Window on Eurasia: Putin Playing with Orthodox Extremists (19 May) 11- Guardian: The Danger of Volunteer Units in Donetsk (15 May)

12- Ukrainska pravda: Medvedev Lying About Ukrainian Refugees [UKL tr] 13- Eurozine: Mischa Gabowitsch, Consensus and Arrogance (21 May)

14- Beyond Brics: Taras Kuzio, The Man Who Served Everyone (22 May) 15- Anton Shekhovtsov: Ukraine’s Presidential Election and the Far Right 16- Tablet: Putin and His Far Right Friends in Europe (4 April)

1 UKL #470 6 June 2014 17- Globe & Mail: Roland Paris, Harper’s Heroic Ukraine Message and the Reality 18- Reuters: Canada Trimmed Russia Sanctions to Protect Business Interests

19- Kyiv Post: Grand Corruption in the Homes of Former Ministers (28 March) 20- Isabelle Fortin: Natural Gas—Ukraine Achilles’ Heel [for UKL] 21- Financial Times: Naftohaz to be Split in Three

22- Forbes: The Turnout of the Crimean Referendum As Low As 30% (5 May) 23- Statement of Concerned Scholars on the Crimean Tatars 24- Hollywood Reporter: Crimean Ukrainian Director Accused of “Terrorism”

25- UJE Graduate Student Symposium, U of Toronto, 24 September 2014 26- Colloque: L’espace politique ukrainien, Lyon, 26-27 juin 2014

------Thanks to Maciej Bartkowski, Anna Colin Lebedev, Keith Darden, Valentyna Dymytrova, Isabelle Fortin, Mayhill Fowler, Paul Goble, Anton Shekhovtsov, Mischa Gabowitsch, Jaroslav Koshiw, Oleksandr Melnyk, Taras Kuzio, Ioulia Shukan, and Roman Zurba ------

#1 Chair of Ukrainian Studies: The 14 Maidan Lectures ------

I have been unable to send a UKL since March 14, but the Chair of Ukrainian Studies has remained quite active on the Maidan front since that time. The 14 Maidan-related lectures that I have given since late January can now be accessed at http://socialsciences.uottawa.ca// ukraine/maidan-lectures-roundtables. Half of these lectures were delivered since mid-March (one of them being technically not a lecture, but a publication in Foreign Affairs). This “Maidan lecture” page is part of the brand new website of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, still very much in development – Dominique

#2 Ukraine 2014: Maidan, Insurrection(s), Geopolitics ------10th Annual Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa, 23-25 October 2014 http://socialsciences.uottawa.ca/sites/default/files/public/ukraine/fra/documents/danyliw2014- callforpapers.pdf ------

2 UKL #470 6 June 2014 CALL FOR PAPER PROPOSALS

The internationally renowned Danyliw Seminar will be celebrating its 10th Anniversary this Fall with an ambitious gathering devoted to the extraordinary events that have engulfed Ukraine in the past six months. Entitled “Ukraine 2014: Maidan, Insurrection(s), Geopolitics,” the Seminar will feature more than 30 presentations on topics ranging from Euromaidan, the fall of Yanukovych, political violence, social media, Crimea, Russia, the European Union and more. The Seminar will be held at the University of Ottawa on 23-25 October 2014.

Since 2005, the Danyliw Seminar has provided an annual platform for the presentation of some of the most influential social science research on Ukraine. Studies on the Orange Revolution, electoral and constitutional politics, historical memory, language, and political economy have been particularly prevalent. The seminar generally featured fifteen or so self-enclosed presentations, based on full-fledged papers, and special events. To mark its 10th Anniversary and take into account the scope and fluidity of ongoing developments in Ukraine, the Seminar will be structured around panels, with shorter papers (3000-4000 words). The texts of the presentations, and a summary of the discussions, will then be widely disseminated on the web.

The Seminar invite proposals from doctoral students and scholars (in political science, anthropology, sociology, history, law and related disciplines in the social science and humanities), practitioners from non-governmental and international organizations, journalists, and policy analysts on topics falling under the following ten thematic clusters (the examples given below are not exhaustive):

• Maidan as a Civic and Cultural Revolution: the “revolution of dignity”, civic pressure on structural reforms (and against corruption), citizens and political parties, the role of art in revolution, the shifting meaning of “Ukrainian” and “Russian” culture;

• Constitutional and Legal Challenges: towards a new constitution; the legal dimension of the fall of Yanukovych, Crimea and international law, investigating political violence, lustration, international arbritage over energy, the procuracy and legal reforms;

• President and Parliament—Elections & Politics: the reformation of political parties (a parliamentary election will most likely be held in the Fall), the regional factor in post- Maidan elections, parliamentary groups and behavior in the post-Maidan Rada, new coalitions, the changing role of governors;

• Political Violence: the Maidan insurrection and the role of the police, urban violence in the regions, the Donbas insurrection and the Ukrainian counter-insurrection, state capacity and law enforcement (Army, SBU, police, National Guard, Border Guards), the paramilitaries, Russia’s role, the annexation of Crimea, the historical context of violence (Civil War, famines, purges, WWII);

3 UKL #470 6 June 2014 • The Far Right: Pravyi sector, Svoboda, Russian National Unity, Russian Orthodox Army, Rodina, the far right and the Ukrainian government, the European Far Right and Russia, the Jewish question;

• Regionalism: decentralization, federalism, language politics, regional representation at the center, the perception of Maidan in the East, the reformation of national identities in the East; the regional factor in Ukrainian history;

• The War Over Narratives: the role of social media, the use of Russian TV domestically and abroad, the instrumentalisation of “fascism” and “terrorism”, the resurgence of historical memory over World War II, the role of international media (traditional and new web outlets), the pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia narratives in Western elite and public opinion;

• The Economic Agenda: the energy and debt dispute with Russia, structural reform and social protection, the EU Free Trade Agreement, procurement and the fight against corruption, the resilience of the oligarchic system, the IMF and external aid;

• Maidan and Geopolitics: Russia’s policy towards Ukraine, Russia-Ukraine in historical perspective, the EU and Ukraine, American policy and interests; NATO, the Ukraine question in Europe and North America, the OSCE, the Geneva Accords, international mediation;

• Canada and the New Ukraine: Canadian policy during and since Maidan, the Canadian observation missions, the role and weight of the organized Ukrainian Canadian diaspora, Canada as a mediator, Ukraine in the Canadian media;

Interested parties are invited to submit a 500 word paper proposal and a 150 word biographical statement, by email attachment, to Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, at [email protected] AND [email protected]. Please also include your full coordinates (institutional affiliation, preferred postal address, email, phone) and, if applicable, indicate your latest publication or, in the case of doctoral applicants, the year when you entered a doctoral program, the [provisional] title of your dissertation and year of expected completion.

The proposal deadline is 26 June 2014. The Chair will cover the expenses of applicants whose proposal is accepted by the Seminar. The proposals will be reviewed by an international selection committee and applicants will be notified in the summer.

The Seminar is made possible by the commitment of the Wolodymyr George Danyliw Foundation to the pursuit of excellence in the study of contemporary Ukraine.

4 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #3 The Donbas Insurrection ------by Dominique Arel Chair of Ukrainian Studies Presented at the event ““L’Ukraine à la veille de l’élection présidentielle du 25 mai 2014”, CERI, SciencesPo, Paris, 14 May 2014 [UKL translation – originally given in French] ------

For a month, Ukraine has been facing an armed rebellion in the two provinces of the mining region of Donbas—Donetsk and Luhansk. Heavily armed commando have stormed government buildings, police stations and sometimes the procuracy in a dozen of towns. The insurgents have proclaimed a “Donetsk People’s Republic” (a gesture imitated by their sidekicks in Luhansk) and organized last Sunday what they called a referendum for the “self-determination” of this republic. The Ukrainian Army has been seeking to encircle their headquarters in Sloviansk, a small town apparently chosen for its strategic location near a highway linking Kharkiv and Donetsk (and quite close to the Russian border), but the results have not yet been very convincing. Once again, yesterday, half-a- dozen Ukrainian soldiers perished in a rebel ambush. A climate of latent war absorbs the region and continues to deteriorate.

The first level of confrontation, as always, is with words. The Ukrainian government, from the beginning, calls these insurgents “terrorists,” a term uncritically adopted by the Ukrainian media, including Ukrainska pravda, the best source of online information in Ukraine. The term is not only misleading analytically, it is also fateful, if not disastrous, politically. Terrorism is the indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and 9/11 is the seminal example of our times. The Donetsk rebels use kidnappings, torture (sometimes lethal) and beat up demonstrators, but this violence, as terrifying as it can be, is in fact targeted, since the victims are chosen according to their presumed political opposition, on the suspicion that they show a certain loyalty to the Ukrainian state. In the general sense of the term, we could say that this violence terrorizes a certain layer of the population, but the terror weapon is more efficient when it strikes where it is not expected. Politically, to reduce rebels to terrorists has the contrary effect of aggravating the sentiment of alienation amongst a good part of the population in the East. An insurgency succeeds in becoming durable when it enjoys a certain popular support, a support often ambivalent, and in the case of Donbas, most likely a minority support, and yet sufficient to transform the insurgency into a social force.

The armed men of the Donbas are insurgents, since they seek to overthrow the established order by arms. An insurgency can be considered illegal, immoral or illegitimate, but what interests us here is the phenomenon in itself, and not its normative evaluation. An insurgency can also be fueled by a foreign power, which is manifestly the case here, since it is under the command of an officer of Russian intelligence and since

5 UKL #470 6 June 2014 many of the weapons used are only made in Russia, yet observers on the grounds attest that most rebels are territorially Ukrainian, assisted with a certain number of Russian mercenaries.

These rebels, however, were complete unknowns on the Donbas political scene until recently. The Party of Regions was the only party in Eastern Ukraine—with the exception of the small Communist satellite—and brooked no opposition. According to the scholar Oleksandr Melnyk, this meant that Russian nationalists and Ukrainian nationalists were equally repressed. The fall of Yanukovych, however, has led to a weakening, if not the collapse, of the Party of Regions and to a political vacuum in Donetsk, where it massively originated from. Fringe groups totally ignored until then, such as the regional branch of the Russian Party of National Unity, took the initiative. Their first operations were evidently coordinated from the outside—videos suggest the presence of special forces from Russia—but by all indications the people forming the core of this rebellion knew each other. The networks, bereft of any serious political influence, were in place. It is the first case of a mirror effect of the Maidan insurrection. Pravyi sektor, who played a determining role in the use and escalation of violence on Maidan, came about as a coalition of groups who had occupied, in the past ten or twenty years, the most obscure corners of the political spectrum in Ukraine.

The question of the popularity of this insurrectional movement is at the heart of the conflict between Kyiv and Donetsk. Since we have recently learned from the very official Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights attached to Presidential Office in Russia that the turnout in the Crimean referendum was perhaps as low as 30%, it does not seem plausible that more Donetsk residents took part in an exercise organized in a hurry in a few days and where four times less electoral precincts were open in the capital Donetsk. It is thus possible that close to three-fourths of residents stayed home last Sunday, a score close to the proportion of inhabitants who declare themselves, in public opinion surveys, favorable to the maintenance of Donetsk within Ukraine. We can also assume that the average citizen does not like that an armed paramilitary man can walk about in all impunity, with the police unable, or unwilling, to protect civilians. That being said, the fact that an important minority, perhaps 30%, went to the polls, polls guarded by masked gunmen, in order to vote on a question that was vague but still pertained to a Donetsk People’s Republic proclaimed by these same masked men, tells us a great deal about the popular support of this insurgency, even if it is led by men affiliated with extremist groups for which this population would not vote if free elections were to be held.

A small minority within this minority is even ready to confront Ukrainian armed forces when it ventures on the ground, as we could observe in each of their attempts, to the point that the most reckless, if not the most aggressive ones, threaten the security of soldiers lacking training in having to cope with crowds of civilians. The upshot is that civilians end up dead from bullets shot by men representing the Ukrainian state, a situation that can only increase the resentment of this minority towards Kyiv. The cold assessment is that the storming of public buildings does not bring civilians to oppose it, while almost each

6 UKL #470 6 June 2014 attempt by the state to undo their takeovers attracts a crowd that puts itself literally in the way. These crowds are not particularly numerous, perhaps due to the danger inherent to such an activity, but it is them who occupy public space. (A pro-Ukraine demonstration, two weeks ago, was savagely attacked with baseball bats, which will most likely have the effect of neutralizing future attempts). By staying home, the majority leaves the field to the active minority. This political dynamics can, of course, be observed in our societies. There is a democratic majority and the capacity to act on the ground, sometimes using the tool of political violence, and the two do not always match.

The majority who stays home declares itself pro-Ukraine in surveys, but this majority also considers the post-Maidan government illegitimate, in a proportion close to 75%, while the average in the other provinces of the East and South is around 50%. We are touching here at the root of the problem. The fall of the government is not accepted in the East, and most certainly in the Donbas. This is not because Yanukovych is missed: the same survey gives a majority (in Donetsk) no longer considering him as the legitimate president of Ukraine. The first breaking point happened in January when the Maidan frontline activists, evidently at the initiative of Pravyi sektor, decided to resort to violence (throwing cocktail molotovs and stones) in order to break the political deadlock, at a time when the Rada had just passed oppressive laws banning all demonstrations. After initially denouncing the violence as a provocation, public opinion in Kyiv and Western Ukraine accepted it as legitimate, but Eastern Ukrainians read it differently. The influence of Russian TV was certainly a factor, although it is not clear that a pluralist coverage of the events would have necessarily changed percpetions and we may be facing here an asymmetry in political cultures. The second breaking point, deeper, took place when activists in te West, but also all over in Ukraine, began to attack government buildings. The normative story was clear: these activists were going after symbolic sites of a government that had become, in their eyes, illegitimate through its recourse to violence, even with live bullets, against demonstrators. Yet this strategy also demonstrated that it was now possible to assault the very institutions of the state. The legal culture in Ukraine is weak, but never in its history had institutions been threatened.

The massive rejection in the East of the legitimacy of the current government explains in large the behavior of police forces. Policemen in rare occasions have resisted the assault of insurgents—and in these rare cases have paid a steep price for their resistance. The trend has rather been one of laissez faire or of defecting to the side of insurgents. The policemen do not want to fight, some would say that the institution of the police in itself, compromised with organized crime and corroded by corruption, is incapable of performing its task. But an important part of the problem can certainly be traced back to the chain of command and to the unwillingness of police forces to follow orders from Kyiv. If 75% of Donbas residents do not consider the current government as legitimate, a proportion as significant of policemen must be of the same mindset. Restoring the legitimate of the state cannot be accomplished through “anti-terrorist operations.”

The insurgents, repeating the narrative hammered by the Russian state, claim to be fighting the “fascists.” By their actions, however, they are reproducing the fantasies

7 UKL #470 6 June 2014 attributed to their enemies. Pravyi sektor became known for its “self-defense” units, its capacity to fight police forces and sometimes by excessive statements of its leader, such as threatening to blow up pipelines. Yet Pravyi sektor, notwithstanding disgraceful episodes of public humiliations and the storming of offices of the Party of Regions and of the Communist Party, did not kidnap civilians, resort to torture, issued death threats or engaged in murder. Numerous such cases have been documented in this Donetsk People’s Republic. Pravyi sektor and Svoboda belong to the populist right, if not the hard right, yet they operate in a pluralist universe where their actions have been analyzed in depth by the local and international media during and since Maidan. By contrast, the Donetsk insurgents are secretive and seek, through violence, to eliminate all political opposition. And yet they are supported by those willing to occupy public space and by the local police, tacitly or actively. As for political elites, they have practically vanished and this constitutes the largest political problem facing the Kyiv government.

The Ukrainian government says it is ready to engage a dialogue with regional representatives on a decentralisation of power and a first round-table took place today in Kyïv. But who should he talks to? With the political vacuum in Donetsk, who could possibly sit at the other end of the table? The government, coopting a dominant narrative in the West, refuses to negotiate with what he calls “terrorists.” But comparative experience teaches us that governments always end up negotiating with insurgents, unless it succeeds in defeating them by the force of arms, which cannot be accomplished without severe civilian losses. Is there really a third way, without negotiations and without a civilian population paying the price? It is hard to see it un the current policies of the Ukrainian government. One should note that negotiations are already taking place at the local level with Governor Taruta and insurgents, but government representatives complain that insurgent delegations keep changing, denoting a certain political confusions among these armed men.

As for the substance of these negotiations, the main item on the agenda is to provides regional and local institutions with fiscal and administrative resources to allow them to better address issues of health, education and territorial planning. This initiative is fundamental, but it omits an equally crucial dimension of the regional question, that of inclusion. The relation between the center and the regions goes both ways: the regions want more power for themselves, but they also want to be adequately represented at the center. This is characteristic of federalism, but we have to understand here that the word cannot be uttered in Ukrainian politics, due to its rather suspect use by Russia and also as a result of the recent experience of communist federations. Russia understand by Ukrainan federalism the capacity by the regions to exercise a veto on the foreign policy of the state (NATO, EU), as well as a control over the security forces deployed in the regions—prerogatives that, of course, applies neither to Russian federalism, nor to any other federal system, with the partial exception of Bosnia. As for the recent experience in Eastern Europe, the three communist federations (USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) all shared the same fate, namely, implosion. Some would say that these were not true federations, due to the centralizing powers of the hegemonic party, but the fact remains that the very term of federalism prevents a public debate in Ukraine.

8 UKL #470 6 June 2014 But if the term of federalism has no future in Ukraine, its practice of regional representation appear essential to allow Ukraine to overcome the grave crisis that it faces and keep its territorial integrity. Since independence, Ukraine has never developed practices of regional representation its governments, because no political party has been able to develop solid electoral foundations in the two great regional poles of Ukraine—East and West. As a result, the Kuchma government was from the East, that of Yushchenko—from the Wesy, that of Yanukovych—from the East (in fact, from a single province: Donetsk), and the Maidan one is from the West. Despite the quasi-existential crisis that has been plaguing Ukraine, it is rather remarkable that the opposition leaders did not try to form a government of national unity, that is, representative of all important regions. Admittedly, the Ukrainian political system lacks incentives to favor such representation at a time when people in the East repeat that “Kyiv does not hear us.” The best way to be heard is to have a voice at the table. It is a matter of political will, but the priorities are elsewhere at the moment in Kyiv.

#4 On the Logic of Nation/State-Building/Breaking in “Ukraine” ------by Oleksandr Melnyk Current Politics in Ukraine Blog, 15 May 2014 ------

Oleksandr Melnyk is a native of Kherson, Ukraine, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto

The events of recent months: “Euro-Maidan revolution” in Kyiv; Russia’s annexation of Crimea; the emergence of a pro-Russian separatist movement in eastern and southern regions (clandestinely supported by the government of the Russian Federation); and the “counter-terrorist operation” by the government in Kyiv; resulted in the de facto break- up of the fragile political community confined by the borders of the old Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. What we are witnessing now is the crystallization of new political communities and their efforts to assert their own political legitimacy and sovereignty over territories they regard as rightfully theirs.

The largest of these political communities can be called the “Maidano-Ukrainian nation”—driven by a loose coalition of oligarchs, functionaries of the post-1991 Ukraine, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, liberal civic activists, journalists, academics and other democrats of yesteryear. Dominated by ethnic Ukrainians, this political community is a work in progress and encompasses people of different ethnic, linguistic, and political background. It is in principle open to everyone and highly tolerant of those on the inside (herein lie the roots of the ostensibly paradoxical alignment of Ukrainian ultra- nationalists, liberals, non-Communist left, and pro-Ukrainian Jews. This paradox

9 UKL #470 6 June 2014 has occasionally been encapsulated by the neologism “zhydobanderivets’” [“Judeo- Banderite.”]).

Members of the “Maidano-Ukrainian nation,” however, can be ruthless towards those deemed outsiders both in discourse and in action (e.g. events in Odesa on 2 May). The instruments of coercion include the organs of the state and numerous paramilitary structures that operate on the margins or outside the legal realm: the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVS), the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the armed forces, the National Guard, special police battalions formed under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior and consisting in part of members of organizations of the radical right, the remaining units of the Maidan self-defense, and informal groupings of football (soccer) fan “ultras.”

The community plays an important, though not exclusive role in defining the criteria of membership. The other in Maidano-Ukraine is not a “Russian,” “Pole” or “Jew” (historical antagonists of the Ukrainian national movement in the era of ethnic nationalism), but a “Rushist” (a neologism evoking both “Russian” and “fascist” and designating a member of the Russian political community), “separatist,” or “federalist” (the latter two notions are usually collapsed together). Since members of the “Maidano-Ukrainian nation” now control much of the apparatus of the post-1991 Ukrainian state and enjoy international recognition, they have a structural advantage in projecting their legitimacy claims as a “community of citizens” within Ukraine, certainly as far as Ukrainian speakers and ethnic Ukrainians are concerned. The “Maidano-Ukrainian nation,” however, has failed to persuade the whole population of the country of its legitimacy and now has to contend with armed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”).

The latter are anything but democrats, are supported by Russia and, according to the latest poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, enjoy the active or passive support of close to 30% of the population of the respective regions (primarily among local Russians).

The success of the separatist challenge in the eastern regions has been predicated on the synergetic confluence of several structural and conjunctural factors: a) The comparatively large share of ethnic Russians in the general structure of the population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (38% and 36% respectively as per the 2001 census). b) Russia’s annexation of Crimea. c) The crisis of legitimacy of the Kyiv government in the Donbas in the aftermath of the “Euro-Maidan revolution,” which in late February and March assumed the form of sizable anti-Maidan demonstrations (not only in the Donbas, but also in Kharkiv and Odesa)—the so-called “Russian spring.”

10 UKL #470 6 June 2014 d) An information campaign first against the Euro-Maidan and subsequently against the new interim Ukrainian government by the Russian state media e) Destabilizing operations by Russian special services in Ukraine following the fall of the Yanukovych regime (according to various functionaries of the MVS and SBU, Russian special services have in the course of recent years managed to infiltrate extensively both the organs of the Ukrainian state and various pro-Russian organizations. f) Weakening of the Ukrainian state apparatus in the aftermath of the “Euro-Maidan revolution,” most notably in the law enforcement segment (in large part due to the influence of factors No. 2, 3, 4, and 5). g) The arrival in April 2014 in the problem regions of roving paramilitary units under the general command of Igor Girkin-Strelkov, which carried out armed assaults on government buildings and police precincts in a number of localities (most notably in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk), re-subordinated parts of the local police forces, and pushed the local separatist movement in the direction of armed insurrection.

While efforts by the SBU to portray Girkin-Strelkov as a colonel in the active service of the Russian military intelligence appear thin on evidence, there is little doubt that much of his fighting force has special expertise and combat experience. Some of the rebels have been identified as veterans of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces and members of the paramilitary Russian nationalist and Cossack organizations (both Russian and Ukrainian citizens). There is also evidence of links between the activists of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the Russian neo-Nazi organization “Russian National Unity” (RNE), led by Aleksandr Barkashov. RNE engaged in recruitment of volunteers for the combat operations in the Donbas.

The continuing “counter-terrorist operation” by the Kyiv government and the pseudo- referenda on 11 May legitimating the creation of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (followed by Girkin-Strelkov’s decree subordinating to the “DNR” all coercive actors on the territory of the “republic”) signal a deepening of the conflict, which will now definitely be resolved by force. The ultimate outcome of the armed confrontation at this point is difficult to predict. Certain trends, however, are already visible and may become even more pronounced in the near future.

1) The KIIS poll from several weeks ago (prior to the events in Odesa and the resumption of “counter-terrorist operation”) places the level of support for separation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions at close to 30%. While the majority of the population would prefer to remain part of Ukraine if the question were to be asked in a referendum, only 5-10% at the time regarde the government in Kyiv as legitimate, which makes the matter of allegiances completely unpredictable and contingent on the local perception of the relative might and benevolence of the belligerents. Thirty percent of the adult population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions is a lot of people

11 UKL #470 6 June 2014 in absolute numbers when it comes to real politics—especially when these people are active. Adherents of the united Ukraine in the Donbas at this stage may be more numerous, but they for the most part stay home. Moreover, most of them offered ambivalent support for the Maidan: this is true of both the local elites (e.g. Rinat Akhmetov) and ordinary citizens. The possibility of military intervention by Russia is another important factor. In the final analysis, whoever succeeds in establishing effective control over the territory without delegitimizing themselves through criminal activities, will also enjoy an increase in legitimacy.

2) Militant civic nationalism in “Maidano-Ukraine” can be expected to lead to strengthening of repressive functions of the state (engaged in what would appear to be an existential battle) and the increased role of paramilitary organizations, which, in its turn, may precipitate a shift of the discourse further to the right and in the direction of ethnic Ukrainian nationalism (e.g. through spontaneous strengthening of the positions of the Ukrainian language).

Elimination of ambiguity and consolidation of rival political communities, as people on the proverbial fence will be forced to choose sides. Active adherents of the rival political communities that will wind up on the losing side in each of the contested regions will find themselves at serious risk.

3) Barring Russia’s military intervention, one can expect a further shift of power towards the strongest and militarily competent factions within the “DNR” and “LNR,” i.e. towards the group of Girkin-Strelkov, Russian Nationalists, and Cossacks from Russia, and away from local activists.

4) The intentions of the Russian government are difficult to predict. But if groups such as RNE are relatively independent actors, one can expect the spread of their subversive activities into the remainder of “Novorossiya,” should the “DNR” and “LNR” prevail in the confrontation with “Maidano-Ukraine” in the Donbas.

#5 Ukraine Needs Nonviolent Resistance To Beat Russia ------Maciej Bartkowski War on the Rocks, 21 May 2014 http://warontherocks.com/2014/05/ukraine-needs-nonviolent-resistance-to-beat-russia/ ------

Dr. Maciej Bartkowski is an adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches strategic nonviolent resistance, and is editor of Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles, published in 2013.

12 UKL #470 6 June 2014 The Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the continued destabilization of southern and eastern parts of Ukraine by separatists, and the Russian special operation forces and the approximately 40,000 Russian “peacekeepers” poised on the Russian-Ukrainian border raise the question of what, if anything, Ukrainians can do to effectively resist and defend themselves and their territory. The logic of strategic nonviolent resistance and the past examples of nonviolent defense against occupiers offer useful lessons for Ukrainians. Russia is already using instrumentally the dynamics of people power against Ukraine, but if Ukraine plays its cards right and eschews violent responses that play into Russia’s hand, it should be able to win this game.

The contest in eastern Ukraine is not a traditional war – at least not as long as the Russian conventional forces remain on the other side of the border. Rather, what is happening in Ukraine amounts to camouflaged warfare led by Russian special operations troops together with some local separatist groups and civilian volunteers. They capture regional government buildings, install “people’s mayors,” take over local media, declare autonomous republics and call for local referenda to decide the status of the regions. Their control over towns and cities in eastern Ukraine has been marked by targeted kidnappings and killings of activists and pro-Ukrainian officials.

To counter separatists and Russian operatives, the Ukrainian government launched an “anti-terrorist operation” with infantry, armor, and its own special forces. Some small progress apparently resulted, but then the unrest spread to the south where more than 40 people were killed in Odessa. The tragedy immediately fed the Russian regime’s anti- Ukrainian rhetoric, fueled separatism helped by the Russian infiltrators and deepened the rift between Ukrainians and the pro-Russian population in the country.

Kyiv is forgetting that ultimately, the success of the Russian-inspired camouflaged war in Ukraine – like any insurgency in the past – depends on the popular support or acquiescence of the local population, or at a minimum its silence and non-engagement. In that sense, the struggle for eastern Ukraine is a political undertaking even more than a military one.

If the struggle in eastern Ukraine is reliant on the behavior and attitudes of the locals, then the “anti-terrorist operation” cannot be an effective tool no matter how competent and professional its implementation is (an unlikely eventuality anyway). Like guerrilla warfare itself, any anti-guerrilla operation is likely to fail without extensive political mobilization in the guerilla-controlled territory. In his 1969 seminal volume on civilian national defense, Adam Roberts, a long-time student of civil resistance, quotes Colonel C.M. Woodhouse, the World War II scholar-soldier, as saying that “the art of defeating guerrillas is the art of turning the populace against them.” In fact, neither guerrilla war nor anti-guerrilla actions have ever been successful where the populace remained hostile towards them.

The implication is clear: the Ukrainian government needs to put more effort into political organizing. The essence of Ukraine’s strategy must be to develop and lead an effective

13 UKL #470 6 June 2014 political struggle aiming to win popular legitimacy and representation, mobilize local populations and impose tangible political, economic and organizational costs on the opponent.

A careful reading of history shows the merit of this idea. To begin with, large-scale nonviolent resistance is likely to throw a violent adversary off-balance. When Basil Liddell Hart interviewed the German generals after World War II, they spoke of the military challenges of occupying Denmark, Holland and Norway, and their inability to fight nonviolent actions. As Liddell Hart put it:

“[Nazi Germans] were experts in violence, and had been trained to deal with opponents who used that method. But other forms of resistance baffled them- and all the more in proportion as the methods were subtle and concealed. It was a relief to them when resistance became violent, and when non-violent forms were mixed with guerrilla action, thus making it easier to combine drastic suppressive action against both at the same time.”

Indeed, in supposedly violence-dominated struggles ranging from the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon to the Chinese revolution against Japan to the North Vietnamese guerrilla war against the United States and South Vietnamese allies, “military tools were subordinated to a broader political struggle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of ordinary people.” Over more than a century, civil resistance movements proved to be more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in challenging violent state adversaries. They did that because they won popular legitimacy and mobilized millions. The fact that the activists were unarmed and used nonviolent tactics such as protests, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation helped them reach out to undecided or fearful majorities and win over segments of the population that constituted important pillars of support for the movement’s adversary. Such actions put military forces in a quandary: violence against unarmed protesters backfires, increasing domestic and international sympathy for the movement and mobilizing greater numbers of people. In the end, the adversary’s capacity to govern, control and repress can be effectively dissolved without violence.

The power of nonviolence should be clear to Kyiv because, in part, this is what Moscow is doing in Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin has incorporated elements of nonviolent dynamics into his Ukraine strategy, and he has not been shy in talking about it. During his famous interview on March 4, 2014, Putin alluded to the nonviolent tactical repertoire that Russia prepared to deploy in Ukraine.

“Listen carefully. I want you to understand me clearly: if we make that decision [to send Russian army to Ukraine], it will only be to protect Ukrainian citizens. And let’s see those [Ukrainian] troops try to shoot their own people, with us behind them – not in the front, but behind. Let them just try to shoot at women and children! I would like to see those who would give that order in Ukraine” (Emphasis added.)”

14 UKL #470 6 June 2014 The Russian military employed this tactic in Crimea when pro-Russian older women marched on the Ukrainian military base, behind them the armed “little green men.” It worked; the Ukrainian troops refrained from violence. Nowadays, in eastern and southern Ukraine, Russia is using “grassroots” civilian groups that would either be at the forefront of the unarmed assault on the government buildings or providing human shields for the armed pro-Russian militia already in control of the government institutions. Nonviolent actions deployed by Russia are, however, purely tactical, intended to support the armed groups in a specific operation. In that sense, nonviolent tools are a short-cut to help wage a violent campaign.

This largely explains why the local separatists and their Russian supporters are anywhere near in effective control of the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. Militias organized local referenda in Donetsk and Lugansk regions to cloak their armed takeover with a semblance of popular support. Improbable turnout with a close unanimity in favor of the separatist option clearly skewed true preferences of millions of voters. Meanwhile, in Crimea a creative defiance remains visible and is likely to grow.

Admittedly, it feels counterintuitive to suggest that nonviolence can defeat violence. Not surprisingly, then, calls for the introduction of martial law in the hot spots and more aggressive anti-terrorist measures to deal with the separatists are growing in Ukraine. Meanwhile, a leading Ukrainian presidential contender, Petro Poroshenko, said in his latest interview on April 28 with the German tabloid Bild that unless Russia changes its behavior Ukrainians must respond to separatists with “the language these people understand [and] this is not the language of diplomacy (…).”

If the adversary is steeped in the language of arms, why challenge it with the very instrument it is so proficient in using? Would it not be strategically wiser to engage the adversary on grounds not of his own choosing?

It is also important for Kyiv to remember that violent resistance comes with hidden costs. It attracts not only genuine patriots but also criminals and war profiteers. It also instills a culture of violence that persists long after the struggle ends and creates a political instability that can be exploited by outside actors. Consider how much propaganda ammunition the presence of a violent minority in the protests against former president Yanukovych gave to the separatists and Russia. Why? It gave the Russian propaganda a convenient bogeyman of the Ukrainian “fascists” who previously fought Soviet liberators during and after World War II, and now are bent on killing ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine.

Of course, no struggle is without risks. Nonviolent activists have been killed before and will be killed in the future. However, the lessons of civil resistance are that many civilian lives are saved if the struggle is waged nonviolently in contrast to when the armed adversary is challenged with arms. Moreover, Ukraine will have to fight a protracted political struggle until the other side becomes exhausted. However, history suggests that there is every prospect for success.

15 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #6 Order from Chaos: Moscow’s Men Raise a Rebel Army in Ukraine’s East ------By Harriet Salem Vice News, 4 June 2014 https://news.vice.com/article/order-from-chaos-moscows-men-raise-a-rebel-army-in-ukraines-east ------

The metal gates slowly shut behind the car. “Sorry it smells of blood, I was transporting our wounded,” Aleksandr Verin, a senior commander of the Russian Orthodox Army (ROA), tells VICE News.

Commander Verin — who goes by the nom de guerre “Kerch,” a reference to the three years he spent living in the Crimean city — steers his silver Land Cruiser slowly through the military compound of this newly-formed faction. There’s pile of camouflage flak jackets on the backseat and an AK-47 in the front. On either side of the entrance, soldiers man makeshift gun positions built out of stacked sandbags. Dusk is drawing in, and light spills out from the garages where rebels work on the vehicles they have commandeered: shiny BMWs, Audis and 4x4s. All have their license plates removed. In the background squads practice their drills.

Kerch proudly points out the Orthodox chapel in the unit’s yard, a commandeered security service building. Its golden towers glint in the last rays of the day’s light, providing beauty amid the encroaching darkness. “The priest comes every Tuesday, everything here is as it should be: ordered,” he tells VICE News.

The unit commanders’ HQ is next door, in a UniCredit bank. Through a warren of corridors and coded security doors the ROA’s leaders have occupied a swish office, decked out with cream leather seats and a large glass table. A muted flat-screen television plays the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) channel in the background. “We are cleansing this territory of criminals and looters, we are bringing order to the DPR, this is our task” says Kerch with a steely gaze.

The leaders sit while a striking redhead brings a bottle of cognac to the table — the gangsters of the revolution are making the most of their rise to prominence. The ROA is just one of three pro-Russia units that have risen to the fore in Ukraine’s eastern conflict. There’s also Oplot, a militarized Russian nationalist movement based in Donetsk and Kharkiv that predates the crisis, and Vostok Battalion, a unit that has borrowed its name from a defunct Russian military special force based in Chechnya.

The rise of the DPR army, which was formerly announced on May 13 by self-styled people’s leader and Donetsk native Denis Pushilin, has been accompanied by a power change in the rebel republic’s political elite, a shift that has bought Moscow’s men to the fore. “Our first government was not suitable to rise up the republic. But with time, two to three weeks

16 UKL #470 6 June 2014 ago, strong personalities came to the front amid this sea of chaos,” ROA commander Misha the Fifth, a former businessman from Moscow, tells VICE News as he knocks back another cognac.

Those new strongmen are both Russians: Igor Girkin, a.k.a. Strelkov, meaning “shooter,” and Aleksandr Borodai.

Borodai, a political unknown in the fledgling republic until the May 11 referendum and his appointment as “prime minister” five days later, already has substantial mileage in the Ukraine crisis under his belt, and its attached pistol holster. Before arriving in Donetsk, with an entourage of swarthy security personnel and Moscow political consultants in tow, Borodai acted as an advisor to Sergei Aksyonov. Aksyonov is the figurehead of Crimea’s secessionist movement, which resulted in the southern peninsula’s annexation by Russia in April.

Strelkov, a Russian military officer and accused by Kiev of being a secret agent for the Kremlin, arrived in the DPR to lead the Sloviansk militia groups but was formerly appointed as the rebel republic’s defense minister at the same time Borodai was made prime minister. The two men go way back, having fought together in Transnistria and other hotspots.

Indeed, it was with the support of Strelkov’s army that Borodai’s grip on power in the DNR was completed with a “cleansing operation” of the city’s administration building on May 29, which ousted lower-ranking militia accused of looting and criminal activities.

The operation, was carried out by a heavily armed unit of the Vostok Battalion, but also had the support of the DNR’s other two security forces.

The commanders of all three factions told VICE News they are subordinate to Strelkov and Borodai. “There has been a need to install order. And the republic’s new leaders know how to get this done,” Aleksandr Zakharchenko, commander of the Donetsk branch of Oplot told VICE News.

Sitting at his desk on the second floor of the rebel-occupied television tower, Zakharchenko, a burly former miner, cuts an imposing figure. Outside his office beside a television set, a World War II era anti-tank rifle is aimed out of the window. “The position of Oplot is completely that of the DPR,” he tells VICE News. “We work closely with Vostok and the Russian Orthodox army. These are now the only security services of republic. We answer to Strelkov and Borodai,” he added. But the suspicion is that these men in turn answer to Moscow.

17 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #7 Vostok Battalion, A Powerful New Player In Eastern Ukraine ------by Claire Biggs RFE/RL.org, 31 May 2014 ------

Rumors that battle-hardened Chechen fighters from Russia’s notorious Vostok Battalion are active in eastern Ukraine have been swirling for weeks.

They unexpectedly materialized on May 29 when dozens of heavily armed men identifying themselves as members of the Vostok Battalion stormed the separatists’ headquarters in central Donetsk, evicting the motley band of pro-Russian rebels that had occupied the building since March.

The brazen raid, conducted in broad daylight, has plunged the region into new uncertainty. The emergence of such a widely recognizable Russian military structure in eastern Ukraine has also raised questions about Moscow’s role in the conflict.

So what is the Vostok Battalion and what is it doing in eastern Ukraine?

The Vostok (“East”) Battalion was formed by Chechen warlord Sulim Yamadayev in 1999, at the onset of the second Chechen war.

Together with his four brothers, Yamadayev defected from the Chechen separatist insurgency in protest at its growing Islamization and rounded up a group of loyal fighters.

The newly formed Vostok Battalion remained stationed in Chechnya.

It answered directly to the Russian Defense Ministry’s main intelligence directorate, the GRU, and was tasked with rooting out Arab jihadists fighting alongside local insurgents.

In 2008, the unit was dispatched to help pro-Russian separatists from South Ossetia in the Russian-Georgian war.

It was officially disbanded shortly after the war in what experts believe was a political move to end the scorching rivalry between “Vostochniki,” as the battalion was colloquially known, and members of the “Kadyrovtsy,” the feared militia controlled by Moscow-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Yamadayev’s 2009 killing in Dubai sealed the Vostok Battalion’s demise.

The unit, however, was not truly dissolved.

18 UKL #470 6 June 2014 “It was never really broken up, it was re-profiled and incorporated into a Defense Ministry unit based in Chechnya,” says Ivan Sukhov, a Russian journalist and North Caucasus expert.

Despite Russia’s claims that it isn’t involved in the eastern Ukrainian conflict, the emergence of a Vostok Battalion in Donetsk is not entirely surprising.

“We know there are well-trained North Caucasus units, formed on the basis of their ethnicity, that are ready for combat and have long been in reserve,” Sukhov says. “They were used during the war with Georgia in 2008, and those in charge no doubt remember they have this resource at their disposal.”

The battalion now flexing its muscles in eastern Ukraine, however, is unlikely to be an exact resurrection of the commando formed by Yamadayev 15 years ago.

“I think the heart of the unit is made up of veterans of the original battalion,” says Mark Galeotti, a New York University professor and expert on Russian security affairs. “But it is clear that the present incarnation also includes non-Chechens and soldiers who did not fight in the earlier force.”

The Vostok fighters in Donetsk say they want to put an end to the rebels’ looting of groceries from local supermarkets.

Their raid on the separatists’ headquarters, however, is widely seen as an attempt by a group of Moscow-connected separatists to rid the insurgency of ragtag elements and assert control over eastern Ukraine.

This group is led by Igor Girkin, who goes by the pseudonym “Strelkov” and commands the separatists’ military operations in Slovyansk, and Aleksandr Borodai, the prime minister of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic.”

Girkin -- who the Kyiv government says is a Russian military intelligence officer -- has himself taken a tough stand against indiscipline within rebel ranks, recently ordering the execution of two looters.

The Donetsk raid was obviously aimed at shaming the militants who had established quarters there, analysts say.

Vostok fighters actually led Western journalists through the reclaimed building, vigorously breaking down doors and showing off the groceries, cigarettes, and alcohol looted by the previous occupiers.

This adds weight to the notion that Moscow, after tacitly fueling separatist unrest for weeks, is now eager to rein in the spiraling anarchy unleashed in eastern Ukraine.

19 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Galeotti says the battalion was “clearly either directly created by Russian military intelligence or at the very least blessed by it.”

“I think this represents an attempt to put in a force that is more disciplined but above all that looks to Moscow for orders,” he adds.

Galeotti says Russia could also be seeking to rein in the potentially explosive enmity between different armed rebel factions.

But while the Vostok fighters seem cut out for the job, with their experience in underground guerrilla operations, their appearance considerably raises the stakes in Ukraine.

“The presence of these people in southeastern Ukraine,” says Ivan Sukhov, “is a scandal.”

#8 The Chaos Engulfing Eastern Ukraine ------by Joshua Yaffa New Yorker, 23 May 2014 ------

Velyka Novosilka is an agricultural hamlet of sixteen hundred people, a charming and archetypically Soviet provincial town with nearly empty streets and an unusually large Lenin statue in its central square. It sits in a flat expanse of green farmland, an hour and a half by car from Donetsk, the regional capital and the epicenter of an insurrection against the government in Kiev. In Donetsk, and in towns to the northeast like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, pro-Russian separatist militias have set up armed roadblocks and barricaded themselves in government buildings.

In recent weeks, the fighting in eastern Ukraine has taken on its own grinding, self- perpetuating momentum, independent of developments taking place in Kiev, Moscow, or the West. An array of militia forces on both sides launch attacks almost daily, and within each respective camp—insurgent and pro-Kiev—the proliferating paramilitary brigades do not necessarily communicate, or even care for one another. Earlier this week, on May 21st, a group of unidentified anti-Kiev insurgents launched an attack in Blahodatne that killed sixteen Ukrainian soldiers, a sign of their deadly strength. A few months ago, larger powers—whether the Kremlin or Ukrainian oligarchs who thought that a rebellion in the east could further their own interests—may have had some operational control or sway over the militias in eastern Ukraine, but that influence appears to have waned. The men with guns are the ones in charge now. That is a thoroughly depressing development for Ukraine. Even if there is a negotiated solution to the ongoing conflict—itself an unlikely development—it may not be sufficient to halt the cycle of violence across the Donetsk region.

20 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Velyka Novosilka lies to the west, farther from the strongest, most concentrated hostility toward Kiev along the border with Russia. Here, the encroachment of separatist feeling has been more subtle, and certainly less forceful. On the morning of May 14th, around fifty people gathered in front of the regional administration building for a rally in support of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the imaginary breakaway state declared by separatist leaders earlier this month after a dubious “referendum” on May 11th. They chanted and made speeches, and, soon enough, the red-blue-and-black flag of the would-be republic hung from the flagpole out front. The handful of regional bureaucrats inside the building didn’t do anything to stop them; the police were similarly idle. The passive response seemed understandable. Why risk your life to defend a distant, ineffectual government in Kiev that isn’t very popular in the east, especially when it seems possible that the Donetsk People’s Republic—or simple anarchy—will win out after all?

If that was Velyka Novosilka’s counter-revolution—the local version of the pushback against the Maidan protests that toppled the former President Victor Yanukovych, in late February—it was followed by a counter-counter-revolution, led by a small band of disgruntled residents. One of them, Sergei Komburov, a forty-three-year-old retired policeman, told me that his group, which numbered about ten, had come together even before the protests began in Kiev late last year. “We were against these authorities even before Maidan, and after Maidan nothing changed, all the corrupt people stayed the same,” he said. I met Komburov and his allies one afternoon last week, at a Soviet-era collective farm that served as a kind of headquarters and staging base, before they set out on a mission to recapture the regional-administration building. Komburov, who had taken to bee-keeping on his family land since his retirement from the police, told me that the separatist demonstration in town had been a ruse, an attempt by the old élite of the rural community to hold on to power. Its ringleaders, he said, consisted of the area’s former deputy police chief, members of the local branch of the Communist Party, and businessmen involved in the illegal scrap-metal trade.

Komburov and his compatriots were intent on raising the Ukrainian flag again and restoring Kiev’s writ over the town. Their other objective was to install Alexander Arykh, a baby-faced twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, as the regional administrator for Velyka Novosilka. Arykh had been appointed to the post by the government in Kiev, but was unable to take office so long as the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic hung outside the administration building. Komburov was also expecting his own appointment from the ministry of internal affairs in Kiev, as the new regional police chief—he would be leaving his bees and returning to the force. Such are the times, he said.

In anticipation of resistance from the separatist forces, Komburov’s group had appealed for some extra muscle from pro-Kiev figures in the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region, whose governor, the colorful oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, has helped to finance the creation of loyalist militias with his own cash. Around two dozen members of the Donbass Battalion, a volunteer paramilitary group formed in recent weeks to counter pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, were dispatched to assist Komburov. The Donbass Battalion is one of a handful of new armed factions—militias with the mission

21 UKL #470 6 June 2014 of combating separatist insurgents and retaking territory for Kiev, but with unclear orders and legal authority. The Donbass fighters looked like a simultaneously ragtag and fearsome bunch: they wore mismatched black uniforms with balaclavas pulled over their heads, and carried an assortment of weaponry that ranged from Kalashnikov assault rifles to a Second World War-era carbine and a wooden crate full of grenades.

Before the mission, I spoke with Semyon Semenchenko, the Battalion’s thirty-eight-year- old commander. He told me that he was a former officer in the Ukrainian Navy, who had years ago gone into private business in Donetsk. He decided to head the militia after he saw the government’s weakness and its inability to counter the creeping rebel takeover of the east. “They weren’t doing anything, so we decided to do it ourselves,” he said. “Our goal is the defense of our homeland, and that is of a higher order than following any one particular law.” It’s a troubling operating philosophy, given the murky, lawless nature of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where militias under nobody’s control do battle with one another. The men fighting in paramilitary formations like the Donbass Battalion believe they can save Ukraine from disintegration—but they could be what pushes it deeper into internecine conflict.

At around four in the afternoon, Komburov and his men, along with the gunmen from the Donbass Battalion, piled into a handful of cars and headed down a dusty, potholed road toward Velyka Novosilka. I caught a ride in an old, clunky van with two local farmhands crouching in the back, wooden rifles at their feet. After a short drive into town, the small convoy pulled up outside the police station. The Donbass fighters took up positions in the grass by the side of the road, stopping approaching cars and aiming their guns at the upper windows of the police building.

A crew from Vice News captured what happened inside: led by Semenchenko, the Donbass Battalion tore through the building, pushing the police officers inside to the floor. Semenchenko assembled them all and berated them. “We are fucking pissed off by your prostitute politics,” he said. “Who has forgotten their oath of loyalty to Ukraine? I will take your silence to be representative of your shame… There will be a Ukrainian state here, this is Ukrainian land.” A few minutes later, the Donbass men filed back onto the street, and rushed in the direction of the administration building. Locals stopped to watch as armed men in masks ran across the town square. One of Komburov’s men, Alexander, pulled down the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic and ripped it up with his hands. “Fucking separatists,” he said. He reached for a Ukrainian flag he had brought in his car, and, as the afternoon turned into evening, the blue and yellow of Ukraine were raised over Velyka Novosilka once more.

The next day, Komburov was standing in the doorway of the police station. A cleaning lady was sweeping up pieces of glass and measuring an empty window frame; it had been smashed during the assault the day before. “Don’t worry, we’ll pay to replace that,” Komburov told me. The Donbass Battalion may have been rough and aggressive, he said, but it was just a “passionate display to show the personnel they can’t let the region slip away to the separatists.” The operation, he continued, was meant “to show these people

22 UKL #470 6 June 2014 that they took an oath to the state of Ukraine. All we’re asking is that they carry it out.” The town was essentially without any sense of authority. The chief of police had gone missing: he had taken a sick leave, then disappeared, and he wasn’t answering his phone.

“There is no state,” Komburov said. “The police are demoralized, totally without discipline. They don’t know what to do.” Komburov and his men had called around and asked all the officers to come for a meeting that afternoon. About a third of them had shown up, and those whom I saw walking into the precinct looked confused and dispirited.

With the chief nowhere to be found, one of his deputies, Alexander Tsura, took charge of the meeting. Tsura tried to project an air of normalcy, even though it was clear to everyone that the situation was far from normal—their ostensible bosses in Donetsk had either gone silent or were working with the separatists, and, above all, everyone in the room remembered the unpleasant armed raid the day before. The officers had no weapons: their guns had disappeared a few days earlier, when the previous chief ordered them all to turn in their arms. No matter, Tsura said; patrol shifts would continue as before. He pleaded with his charges not to abandon their jobs. “Nobody run away,” he said. “If everyone deserts their posts, then it will just be me all alone, and I won’t be able to do anything. But together we’ll survive these hard days.”

Semenchenko then asked to speak to the officers. His tone was softer and more agreeable than the day before. He was no longer trying to frighten them, but to make a moral appeal—one that was nonetheless backed with a hint of menace, if only because he was still wearing a black balaclava. (He explained that he would fear for the safety of his own family in Donetsk were his identity to be revealed, but promised the men that he would show his face soon enough.) “You can argue for any political position you like—for any republic—and I can agree with it or not, it’s your right,” he said. “You can want to join Zimbabwe, I have nothing against it. But if you begin to use force, I won’t allow it.” In that case, he said, the men of the Donbass Battalion would respond in kind. “Maybe I’ll be judged for this later. And maybe it’s a personal tragedy, but society benefits, and I’m ready to take responsibility for this,” he concluded. The officers filed out without saying much.

Later that afternoon, I met Arykh in a small park dotted with stone memorials: to the Holodomor, the Stalin-era famine in the Ukrainian countryside; to the local men who died in the Second World War; to the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I asked him if he was uncomfortable with how he took up office, on the back of an armed incursion led by masked men. “It was unfortunate—sad, maybe—but there was no other way. It’s a necessary method in our times,” he said.

The challenge to governing Velyka Novosilka was not so much the Donetsk People’s Republic, he said, but a long-standing sense of discontent. The village and its surrounding area had been neglected by successive waves of politicians, and it had been easy to play on that disappointment in a time of broader crisis and fear. The town, Arykh explained, doesn’t even have gas: in winter, residents warm their homes with old stoves or electric

23 UKL #470 6 June 2014 heaters. “For fifteen years, the state has been promising to lay a gas line,” he said. “Every now and then, some deputies show up and say, ‘We’ll bring you gas,’ but nobody does anything, they just make fools of people.” His first task is to prepare for a nationwide Presidential election, scheduled for this Sunday, May 25th. In areas controlled by separatist militias, voting will happen sporadically or not at all. Arykh had to rush to put together the forty-nine electoral commissions in the Velyka Novosilka region. He told me that several people had been receiving threatening phone calls, warning them not to serve on electoral councils. In the small town of Velyka Novosilka, these unidentified voices were familiar enough. “They know perfectly well who was calling them,” he said.

The greater threat to elections, at least in Velyka Novosilka—where polls should function more smoothly than elsewhere in the region—is a lack of enthusiasm. Voters in eastern Ukraine have no clear candidate to support, no well-known and credible defender of the interests of the Donetsk region. Much of that is the fault of Yanukovych, who, over the years, kept the region’s political field weak and underdeveloped, lest any challengers to his authority emerge on his home turf.

Although the streets of Velyka Novosilka are calm, the conflict does not appear to be over. The presence of the Donbass Battalion frightened as many people as it reassured; several mothers complained to me about walking with their children while masked men with assault rifles roamed the streets. “It’s a humiliating situation,” one local man said. It didn’t seem to matter who the Donbass fighters were, or what they sought to protect—the very sight of them was threatening to people accustomed to the placid rhythms of village life.

On Wednesday night, I spoke with Komburov in his office at the local police station; he had gotten his appointment from Kiev a couple days before, and was still waiting to be fitted for a uniform. It wasn’t clear how his new underlings were reacting to his arrival: when I saw him discipline a handful of officers inside the precinct, the injured pride and outright loathing in their faces was obvious. Komburov acknowledged that the Donbass Battalion had alarmed the town’s residents. “People didn’t understand that people with masks and machine guns are here for their protection,” he said. It seemed like an easy thing to get confused about. But, he added, fewer Donbass fighters were on the streets now, and he hoped that they would move on before long. “They helped bring order to this village, and now it’s my job to maintain that order.”

That will not be easy. One of Komburov’s first priorities is to investigate the pro-separatist rally on May 14th that hoisted the flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic. He suspects a number of local police officers may have been involved. “I don’t have the authority to forgive them,” he said. Arykh had said something similar to me earlier: “We saw the videos, we know their names, we know who they are.” It’s not clear whether prosecuting the flag-raisers will restore law and order to Velyka Novosilka; it seems just as likely to deepen the sense of civil unrest, and the decay of the state’s authority in the face of suspicion and rumor.

24 UKL #470 6 June 2014 In the meantime, the Donbass Battalion moved out of town earlier this week. On Friday morning, they were caught up in a fierce battle with rebel forces at a checkpoint in Korlovka, a village not far from the city center of Donetsk. Several of the men were killed, and Semenchenko said that about half of his men had sustained injuries.

As the fight was underway, Semenchenko—or someone writing on his behalf—posted increasingly desperate messages to his Facebook page, declaring that his fighters had run out of ammunition, and pleading with the Ukrainian Army to send a personnel carrier to rescue a group of his men who had been pinned down by sniper fire inside a building. At one point, he proposed a prisoner exchange with a rebel battalion, and then threatened that, if any harm was done to his fighters who had been captured by the insurgents, he would bring “terror” to the residents of Korlovka. It was a disastrous and bloody day for the Donbass Battalion in their first showing in real combat; several rebel fighters were also killed. The clash, and the bullet-riddled bodies it left behind on the side of the highway, only added to the deepening sense that eastern Ukraine is slipping away—not even to Russia, or to some separatist republic, but to something darker, more corrosive, and impossible to reverse.

#9 Emergency Statement of Rinat Akhmetov on the Situation in Donbass ------System Capital Management 19 May 2014 ------

Dear fellow countrymen,

Today the citizens of Mariupol wanted to organize a peace march. As I was told, more than 50,000 people were going to be a part of it. And that is in Mariupol alone, while across all of Donbass there are millions ready to join in. Why? Because people are tired of living in fear and terror. They are tired of going out to streets and coming under gunfire. There are people walking around with guns and grenade launchers. Cities are witnessing banditry and looting. Is this a peaceful life? Is this a strong economy? Is this good jobs and salaries? No! And that is why people wanted to go out for a peace march.

But I was told in the morning that there were gunmen in Mariupol, that they wanted to shoot down peaceful people and a peaceful action! I immediately contacted directors of our plants and called on them to suspend participation in the peace march. Because a human life is the biggest value and I will never allow bloodshed. I urged to suspend the action; suspend, not stop it! Because if we stop, Donbass will remain in blood.

I want to tell everyone – we will not stop! We shall not be frightened. No one will frighten us including those calling themselves a Donetsk people’s republic. Just tell me please, does anyone in Donbass know at least one representative of this DPR? What have

25 UKL #470 6 June 2014 they done for our region, what jobs have they created? Does walking around Donbass towns with guns in hands defend the rights of Donetsk residents in front of the central government? Is looting in cities and taking peaceful citizens hostages a fight for the happiness of our region? No, it is not! It is a fight against the citizens of our region. It is a fight against Donbass. It is genocide of Donbass!

I will not let Donbass be destroyed. I was born and am living here. That is why I am calling on everyone to unite in our fight: for Donbass without weapons! for Donbass without masks! for Donbass with a peaceful sky above! Today representatives of the so-called DPR seized the railway. They didn’t just stop the railway, they stopped the heart of Donbass because the industry of Donbass will die without the railway. It means that Donbass, our region of hard-working people, will die! That is why I am calling upon all employees across Donbass to go out tomorrow for a peaceful warning protest at the companies where they work. The rally will start tomorrow at noon with a siren ringing at all industrial businesses of Donbass in support of peace and against bloodshed. And that sound will ring every day at noon across all of Donbass until peace is established. I also call on all motor-car owners and all patriots of our region to join the action!

#10 Kremlin Playing with Orthodox Terrorism Just as Tsars Did with Black Hundreds, Mitrokhin Says ------By Paul Goble Window on Eurasia, 19 May 2014 ------

The selection of Aleksandr Boroday and Igor Girkin to leading positions in the self- proclaimed “Donetsk Peoples Republic” in Ukraine not only shows the absence of mass support for thatentity and its goals but shows that the Kremlin is playing with something many had assumed did not exist – “Orthodox terrorism,” Nikolay Mitrokhin says.

And the Grani commentator warns that there is no assurance that this kind of terrorism will not spread back into Russia itself and pointedly notes that the Russian Imperial government’s use of Black Hundreds and pogroms “clearly shows what this can lead to” (grani.ru/opinion/mitrokhin/m.229356.html).

If the “Donetsk Peoples Republic” had any support, “there would have been a line of representatives of the local political or business elites” ready to “sign an agreement with Putin,” he points out. And there would not have been any need to dispatch “42-year-old Moscow PR specialist” Boroday and make him “prime minister.”

And if the Donetsk population supported the entity, Girkin, who wrote under the pseudonym Igor Strelkov and has now become “the defense minister” of that entity, would

26 UKL #470 6 June 2014 not be acknowledging that “the male population of the region, and especially the youth do not want to join his army.”

“Nonetheless,” Mitrokhin continues, “the presence in the Donbas of hundreds of armed pro-Russian militants remains a fact, and however much their activity appears to be a political farce, it has a military component” and has “support from within Russia.”

“Someone not only assembled these no longer young people but armed them and allowed them to pass through the Russian border. Someone provided them with the support of GRU detachments, “the presence of which was determined not only by [Ukrainian security officials] but by Russian journalists. And someone provided them with media and political support.”

The question, Mitrokhin says, is who that is.

The analyst and political activist traces the links of Boroday and Girkin to the shadowy world of the extreme right of Russian nationalism in the 1990s, a trend that enjoyed the protection and even sponsorship of some hierarchs in the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, some businessmen, and some in the Russian security services.

Out of this murky community emerged groups of “convinced Orthodox Russian nationalists” who like Girkin, for example, seriously came to believe” that they could take their revenge for the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik White Armies by engaging in violent even terrorist actions.

“Post-Soviet Russia has struggled a great deal with Islamic terrorism,” Mitrokhin continues. But while doing so, it has acted as if “Orthodox terrorism does not exist in nature. In fact, however, it did” in the 1990s and does to this day as the statements and actions of Boroday and Girkin show.

Everyone should remember “the ‘White’ Orthodox volunteers in the former Yugoslavia and in Trandniestria, their participation in the October 1993 putsch in Moscow, and the shooting by these people of the American embassy in Moscow from a grenade-launcher in 1999.” That last action was the work of a group calling itself “’the Partisan detachment named for Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg and Ladoga.”

Finally, Mitrokhin says, there was a case on Easter Sunday 1999 that very much resembles the Donabass scenario. In Vyshny Volochka, a group led by radical Novosibirsk priest Aleksandr Sysoyev “attacked a militia station with the goal of obtaining and distributing arms to the people and thus launching a war with the authorities he hated.”

Three militiamen were killed in that attempt, Mitrokhin says while Sysoyev, despite being confined to a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital, writes in his memoirs that before being apprehended, he had “received support from Orthodox radicals” who hoped to spirit him out of Russia to Abkhazia.

27 UKL #470 6 June 2014 All this – and the Grani writer provides far more names and details in his article which is only summarized here – is, he insists, “only the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of the last two decades within the Russian Orthodox Church, thousands if not tens of thousands of young people have been trained in all kinds of military patriotic clubs.”

In these clubs, “they have not simply been trained to shoot Kalashnikovs and engage in hand-to-hand combat,” Mitrokhin continues. “In their consciousness have been imprinted the ideas of revangism, nationalism and anti-humanism.”

Not everyone who has gone through this processing has been transformed in the way that the leaders would like, “but who knows where, when and how they will be called back to it?” For at least some, “the current eastern Ukraine campaign which has become in Russia a task of state importance, has untied the hands of the radicals.”

“Today,” Mitrokhin says, “these people are fighting in Ukraine, including with ethnic Russians and [genuinely] Orthodox. But tomorrow they may begin a war with ethnic Russians and [the genuinely] Orthodox in Russia” itself. After all, this has happened before although the results were horrifying for all concerned.

#11 Ukraine Civil War Fears Mount as Volunteer Units Take Up Arms ------Shaun Walker and Howard Amos The Guardian (UK), 15 May 2014 ------

The men, dressed in irregular fatigues and with balaclavas pulled over their heads, fingered their Kalashnikovs nervously and jumped at every unusual sound. Eager to aid their country’s military struggle, the so-called Donbas volunteer battalion was ready to fight, but appeared to be short on training.

The battalion commander, Semyon Semenchenko, a 40-year-old from Donetsk with a degree in film-making, insisted that he and all his men had combat experience, from the Ukrainian or Soviet armies. They are all volunteers, receiving zero salary from either the state or oligarchs, he said, claiming they live off their own savings and donations from patriotic Ukrainians, who transfer them money after reading about them on social media.

“Our state needs defending, and we decided that if the army could not do it, we should do it ourselves,” said Semenchenko, during a meeting with the Guardian outside the town of Mariupol, where his men were based and offering support to regular units of the Ukrainian army in their fight against armed separatists in the region.

28 UKL #470 6 June 2014 With military operations inside Ukraine’s borders an unappealing prospect for many of the country’s professional soldiers, irregular units are springing up as Kiev struggles to wrest back control of Donetsk and Luhansk regions from the grip of pro-Russia fighters. They have been given semi-legitimacy by the Ukrainian authorities, grateful for any help they can get in their fight in the east.

“It is hard to trust the army and the national guard,” said Semenchenko. “There are cases when they have just given up their weapons and fled. I don’t understand it at all, how can you give an oath to a country and then not stick to it?”

Volunteers are recruited from western Ukraine and Kiev, and more quietly, within the east itself. A self-published newspaper in Donetsk gives the phone number where “Ukrainian patriots” can sign up for the volunteer battalions; its editor has gone into hiding to avoid being kidnapped by the separatist fighters. Volunteers undergo training in neighbouring Dnepropetrovsk region, and their battalions can be brought under the command of the interior ministry, allowing them to operate legally. Nevertheless, the training period can be as little as 50 hours, before the volunteers are put into real combat situations.

Arming troops with almost no real training and sending them into extremely sensitive situations where they may be shot at with weapons from within crowds, largely made up of angry but unarmed civilians, sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Indeed, it has resulted in bloodshed on a number of occasions so far, most notably in Mariupol last Friday, when at least eight people died when the national guard entered the city to clear the police station of separatist fighters. On their retreat, troops fired at civilians, almost all of whom were unarmed.

These incidents, already awful enough, are often amplified and distorted by Russian media, leading to even more anger among the crowds in what is becoming a downward spiral of hatred and violence. Kiev’s “anti-terrorism operation” in the east of the country involves units of the army, the police, special forces and the national guard, which is partly made up of volunteers drawn from those who participated in the Maidan protests in Kiev.

Andriy Parubiy, head of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, told the Guardian that these were all coordinated from a single anti-terrorism command centre, but numerous sources on the ground attest to the fact that coordination is poor, and there are major concerns over how ready the volunteer brigades are for combat.

In addition to the difficulties of coordinating such a diverse range of paramilitary groups, there has also been concern at the extreme nationalist element among those fighting. The frequent Russian claim that the Ukrainian government itself is fascist is untrue, but there are certainly far-right elements involved in the fight in the east.

29 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Parubiy himself has an extremely dubious past, having set up the neo-fascist Social National party of Ukraine together with the current leader of far-right Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, in the early 1990s. While there has been little evidence that the militias have been motivated by any kind of far-right ideology when fighting in east Ukraine, there is no doubt that radicals have been the people most willing to fight, and this has led to a number of situations which appear to be well beyond the bounds of normal military behaviour.

In one incident, the radical politician Oleh Liashko was shown in footage that emerged last week humiliating captured insurgent and self-proclaimed defence minister of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, Igor Kakidzyanov.

A video of the interrogation, where Kakidzyanov was shown in his underwear with his hands bound, circulated widely on social media and was promoted by Liashko himself.

“This whole situation is completely out of control,” said Anna Neistat, an associate director at Human Rights Watch, who is currently in eastern Ukraine.

Five days after the incident, Parubiy told the Guardian that he had not even watched the footage, which also appeared to show Liashko ordering around armed men, and there had been no formal condemnation from the government.

Posters promoting Liashko’s presidential campaign read: “Death to the Occupiers!” and are widely displayed all over cities across western Ukraine.

Speaking to the Guardian by telephone, Liashko said he conducted the interrogation because he wanted to find out what the motivations and ideas of Kakizdyanov were. He said he did not think it inappropriate that he was allowed to carry out the interrogation, nor that the questioning took place with Kakidzyanov stripped to his underwear.

“I had before me a terrorist and I wanted to understand how he thinks; what his goals, motivations and ideals were,” said Liashko. “It turned out he was in close contact with Russian intelligence; it just proves that the people we are dealing with are Russian agents.”

Liashko is currently in the process of setting up his own volunteer battalion, which he hopes will become another addition to the motley selection of forces currently fighting for Kiev in the east.

“For 23 years nobody has paid any attention to our army, and now when we need to fight for the borders of our country today, we can’t,” he said.

“We need a people’s war, like in the second world war when people rose up to fight fascism, that’s what we need to do now.” Liashko said that he would be the “commissar” of the battalion but that it would take military orders from the army or the interior ministry. So far, he said, over 3,000 people

30 UKL #470 6 June 2014 had applied to join, of which around 400 had been selected. The criteria were that they should be physically fit, have combat experience, and undergo a background check to ensure they were not working for foreign intelligence agencies.

“We are fighting against terrorists and we will work according to the principle: if they don’t surrender, they should be destroyed,” said Liashko. “Russian mercenaries are trying to turn Donbas into a second Chechnya, and we cannot allow it.”

Russian media reported earlier in the week that Liashko had been captured by rebels, but he later emerged unscathed, announcing his security by posting a photograph of himself, his mother and a large white cat on his blog. He told the Guardian that four pro-Russia separatists had been killed and three captured during the attempt to take him hostage, but gave no further details.

With the new militias often fighting in unmarked uniforms, it has sometimes been difficult even to identify who they are. In one incident during Sunday’s unrecognised referendums on independence, a group of militiamen arrived in the town of Krasnoarmeisk, supposedly to stop people from voting.

They said they were from the “Dnepr” volunteer battalion, a similar outfit to the Donbas battalion, made up of volunteers and trained in neighbouring Dnepropetrovsk region, funded by the local governor-oligarch, Ihor Kolomoysky.

There was shouting and aggression from the crowd about the men who had disrupted the voting. At one point, several people lunged towards them, unarmed, and the men shot into the air. The volley of bullets did nothing to placate the crowd, and the men kept shooting, a look of panic on their faces. The incident ended with two civilians dead, and later the Dnepr battalion claimed its forces had never been there.

Exactly who the men were remains unclear, and the Ukrainian government has said it will investigate. Photographs from the event appear to show one of the deputy leaders of Right Sector involved in the incident.

The Right Sector is a loose grouping of ultra-radical elements that led confrontations with riot police in Kiev, throwing molotov cocktails and wielding baseball bats. The group’s influence has been consistently distorted by its own boasts and Russian state media exaggerations, but it is clear that some of its members are fighting in the east, presumably within volunteer battalions.

It is Right Sector that is most often mentioned as the fascist component of the new government. Although its leader has met with the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine and insisted that the group does not adhere to racial ideology, it is clear that it contains some extremely far-right elements.

31 UKL #470 6 June 2014 One 18-year old Right Sector member, who gave his nickname as “White”, claimed that he was involved in fighting in the east and had been wounded outside the insurgent- controlled town of Slavyansk.

“People are terrified of Right Sector and think that we will kill children, but we don’t make a big show of it [in the east] and we wear different uniforms without recognisable insignia,” he said while patrolling in central Kiev with a gas mask and a rubber truncheon.

In addition to the huge number of different groups fighting on the Ukrainian side, there is also a ragtag assortment of people fighting for the separatists – a mixture of Cossack militias and others from Russia who may have links with Russian intelligence, people representing local business and criminal interests, and ideologically motivated locals who genuinely believe in the cause.

Insiders say there are already extreme tensions between the various armed groups that make up the forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, and there have been exchanges of fire between different pro-separatist groups on more than one occasion.

“I hope it does not progress further, but there is a tendency of moving towards the scenario we saw in the Yugoslav wars,” says Ihor Todorov, a professor at Donetsk National University. “We can end up with different field commanders, who are fighting against everyone; not for a particular side but just for their own ends.”

For now, all-out infighting between groups ostensibly on the same side has been prevented by a stronger hatred for the enemy, as both the pro-Kiev and pro-separation forces have cultivated a hatred for their opponents.

On the pro-Russia side, the gunmen regularly speak of the Ukrainian army as “fascists”. Rumours that Ukrainians are forced to go through psychological training that allows them to kill unarmed women and children with no remorse are widespread.

On the Ukrainian side, too, there is little sympathy for the views or goals of those they are fighting against.

Semenchenko, of the Donbas volunteer battalion, was uncompromising about civilian casualties, claiming that many of the unarmed people in the crowds were paid to be there as cover for armed attackers, and referred to them as “pigs”. It was the “terrorists” who were responsible for genuinely unarmed protesters being inadvertently shot by pro-Kiev forces, such as in Mariupol, he said.

It is the sort of language that precedes civil wars, and talking of Russian anger that the bloodshed in Mariupol had come on Victory Day, Semenchenko he did not believe that the pro-Russians had anything to celebrate.

32 UKL #470 6 June 2014 “My grandfather also fought in the second world war. I think these people are the grandchildren of traitors, secret policemen and collaborators, as real heroes could not produce such grandchildren.”

#12 Medvedev Stated that the G7 and Ukraine are Lying and Lied Himself about Refugees ------Ukrains’ka pravda, 5 June 2014 [translated by Natalia Stepaniuk for UKL] ------

The Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitrii Medvediev claimed that refugees have been fleeing from Ukraine and the local authorities from Rostov region refuted this allegation.

Medvedev stated that the Ukrainian authorities are lying in an attempt to hide the fact that refugees have been fleeing to the Russian Federation en masse, according to ITAR TASS.

“In any case, people are really scared, they are afraid. At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities don’t see any humanitarian problems, claiming that there are no refugees. This is a lie” – said Medvedev.

According to Medvedev, around 5,000 Ukrainian refugees every day seek asylum in Rostov oblast.

“The difference between those who move in and out of the country is 5,000 every day. This never happened before”– he complained.

At the same time, he called statements of the G7 countries regarding the adequacy of Kyiv’s actions in Eastern Ukraine cynical.

‘The so-called ‘simka’ (G7) finds the actions undertaken by the Ukrainian army to be moderate. That’s not what we are talking about here, but this evaluation is beyond cynical,” - said Medvedev.

At the same time, the authorities of Rostov region did not confirm the information that thousands of Ukrainian refugees enter the territory of the region every day, according to Lenta.ru.

“8,300 people crossed the border in a period of 24 hours, but it doesn’t mean that all of them are refugees,” – pointed out the press secretary of the oblast Deputy Governor.

‘The people who entered the territory could be coming to visit their relatives, to have

33 UKL #470 6 June 2014 vacation or to do affairs in other regions of the Russian Federation’, - stated local authorities of Rostov in contradiction to Medvedev.

The office of the Deputy Governor also added that as of June 5, the Department of Migration in Rostov oblast received only 7 applications for refugee status and 5 for temporary shelter. Moreover, the recreation center ‘Dmytriadovsky’ in the bordering Neklinovsky region, where a refugee asylum has been created, contains only 275 citizens of Ukraine.

#13 Consensus and Arrogance ------by Mischa Gabowitsch Eurozine, 21 May 2014 ------

[The author is reporting on the conference “Ukraine: Thinking Together” held in Kyïv on 16-19 May –DA]

There is a paradox inherent in what we are doing, beyond the usual hubris of intellectuals. Despite many disagreements, Ukraine’s intellectual elite is almost unanimously on the side of the Maidan and the many things it can be taken to stand for. Highly educated Russian speakers in the east tend to be especially fervent in their identification with the new Ukraine. They have good reason to feel threatened and beleaguered in their own regions, and some of them have already been forced to relocate to Kyiv. After all, part of Ukraine has come under military occupation by an outside power, and other parts of the country are in a state of civil war fomented by that same power.

So it seems well-nigh impossible to find anyone willing and able to express an anti- Maidan, anti-Kyiv (let alone separatist or pro-Russian) point of view in a peaceful and articulate way and with a level of sophistication appropriate for this kind of gathering. And it is tempting, as some of the participants in the panel “How did the Maidan change culture?” did today, to dismiss inhabitants of Ukraine critical of Kyiv and the Maidan as uncultured people trapped in a Soviet, paternalistic vision of the world, people whose “civilizational choice” has placed them outside the bounds of Europe.

But this kind of talk is, at the very least, arrogant and dangerous: in Vasyl Cherepanyn’s words, the discourse of divergent identities and civilizations is simply a way of othering those one should rather engage with. For, as Jurko Prochasko rightly stressed at the end of the Panel “When do politicians become pariahs?”, it is our duty as intellectuals to understand (not to absolve or engage in dialogue with!) even thugs with machine guns and their motivations. And beyond those thugs – a tiny minority, some of them from across the border – there are hundreds of thousands of people with very real grievances, people

34 UKL #470 6 June 2014 that Ukraine’s politicians and its intellectuals need to take into account and cannot afford simply to dismiss as retrograde barbarians.

It is extremely difficult not to lapse into a black-and-white view of the world in a situation of military aggression. And yet any long-term solution to the current crisis will need to involve new ways of listening to all Ukrainians, including those critical or even afraid of the Maidan, instead of turning them into enemies or second-class citizens.

This congress is tremendously important as a sign of solidarity. Ukraine (and Europe) are in for a protracted crisis, and, as several Ukrainian panelists have said, such gatherings need to become frequent and regular events. I hope intellectual trend-setters and grant- giving institutions manage to muster the necessary stamina.

Yet even if they do, we shouldn’t get our hopes up. It is doubtful whether anything approaching a “solution” to the incredibly complex crisis can be found at a congress of intellectuals, especially when it is so tempting to ignore or dismiss the voices of those who are less educated and less articulate than us.

#14 Will the Willy Wonka of Eastern Europe win Ukraine’s Elections? ------by Taras Kuzio Beyond Brics Blog, Financial Times, 22 May 2014 ------

Ukraine is set to hold its sixth presidential election on Sunday with chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko riding high ahead of his two rivals: Yulia Timoshenko, a former prime minister and a political prisoner under the recently deposed regime; and Serhiy Tihipko, a defector from the regime’s ruling Party of Regions. In presidential elections held four years ago Timoshenko and Tihipko came second and third, respectively.

Timoshenko not surprisingly dismissed Poroshenko’s call for her to drop out of the election and rally behind him to end the race in one round. Timoshenko is trailing Poroshenko but opinion polls in the past have constantly under-estimated her support.

More surprising is Poroshenko’s high popularity. His is not a new face; he held a cabinet position under prime minister Nikolai Azarov before remaking himself as a supporter of the Euromaidan protesters. Azarov is one of more than 30 officials from the government of deposed president Viktor Yanukovich to be criminally charged and now sought by Ukrainian and western law enforcement agencies. As a businessman, Poroshenko’s loyalties have been to his business empire, which has grown under each of Ukraine’s last three presidents. With business and politics closely tied, pragmatists such as Poroshenko always seek to be on good terms with the authorities.

35 UKL #470 6 June 2014 He first entered parliament in 1998 in the Social Democratic party headed by Viktor Medvedchuk, widely viewed as the most pro-Russian politician in Ukraine. (President Vladimir Putin and Svetlana, wife of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister, are godparents to Medvedchuk’s daughter Daryna.)

Poroshenko’s loyality to then-president Leonid Kuchma was portrayed in one of the hundreds of hours of conversation taped in the president’s office by rogue guard Mykola Melnychenko. Poroshenko told Kuchma in 2000: “You know that I am yours. Whatever you say Leonid Danylovych, I am a member of your team and will undertake any of your orders!”

That year, Poroshenko became a founding member of the Party of Regions launched under the patronage of then Donetsk governor Yanukovich. Another founding member was the eccentric Leonid Chernovetsky (known as ‘Cosmo’) who later became mayor of Kiev and whose supporters are working in Poroshenko’s election campaign. After losing a leadership vote to Azarov of the Party of Regions, Poroshenko shifted his allegiances to Viktor Yushchenko, with whom he maintained an alliance while not closing avenues to his former Party of Regions allies. During the Orange Revolution Poroshenko brought Azarov on to the Maidan.

In 2005, as secretary of the National Security Council, Poroshenko first fell out with then- prime minister Timoshenko. Her radical anti-oligarch sentiments reflected widespread public views in the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan, posing a threat to the big business with which Poroshenko has always been allied. Yushchenko’s political force, Our Ukraine, was perennially split between those who agreed with Timoshenko’s anti-elite sentiments and pragmatists such as Poroshenko who sought a grand coalition with the Party of Regions, which he was centre stage in negotiating during 2006 and 2007.

In the 2010 elections those divisions came to the fore when Yushchenko, Poroshenko and other Our Ukraine pragmatists called on Ukrainians to vote against both Yanukovich and Timoshenko. As only ‘Orange’ voters heeded the call, this helped to elect Yanukovich.

Oligarchs and the ‘gas lobby’ have supported opposition alternatives to Timoshenko – Arseniy Yatseniuk (currently prime minister) and Vitaliy Klitschko’s Ukrainian Alliance for Democratic Reforms. Poroshenko’s alliance with Klitschko is a natural one of those willing to work with the gas lobby, former officials of the Yanukovich regime and former Kiev mayor Chernovetsky.

The Euromaidan was a mass uprising against many aspects of Yanukovich’s misrule but a central focus was massive abuse of office and corruption. Poroshenko’s high level of support is therefore especially surprising as he widely associated in the public eye with the ‘gas lobby’, representing a sector of the Ukrainian and Eurasian economies that has attracted more allegations of corruption than any other.

36 UKL #470 6 June 2014 If Poroshenko does become Ukraine’s next president he will face a multitude of crises: the country’s economic and financial bankruptcy, high expectations from the Euromaidan, the need to tackle abuse of office by unaccountable elites, separating business and politics and radical reforms required by recently signed EU and IMF agreements. That is without mentioning the Russian occupation of the Crimea and Russian-backed violent separatism in the Donbas.

Could Poroshenko pull a Willy Wonka and succeed where his former ally Yushchenko failed? Maybe, but only if he changes the habits of a lifetime.

#15 Ukraine’s Presidential Election and the Far Right ------Anton Shekhovtsov’s Blog, 29 May 2014 ------

The results of the presidential election that took place on 25 May 2014 partly confirmed the political trend that had emerged already during the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014: despite the active participation of the far right in the revolution, its political role became comparatively marginal. In the presidential election, which led to the landslide victory of democratic candidate Petro Poroshenko already in the first round (54.70%), Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok obtained 1.16% of the vote, while Right Sector’s Dmytro Yarosh won 0.70%.

True, the results of the presidential election have debunked Putin’s narrative about “the fascist coup in Ukraine” - a narrative in which only the Western unreformed left believed anyway. Yet what do we make of the far right’s apparent failure in the election? And, eventually, whither the Ukrainian far right?

It seems viable to suggest that the failure of Oleh Tyahnybok and Dmytro Yarosh in the presidential election has been determined by a combination of the following factors:

1. The popular vote in the presidential election has been largely tactical. Since March 2014, public opinion polls showed that Poroshenko appeared the most popular democratic presidential candidate, and this even led to the decision of Vitali Klitschko, another popular democratic candidate, not to stand for the election and, instead, support Poroshenko. In April 2014, the idea of electing a new president already in the first round of the election became increasingly pervasive, especially against the background of the separatist activities in Eastern Ukraine and the ongoing aggression of the Russian Federation. Many Ukrainians felt that “doing away” with the presidential election as quickly as possible in order to focus on the anti-terrorist and anti-separatist activities in the East would be good for the country, so they voted for Poroshenko as the most popular candidate. These included adherents of the far right. For example, in Kyiv, where the presidential election took place simultaneously with the mayor election and election to the Kyiv Council (city parliament), some adherents

37 UKL #470 6 June 2014 of Svoboda preferred to support Poroshenko for president and Klitschko for mayor of Kyiv, yet they still supported Svoboda for the Kyiv Council. In Kyiv, only 1.21% of the voters supported Tyahnybok for president, around 2.51% of the voters supported Svoboda’s MP Andriy Illenko for mayor of Kyiv, but around 6.46% of the voters did give preference to Svoboda for the Kyiv Council.

2. With the ouster of Yanukovych, the far right organisations have lost the major source of negative voter mobilisation. Svoboda’s success at the 2012 parliamentary elections was partially determined by its image of the most radical opposition to Yanukovych’s regime (the image promoted by the regime itself), so Svoboda (and the Right Sector too) could be considered an “anti-Yanukovych party”. Without Yanukovych, its raison d’etre became – at least in the eyes of the voters – debatable. Moreover, if before the revolution Svoboda could position itself as allegedly the only patriotic party, then during the revolution and, even more so, after the Russian invasion and annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, all popular democratic parties became patriotic, so Svoboda lost its “monopoly” on patriotism. In the condition where Ukrainian patriotism became a natural, almost instinctive emotion, the far right failed to capitalise on the Russian invasion and aggression in Eastern Ukraine.

3. The far right, as a populist, anti-system force, may benefit from their opposition to the political elites, but post-revolutionary Ukraine, to a certain degree, still lacks its full-fledged political establishment to oppose to. Moreover, even if anti-establishment sentiments were relevant in the run-up to the presidential election, Tyahnybok and Yarosh seem to have yielded the palm of the anti-establishment thrust to Oleh Lyashko, leader of the Radical Party, who obtained 8.32% of the vote. Furthermore, unlike Tyahnybok or Yarosh, Lyashko ran an aggressive (and rather expensive) campaign, while allegedly personally taking part in the anti-terrorist operation in Eastern Ukraine. Tyahnybok’s campaign was anything but active, while Yarosh officially stopped his campaign on 23 April and went to Dnipropetrovsk, presumably to focus on the formation of the anti-terrorist Donbass special battalion. However, since Yarosh stopped his campaign, he - in contrast to Lyashko - did not brag about his real or virtual military successes.

Hence, while not a far right politician himself, Lyashko has managed to lay claim to almost all anti-establishment sentiments in the Ukrainian society (i.e. critical of acting president Oleksandr Turchynov and the interim government).

Obviously, the failure of the far right in the presidential election contributes to the marginalisation of Svoboda and the Right Sector, but this failure does not imply that far right politics has no future in Ukraine (not necessarily in the form of Svoboda and the Right Sector). Let us consider the following points:

1. Tyahnybok was the only relevant far right candidate in the 2010 presidential election, and he obtained 1.43% of the vote. The insignificance of this result did not prevent

38 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Svoboda from winning 10.44% in the 2012 parliamentary elections. The combined vote for the far right in 2014 (Tyahnybok + Yarosh) is 1.86%, which is more than in 2010 (yet still far from significance). Naturally, the political situation in 2014 is different from the previous years, but considering Svoboda’s results in the Kyiv Council elections (6.46%), the party still stands a chance of entering the national parliament after the early parliamentary elections.

2. Oleh Lyashko is “bad news”. He can be compared to late Polish politician Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Samooborona (Self-Defence). Lepper and his party combined agrarian left-wing populism with Polish nationalism; Lyashko’s image is very similar.

Moreover, both Lepper’s and Lyashko’s parties have featured right-wing extremists. Lyashko, for example, included - in the list of his Radical Party for the Kyiv Council elections - the most extreme elements of the Right Sector, namely leading members of the neo-Nazi “Patriot of Ukraine”/Social National Assembly.

3. At least in Kyiv, populist voters still constitute a significant segment of the electorate. At the 2012 parliamentary elections, 17.33% of the voters in Kyiv supported Svoboda and 1.01% supported Lyashko’s Radical Party. Thus, the combined populist vote was 18.34% in 2012. At the 2014 elections to the Kyiv Council, 9.06% supported the Radical Party and 6.46% voted for Svoboda (the Right Sector, as a party, did not take part in the elections); the combined populist vote is 15.52%. This is a high percentage, and populist voters may switch from one populist party to another. The populist vote is volatile: populist parties (including far right parties) may continue splitting the populist vote, but they may also decide to support only one party.

4. The separatist activities in Eastern Ukraine and the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine may hold a key to the revival of far right politics (not necessarily in the form of Svoboda and the Right Sector), especially if mainstream democratic politicians – the political establishment in the making – fail to address the urgent problems of the country.

#16 Putin Warned of Fascism in Ukraine, But a Look Across Europe Suggests He’s to Blame ------James Kirchick Tablet, April 4, 2014 ------

A visit to Kiev’s Jewish institutions reveals Jews there are less concerned about their neighbors at home than the bully next door

39 UKL #470 6 June 2014 According to Vladimir Putin, the revolution that dislodged former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukoyvch this winter was not a popular movement for democracy, European integration, and honest government. It was, rather, he told the world, a “coup” “executed” by “Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites” who “wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing.” Protecting ethnic Russians from a fascist government in Kiev was the pretext for Russia’s invasion and subsequent annexation of Crimea, and it remains the justification for continued meddling in Ukraine’s affairs. In a phone conversation with President Barack Obama late last month, Putin spoke of a “rampage of extremists” across Ukraine, the specter of which Russia cites in dictating terms to Ukraine’s pro-Western government.

The threat of “fascism” has an important historical resonance in Russia, hearkening back to the Soviet Union’s struggle against the Nazis. Soviet leaders continued to use the term long after World War II, deploying it liberally against any and all opponents both foreign and domestic; internal Communist Party dissidents, the United States, NATO, all were tarred with the fascist brush by Soviet leaders and their ideological brethren in the West. But what about today?

Indeed, to hear Ukraine’s Jews tell it, they are being used as pawns in a Russian propaganda war. On a visit to Kiev last week, I stopped at Hesed Bnei Azriel, a community center that serves some 11,000, mostly elderly, Jews. Two unarmed security guards were all that defended the building from the supposed threats outside—light protection compared to the armed policemen and metal detectors usually found at the heavily fortified complexes of Jewish organizations across Western Europe. Inside the building, I found a knitting circle of about two dozen women, who, judging by their laughter and carefree conversation, did not seem particularly worried about “rampaging” fascists on the streets. “The Russians have told us there’s anti-Semitism in Kiev,” one of them, Rima Velichka, scoffed. Russian reports of neo-Nazis running the government in Kiev, she told me, were “contradictory” with her experience.

Last week, a coalition of Ukrainian Jewish leaders took out full-page advertisements in the International New York Times, Canada’s National Post, and Ha’aretz to dispute Putin’s allegations of creeping fascism in their homeland. “The Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine are not being humiliated or discriminated against, their civil rights have not been limited,” the ad states. “Your certainty of the growth of anti-Semitism in Ukraine also does not correspond to the actual facts. It seems you have confused Ukraine with Russia.” In an excellent piece last month for The American Interest, former British Ambassador to Russia Andrew Wood listed the defining features of fascism, detailing point-by-point how Vladimir Putin’s government checks most of the boxes. “Fascist movements in power, or near it, have a readily identifiable leader,” he wrote—a description that fits the Kremlin far better than the hastily assembled ad hoc government in Kiev. Moreover, Wood went on, “The fascist leader of a country relies on personal charisma, making succession to the role impossible” and “fascism depends on legends of betrayals that must be avenged.” Fascists also tend to decry “internal enemies” to sustain their power, fuel

40 UKL #470 6 June 2014 themselves economically via “corporatism,” and emit “continuous, simplistic, populist, and misleading propaganda.” Sound familiar?

Today’s Russia lacks the sort of coherent ideology provided by Soviet Communism, but if there is a conceptual thread running through Putin’s rhetoric and actions, it is that of Eurasianism—characterized recently in Foreign Affairs by Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn as “authoritarian in essence, traditional, anti-American, and anti-European; it values religion and public submission. And more significant to today’s headlines, it is expansionist.” The man at the forefront of this movement is Alexander Dugin, a “conservative revolutionary” in the fascist mold who frequently appears on Russian state television egging on Putin’s neo-imperialist agenda. In 2005, Putin oversaw the creation of the Nashi youth movement, essentially a personality cult, which, in its idolization of the leader, nationalistic rhetoric, and confrontational approach toward critics bears, as some have noted, more than a passing resemblance to the Hitler Youth.

Ethno-nationalist-inspired discrimination toward minorities is another key feature of fascism. The minority in Ukraine most under threat today is not Russian speakers, but Crimea’s Muslim Tatars. Given its history under Russian occupation, the Tatar community rightly fears for its future under Moscow’s revived tutelage. The Tatars, who have been living in Crimea for centuries, were deported to Uzbekistan under the reign of Josef Stalin; an estimated 46 percent of them perished along the way. In recent weeks, the body of a Tatar activist who had been kidnapped by a pro-Russian mob was found in a forest. “We have asked the Crimean Tatars to vacate part of their land, which is required for social needs,” the region’s new deputy prime minister declared last month. “Another genocide has started already,” Ayla Bakkalli, the American representative for the Crimean Tatar community, said in an interview last week. “The groundwork has been laid. They’re grabbing land, they’re expelling people, and they are painting Xs on the homes of the Tatars to mark them out as fifth columnists. Do you understand how chilling that is for us?”

But it is not only at home where Putin has demonstrated a reverence for Europe’s fascist legacy. Across the continent, Russia has provided support to, and received backing in return from, a host of far-right and genuinely fascist movements. In Italy, the far-right National Social Front party plastered Rome with posters declaring “I’m with Putin.” The party’s leader, Adriano Tilgher, praised the Russian president for his “courageous positions against the powerful gay lobby” and “the world’s financial centers, which want war in Syria,” to whose president, Bashar al-Assad, Putin has supplied weapons and diplomatic cover.

Last year, Gabor Vona, leader of Hungary’s fascist Jobbik party, met with Dugin as well as leaders of the Russian Duma and spoke at Moscow State University. There he said that Hungary should leave the European Union and join Putin’s proposed “Eurasian Union” instead. “The role of Russia today is to offset the Americanization of Europe,” Vona declared. It is “clear that Russian leaders consider Jobbik as a partner,” the party boasted on its website. Jobbik applauded the sham Crimean referendum that led to the region’s

41 UKL #470 6 June 2014 annexation as “exemplary,” which is hardly surprising given that it too has revisionist aspirations for Europe’s borders. Jobbik speaks openly of regaining the territories Hungary lost after World War I and in which a significant number of ethnic Hungarians still reside, and Putin’s rationale for seizing Crimea is precisely the sort of reasoning that Jobbik uses in its own, ill-fated quest to restore “Greater Hungary.” When I reported on Jobbik for Tablet two years ago, several Hungarians shared their suspicion that the Kremlin is secretly funding the party.

In France, Putin has found a friend in Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front. Le Pen made a pilgrimage to Moscow last year at the invitation of Duma head Sergei Naryshkin, with whom she made common cause on issues as diverse as opposition to Western intervention in Syria, the EU, and gay marriage, which became legal in France last year. RT, the Kremlin’s multilingual propaganda network, recently celebrated the National Front’s success in municipal elections by featuring the party’s spokesman Ludovic De Danne, who has said that “historically, Crimea is part of Mother Russia.” RT regular Nigel Farage, leader of the virulently Euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party, alleges that the European Union has “blood on its hands” for “provoking” Putin. The network’s leading German commentator is Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of a far-right magazine cited by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution—Germany’s rough equivalent of the FBI—for “rail[ing] against the ‘unending de-nazification efforts’ ” and “spread[ing] revisionist theories on national boundaries.”

In Greece, Russia can count upon the support of Golden Dawn, a criminal gang-cum- political party whose members are infamous for inflicting violence upon migrant workers and refugees and whose symbol resembles a swastika. Last year, the Greek government arrested party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos on charges of forming a criminal organization. According to Mitchell Orenstein, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, an expatriate American website affiliated with Golden Dawn reported that Michaloliakos—who allegedly received a supportive letter in prison from Dugin—“has spoken out clearly in favor of an alliance and cooperation with Russia, and away from the ‘naval forces’ ” of the ‘Atlantic.’ ” The party has also castigated “the international usury of Washington and Berlin” for supporting Ukraine’s nascent government. Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, the extreme-right Ataka Party has also come out in favor of Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory.

A list of election observers welcomed to monitor the farce in Crimea reads like a who’s who of the European far right. The National Front, Jobbik, Ataka, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Italy’s Northern League, Austria’s Freedom Party—of the late Nazi sympathizer Joerg Haider—all dispatched members to certify Putin’s mockery of democracy. Their visit was organized by a Kremlin cut out organization entitled the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy and Elections, which organizes monitoring missions of phony elections in other, Russian-backed separatist territories like Abkhazia and Transnistria, and claims on its website to be “opposed to Western ideology.”

42 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Russia’s support for these groups and individuals is not so much ideological as it is opportunist: All exhibit hostility to the European Union, NATO, and the United States. Moreover, they all tend to be illiberal, homophobic, and admiring of authoritarianism. In other words, perfect partners for Vladimir Putin and his strategy of weakening Europe from within and destroying the transatlantic bond with America. His investment seems to be paying off; next month’s European elections could see far-right anti-European parties win as much as 20 percent of the seats in the European parliament.

None of this is to diminish the role that ultra-nationalists played in ousting Yanukovych. Two groups, the Svoboda (Freedom) party—which has a handful of seats in the new Cabinet—and the Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector) paramilitary, have come under particular scrutiny. Svoboda’s leader, Oleg Tyahnibok, has a history of anti-Semitic remarks. Pravyi Sektor, which venerates the Ukrainian nationalist hero and wartime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, has actually made a concerted effort to allay the fears of Ukrainian Jews; its leader, Dmitry Yarosh, recently met with the Israeli ambassador. But while the presence of these organizations in post-revolution Ukraine is indeed worrisome, their popularity among Ukrainians is not: A poll for next month’s presidential election finds Tyahnibok earning the support of 2.5 percent of Ukrainians, Yarosh a mere 1.6 percent.

Ultimately, the presence of far-right forces at the margins of the country’s second attempt at a democratic revolution doesn’t tell us much about where Ukraine is heading. What we do know for certain, however, is that fascism is indeed on the rise across Europe—and it is Vladimir Putin’s Russia that is fueling it.

#17 Harper’s Heroic Ukraine Message Does Not Reflect Reality ------by Roland Paris Globe and Mail, 3 June 2014 http://cips.uottawa.ca/harpers-heroic-ukraine-message-does-not-reflect-reality/ ------

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper heads to Europe for the G7 summit and anniversary of D-Day, the gap between Canada’s outspoken rhetoric and its diminishing capabilities in international affairs is clearer than ever.

Much of the trip will focus on Russia’s destabilizing actions in Ukraine. First, Mr. Harper will join other leaders in Warsaw to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the end of communist rule in Poland. He and other NATO leaders will likely use the occasion to reaffirm the alliance’s commitment to Poland’s defence. Then he will travel to Brussels for the meeting of the G7, whose member nations will also undoubtedly reiterate their unified opposition to Russia’s behaviour.

43 UKL #470 6 June 2014 However, the prime minister may choose to convey a slightly different message. His government has repeatedly suggested that Canada is leading the Western response to the Ukraine crisis. In the words of Foreign Minister John Baird: “No other government has stood up more forcefully and aggressively against the Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

In fact, the main difference between Canada and its allies has been mainly one of rhetoric, not one of substance.

Ottawa’s language has been unusually strong, including Mr. Harper’s comparison of Russia to Nazi Germany. But Canada’s actions – including targeted sanctions against a limited number of the Kremlin’s supporters, political and economic support for the Kiev government, modest deployment of military assets as part of NATO’s “reassurance package” in Eastern Europe, and the contribution of observers for Ukraine’s election – have been comparable to actions by many other allies.

Mr. Harper, however, seems to have concluded that there are domestic political benefits in portraying himself and Canada as leading the Western response to the Ukraine crisis. This message might convince some at home, but it is unlikely to pass muster with our allies, who are well aware of what Canada is – and is not – doing.

They know, for example, that Canadian defence spending fell to one per cent of gross domestic product in 2013. Among the other 27 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, only five countries spent a smaller percentage of GDP on defence than Canada. One of them was Luxembourg.

A similar pattern also holds for Canada’s non-NATO partners. Australia, for example, currently spends 1.6 per cent of GDP on defense and recently announced that this figure will increase to 1.8 per cent by mid-2015.

Although Canada’s contributions to the Afghan and Libyan missions were greatly appreciated, our allies also know that Canada was reducing, not increasing, its commitment to NATO immediately before the Ukraine crisis. Ottawa abruptly ended its participation in the alliance’s joint ground and airborne radar systems, for instance. One of NATO’s first acts during the Ukraine crisis was to deploy these radar planes to Eastern Europe – without Canadian crew members.

Given all this – and the fact that Canada’s actions on the Ukraine crisis have been similar to those of our allies – the Harper government’s contention that it is leading this response is not only implausible, but also condescending towards our allies. After all, it suggests that they lack Canada’s moral clarity and political resolve.

While most countries speak simultaneously to domestic audiences and foreign actors, the Harper government seems to be very focused on the home game. If doing so weakens Canada’s position internationally, this is a price that the Conservatives seem willing to pay.

44 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Canada appears to have largely lost interest in the long, steady, patient work of cultivating and maintaining relationships.

Indeed, the Harper government seems to regard diplomacy itself as morally questionable. They have suggested that Canadians have a choice between either Mr. Harper’s foreign policy or the abandonment of their principles.

Of course, this is poppycock. Skilled diplomacy – the ability to persuade others to do what you want them to do – is a prerequisite for upholding moral principles and Canadian interests. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, for instance, succeeded in galvanizing international opposition to apartheid – a moral stance, if there ever was one – because he took diplomacy seriously. He nurtured a broad array of international relationships and worked through the Commonwealth and other institutions to mobilize a coalition.

By contrast, Canada’s recent neglect of diplomacy may be reducing our ability to get things done – even with our closest ally, the United States. The Harper government has not hidden its exasperation with the Obama administration, including on the Keystone XL pipeline. But should they be surprised? You can only lecture people so many times before they reach for the mute button.

Taking credit for leading the West’s response to Russia fits this pattern. If it ends up irritating allies who have done just as much as Canada, and who believe themselves to be no less moral, then so be it. The Harper government seems determined to sustain a narrative that portrays Canada – and, specifically, Mr. Harper – as a brave outlier in international relations, leading the West in the face of Russian aggression.

It is a heroic image. But like other romantic tales, it is largely fictional.

#18 Canada Trimmed Russia Sanctions to Protect Business Interests ------by David Ljunggren and Euan Rocha Reuters, 16 May 2014 ------

Canada broke with the United States and did not impose sanctions on two key allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin because the pair had Canadian business interests, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The revelation puts into question the government’s tough line on Russia over the crisis in Ukraine. Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently compared Putin’s actions to those of Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War Two.

45 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Canada, home to 1.2 million people of Ukrainian descent, has imposed sanctions on more than 80 Russian and Ukrainian officials and businesses, compared to about 60 by the United States.

But unlike the United States, Canada has not moved against Sergei Chemezov, who heads state-owned industrial and defense conglomerate Rostec, and Igor Sechin, CEO of oil giant Rosneft . Both men, who are close to Putin, have Both men, who are close to Putin, have business ties to Canada.ian oil field, while Rostec has an aircraft assembly joint venture lined up with Bombardier Inc. The venture is vital to the Canadian plane and train maker, as the fate of a roughly $3.4 billion aircraft sale deal is tied to it.

Asked about the decision not to go after either Sechin or Chemezov, a Canadian government source familiar with Ottawa’s sanctions strategy told Reuters: “Our goal is to sanction Russia, it is not to go out of our way to sanction or penalize Canadian companies.”

The comments appear to contrast with the official government approach. Harper, referring to the Ukraine crisis, said in March that “we will not shape our foreign policy to commercial interests” and officials say that stance is still valid.

Indeed, the Conservative government on Wednesday called on business executives not to attend events in Russia, like the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum this month and the World Petroleum Congress in Moscow in June.

“We will continue to apply pressure to Russia, we will continue to impose sanctions along with our allies, but we will also look out for Canada’s broader interests,” the government source said.

Canada’s official opposition New Democrats said the failure to target Chemezov and Sechin undermined the case for sanctions. “It’s egregious. I think this is not consistent with what the government’s rhetoric is on getting tough with the Russians and getting tough with Putin,” the party’s foreign affairs spokesman Paul Dewar said.

In Europe, some leaders have also tempered their criticism of Moscow, in a sign they, too, are worried about business ties with Russia, a major provider of oil and gas to the region. But Harper took a strong line from the start, castigating Putin and pushing the effort to have Russia kicked out of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations.

CEO Lobbies Ottawa

As Ottawa developed its sanctions policy, it was being lobbied by top officials from Bombardier, which is one of Canada’s major industrial players.

46 UKL #470 6 June 2014 The company last year signed a preliminary deal to sell 100 short-haul aircraft in Russia and agreed to set up an assembly line for the planes in that country, in partnership with Rostec. Bombardier also has other interests in Russia, including a long-standing joint venture in its rail business.

Canada’s official registry of lobbyists shows Bombardier CEO Pierre Beaudoin reported six meetings in March with government officials, including Transport Minister Lisa Raitt and Industry Minister James Moore.

One source familiar with the discussions said Bombardier did not specifically ask the government to keep Chemezov off the sanctions list but stressed the ramifications that punitive measures could have on its business interests in Russia.

Three of the meetings took place on March 4 and one on March 7. After Canada announced sanctions in mid-March, Bombardier again met with senior officials on March 20 and 27.

Bombardier declined to comment on the specifics of its lobbying efforts in Ottawa but said the discussions revolved around its extensive overseas interests, among other matters.

A spokeswoman said the firm remained hopeful about the joint venture with Rostec, but acknowledged the current political environment was likely to delay its timeline.

The registry of lobbyists showed no record of Rosneft representatives meeting with the Canadian government in March. But a third well-placed source, familiar with sanctions planning, confirmed the decision to exclude both Chemezov and Sechin was made because of Canada’s commercial interests.

Rosneft owns 30 percent of an an Exxon Mobil Corp oil field in the western province of Alberta, where it is learning the horizontal drilling and fracturing techniques that have revolutionized the North American oil industry.

Canada coordinates sanctions closely with the United States, which described Chemezov as a trusted Putin ally and said Sechin “has shown utter loyalty” to the Russian leader.

Outwardly, Canada’s reluctance to impose sanctions on the pair does not appear to have caused tensions with its neighbor. A White House official said the United States valued its cooperation with Canada and other partners.

In Moscow, spokespeople for both Rosneft and Rostec declined to comment.

47 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #19 Investigators Find Fortunes in Homes of Ex-Ministers ------by Katya Gorchinskaya Kyiv Post, 28 March 2014 ------

“Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” could not have dreamed about loot as large as that allegedly left behind by Ukraine’s fugitive and corrupt former officials.

Just one police raid on March 21 on a property that belonged to former Energy Minister Eduard Stavitsky uncovered a fortune that cannot be explained by his $15,000 in earnings declared last year.

“One safe was completely stuffed with cash – about $5 million. Another safe was fully stuffed with gold and jewelry – 50 kilograms of gold bars, and jewelry made of various metals – gold, platinum and diamonds,” Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitskiy said on March 22.

The previous day, Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies searched 32 different premises that belonged to Stavitsky and another former top official, Agriculture Minister Mykola Prysyazhnyuk. In his flat, he kept $300,000 and Hr 800,000 in cash, among other things. Both ministers were a part of overthrown President Viktor Yanukovych’s close circle. They could not be reached for comment.

The raids also yielded many title deeds to land, ownership documents of offshore and other companies and details of various bank accounts that would be enough to keep law enforcers busy for months, untangling webs of business deals and chasing stolen assets.

But there has barely been a day when the law enforcers did not get back home with an impressive catch, which has been both satisfying and extremely depressing for the nation, which is discovering just how much it has been looted from over the past few years.

Moreover, the job has turned into a truly international project as teams from the United Kingdom and the U.S. stepped in earlier this month to help trace international operations of Ukraine’s corrupt elite, many of whom already face travel and economic sanctions and asset freezes by the European Union, the U.S. and a few other countries.

Bounty hunters, the lawyers who specialize in asset recovery, are digging into company documents in exotic destinations anywhere from North Africa to Central America.

In the meantime, journalists at home continue combing through files found in presidential real estate Mezhyhirya and gluing back together shredded documents from

48 UKL #470 6 June 2014 the offices of Serhiy Kurchenko, a young former billionaire whose companies served as a front for the business activities of the president and his family.

Arsen Avakov, the nation’s top cop, earlier this month said that his investigators uncovered Kurchenko’s gas trading schemes that robbed the state treasury of $1 billion. To add insult to injury, prosecutors allege some of Kurchenko’s ill-gotten gains were used to suppress the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled his patron Yanukovych on Feb. 22.

“A significant part of this illegally acquired money was spent on financing suppression of peaceful protests in Kyiv, and in particular to pay for the services of the so-called titushki (hired thugs),” the general prosecutor said in his statement.

Kurchenko’s close ally, former head of the supervisory board of Brokbiznesbank Denys Bugay, and head of Kurchenko’s Gaz Ukraine 2020 Anatoliy Kashkin, were arrested as part of that gang, but the prosecutor’s office said the group had some 20 members, including unnamed former ministers and high-ranking officials from the energy, economy, infrastructure, interior and tax ministries, as well as law enforcement agencies.

Nearly $5 million in cash was found in ex-Energy Minister Eduard Stavitsky’s home, including 50 kilograms of gold bars and luxury jewelry made of gold, platinum and diamonds.

Borys Timonkin, the former top financial manager for Kurchenko’s holding, told Ukrainska Pravda internet portal on March 24 that the arrests “are a total farce.” He said those individuals, like himself, were hired to clean up the business.

The prosecutor’s office said the group’s aim was to “illegally assume the ownership of property and money of state institutions, including Naftogaz and daughter company Ukrgazvydobuvannya.”

The oil and gas industry, which has given birth to many billionaires over the past two decades, remained the center of corrupt deals under the previous government. Yuriy Prodan, the energy minister, told the Kyiv Post that Kurchenko’s companies acted as intermediaries in the gas industry, buying gas from national importer Naftogaz Ukraine, reselling to end consumers and failing to pay the state in the process.

“The gas was simply sold to a fake firm. The firm is no longer there, and the person who signed these agreements is also no longer there,” Prodan said. He said other schemes were related to liquefied gas auctions, which is supposed to be supplied to households. “The gas did not go to supply the population, only a third of it went to supply the population. The gas was bought (at auctions) at Hr 2,000 at 1,000 cubic meters, and then was resold at gas stations and sold at Hr 10,000 for 1,000 cubic meters,” Prodan said. Similar schemes were used in the coal industry.

49 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Naftogaz’s former chief, Yevhen Bakulin, was detained on March 21. Two days later, a local court in Kyiv ruled to arrest him or offer a bail of Hr 1.5 billion, reflecting the gravity of his alleged financial crimes.

Teimur Bagirov, a former member of Naftogaz’s board, said that, under Yanukovych, people who acted in his name did not bother covering up the schemes. “The Donetsk guys thought they came forever,” he says. Bagirov adds that the company was constructed specially for the purpose of siphoning off cash though various schemes, and each consecutive government has built on them. There is a danger that Naftogaz will remain a black hole and cash cow for a small circle of people, Bagirov said, unless the newly appointed chief, 35-year-old Andriy Bobolev, takes up the job of cleaning up “this Aegean stable.”

Violations were rampant in the financial sector, as well.

This month, the central bank uncovered money laundering centers in 12 banks, which siphoned an estimated Hr 142 billion last year alone, National Bank Governor Stepan Kubiv said. He said that one of the banks had previously received $2 billion of bail money from the budget, and laundered $1 billion of that.

#20 Natural Gas: Ukraine Achilles’ Heel ------by Isabelle Fortin Written for UKL, 23 March 2014 ------

Isabelle Fortin, a doctoral student in political science at the University of Ottawa and Coordinator of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, is writing a dissertation on EU-Russia energy security.

While the risk of military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine in the Eastern part of Ukraine is still a concern and while Western capitals and Moscow are confronting each other with escalating economic sanctions following the Russian annexation of Crimea, Kyiv is preparing itself for a new gas confrontation with Moscow following its incapacity to pay its gas debts and the price increase of its Russian gas imports at the end of the month.

According to the new Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuri Prodan, Ukraine needs to import around 30 billion cubic meter (bcm) of natural gas this year, most of it coming from Russia, in order to meet its domestic demand. Ukraine produces some natural gas but its output has been declining for a number of years and the lost of Crimea impedes even more this trend since Crimea nationalized off-shore gas fields in its exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea and might sell them to Gazprom, reducing Ukraine’s gas production of 5% and increasing even more its dependence over Russian gas imports.

50 UKL #470 6 June 2014 The fall of the Yanukovych regime and the referendum in Crimea might lead to a sharp increase of the price of Russian gas imports for the new Ukrainian government. At the time of the December 2013 agreement between Vladimir Putin and Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine got a reduced price of 268.5$ USD for 1000 m3 of natural gas for its gas imports from Russia, but that price is subject to quarterly renegotiations, for which the next due date is April 1st. Following the change of government in Kyiv, Gazprom cancelled the December 2013 discount price and announced an increase of 37% of the gas price, at 368,5$ USD for 1000 m3, for the next term. Ukraine also runs the risk of facing another price increase since Russia might decide to cancel the 2010 Kharkiv agreements which gave a 100$ price discount to the Ukrainian government in exchange for a lease extension until 2042 of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol (since the naval base is now de facto Russian), which might increase the price for gas imports to 480 USD for 1000 m3 while Germany’s gas price for Russian imports, the reference point for the European price, is at 407$ USD.

Naftohaz Ukrainy, the national gas company of Ukraine, has also accumulated gas debts towards Gazprom estimated at nearly 2 billion USD. The Russian gas company requires an immediate reimbursement at risk of seeing a repeat of the 2009 gas crisis, when Russian gas exports to Ukraine were cut off following a dispute between Kyiv and Moscow regarding the price renegotiation for Russian gas deliveries to Ukraine. The new Ukrainian government has raised doubts about its ability to quickly pay the amount claimed by Gazprom and the European Union confirmed on March 19 that it will not help Ukraine to pay its gas debts, which increases the possibility of a new gas crisis between Ukraine and Russia. The important gas storage facilities in Ukraine, which are located mostly in the Western part of the country and constitute the second most important gas storage facilities in Europe, could help to ease the impact of a supply disruption, but the Ukrainian energy minister stressed that the current level of reserve would not fully respond to the Ukrainian domestic demand.

EU to the rescue?

Unlike in 2009 when Ukraine became isolated after the interruption of Russian gas deliveries, the EU could this time provide greater assistance to Ukraine in case of a gas crisis between Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, following the 2009 gas crisis, the EU has developed its gas transmission network in Eastern Europe through several reverse flows and interconnector projects between Eastern European and Central European countries in order to enhance the interoperability of the transmission gas network by diversifying supply routes within the internal energy market and reversing the gas flow from west to east in case of supply disruptions or technical problems. Among these projects, the EU has built reverse flows connecting Ukraine to Poland and Hungary, but is still negotiating to build a link with Slovakia which would be able to carry up to 20 bcm in Ukraine.

Facing the unfolding crisis in Ukraine and the risk of gas supply disruptions between Russia and Ukraine, the European Commission, through speeches from its president Jose Manuel Barroso and from energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger, said that

51 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Ukraine’s energy security is a priority for the EU and that in the short-term they intended to use, thanks to the more important gas reserves after a mild winter in Europe, the gas transmission networks and the gas storage facilities in Europe to activate as fast as possible a reverse flow between Ukraine and its European neighbours.

Since 2012, Ukraine imports natural gas from its European neighbours, particularly Poland, Hungary and Germany which together provide between 6 and 10 bcm to diversify Ukraine gas imports and reduce its dependence over Russia. The German company RWE also signed an agreement with Ukraine in 2012 to deliver up to 10 bcm per year up until 2017, but to successfully deliver such a quantity of gas, RWE will need to gain access to the Slovak pipelines that have not yet built a reverse flow with Ukraine. Gazprom contested this agreement between RWE and Ukraine and the use of reverse flow mechanisms to re-route Russian gas delivered to the European market to Ukraine since it is, in their view, undercutting the Russian company’s position and sale in the Ukrainian market. RWE discarded this accusation by relying on EU rules prohibiting destination clause for gas deliveries to the European market which let the gas flow freely within the European energy market. It remains clear, however, that the current capacity of the European gas transmission network to Ukraine is not sufficient to completely replace the amount of natural gas that Ukraine imports from Russia, but it would certainly reduce in the short- term Ukraine’s vulnerability if Russia were to stop supplying gas and also allow Ukraine to pay European prices for some of its imports, an interesting perspective if the price of its Russian imports were to increase to around 500USD per 1000 m3.

Obviously, EU long-term assistance to Ukraine may be reduced if gas supply disruptions between Russia and Ukraine were to persist over time as European countries do not necessarily have the ability to ensure supplies to Ukraine in the long term without jeopardizing their own domestic demand, particularly if Russia, as in 2006 and 2009, reduces or stops delivering gas to the European market through Ukraine. However, the EU has now more diversified supply routes from Russia thanks to the launching of the Nord Stream, whose two pipelines are now in operation since 2012 and can bring 55 bcm of Russian gas directly to Germany and the European energy transmission network, reducing Europe’s dependency upon transit routes through Ukraine.

To ensure the cooperation of European partners, however, the Ukrainian government should seek to secure its pipeline networks and to prevent any attack against the main gas pipelines crossing its territory. Following the referendum in Crimea, Pravy Sektor leaders threatened to attack the pipelines that deliver Russian gas to the European market in order to reduce the significant revenues that Russia is earning through its gas exports to Europe. Such gestures would weaken Russia economically, but it could also have a backlash effect for the Ukrainian government if it reduces the feeling of solidarity among European countries towards Ukraine and push them to further diversify supply routes to bypass Ukraine. Such a situation would isolate Ukraine at a time when she needs more than ever strong international support to cope with the major challenges it currently faces.

52 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #21 Ukraine: shifting energy gears from east to west ------by Roman Olearchyk Financial Times, 4 June 2014 ------

With pressure from the east piling up, Kiev’s pro-western government is shifting gears to more swiftly integrate its vast but financially-troubled energy sector with the west. Arseniy Yatseniuk, Ukraine’s prime minister, said on Wednesday his government had decided to unbundle Naftogaz, the debt-laden state gas and oil company, into separate domestic supply, transit and storage companies. News of the bold plan, presented at a Cabinet meeting, came amid still-raging battles with Russian rebels in eastern regions and still unfruitful talks with Russia’s Gazprom on import prices.

Yatseniuk said market monopoly and behemoth Naftogaz would be preserved as a standalone company to compete with others on the domestic market in gas trading. Subsidiaries that handle the transit and storage of EU-bound Russian gas would be unbundled into separate companies, Ukrainian Gas Transportation Systems and Ukrainian Gas Storage. Ukraine is a major corridor for Russian gas exports to Europe and the restructuring will bring its oil and gas sector closer to EU energy market rules, in compliance with the so-called 3rd Energy Package of the European Energy Charter. EU market rules require separation of supply, transit and other functions to prevent monopolisation and boost competition.

In Kiev, the move is seen as a step towards diversification and, in turn, a break from heavy energy dependence on Russia. The long-term aim, according to Ukrainian officials, is to shift Ukraine’s current role as a transit zone for Russian energy so that it becomes an integrated part of the EU market, a regional energy hub. Tired of facing Moscow single- handed, cash-strapped Kiev hopes that if it reforms and opens up its energy sector European energy companies will step in to share the burden, buying Russian gas at the Ukrainian-Russian border and then transiting it through Ukraine and/or storing it in the nation’s vast underground storage facilities. These are well positioned to allow traders to play the EU spot market during peak winter demand.

The reforms could also help Ukraine attract new energy market investors, bringing new suppliers into the domestic market, and help stabilise its stretched finances. Naftogaz, a market monopoly which resells costly gas imported from Russia at subsidised prices, has run up overdue debt to Gazprom of more than $3bn. Bringing in new players would relieve cash-strapped Kiev of the burden of financing gas purchases and de-politicise energy relations with Russia. Addressing lawmakers on Tuesday, Yatseniuk said talks were underway with the EU and US to raise investment for modernising the country’s strategic gas transit pipeline. He also called on EU companies to buy at the Russian-Ukrainian

53 UKL #470 6 June 2014 border. However, Moscow, which stands accused of using gas prices as a lever of influence over Kiev, is expected to resist such changes in its relations with European clients.

Dragon Capital, a Kiev-based investment bank, wrote in a June 4 note to investors. The proposal to shift the delivery point for Russian gas exports to the EU will be severely opposed by Gazprom, as this would greatly facilitate reverse gas flows between Ukraine and the EU (both “physical” and “virtual”), thus weakening Gazprom’s bargaining power.

#22 Putin’s ‘Human Rights Council’ Accidentally Posts Real Crimean Election Results ------by Paul Roderick Gregory Forbes, 5 May 2014 ------

As you may recall, the official Crimean election results, as reported widely in the Western press, showed a 97 percent vote in favor of annexation with a turnout of 83 percent. No international observers were allowed. The pro-Russia election pressure would have raised the already weak vote in favor of annexation, of course.

Yesterday, however, according to a major Ukrainian news site, TSN.ua, the website of the President of Russia’s Council on Civil Society and Human Rights (shortened to President’s Human Rights Council) posted a report that was quickly taken down as if it were toxic radioactive waste. According to this purported report about the March referendum to annex Crimea, the turnout of Crimean voters was only 30 percent. And of these, only half voted for the referendum–meaning only 15 percent of Crimean citizens voted for annexation.

The TSN report does not link to a copy of the cited report. However, there is a report of the Human Rights Council, entitled “Problems of Crimean Residents,” still up on the president-sovet.ru website, which discusses the Council’s estimates of the results of the March 16 referendum. Quoting from that report: “In Crimea, according to various indicators, 50-60% voted for unification with Russia with a voter turnout (yavka) of 30- 50%.” This leads to a range of between 15 percent (50% x 30%) and 30 percent (60% x 50%) voting for annexation. The turnout in the Crimean district of Sevastopol, according to the Council, was higher: 50-80%.

(…)

To make sure no one misses this:

Official Kremlin results: 97 percent of polled voters for annexation, turnout 83 percent, and 82 percent of total Crimean population voting in favor.

54 UKL #470 6 June 2014 President’s Human Rights Council mid-point estimate: 55 percent of polled voters for annexation, turnout 40 percent, 22.5 percent of total Crimean population voting in favor.

A member of the Human Rights Council, Svetlana Gannushkina, talked about election fraud on Kanal 24 (as replayed on Ukrainian television), declaring that the Crimean vote “discredited Russia more than could be dreamed up by a foreign agent.”

We can debate the extent of fraud in the March 16 referendum, but only the Council’s highest estimate just yields the fifty percent turnout ratio normally required for major referendums. What counts is that the Putin regime solemnly announced to the world that 82 percent of the Crimean people voted to join Mother Russia, and many in the West swallowed this whopper. At best, according to Putin’s own council, only 30 percent did.

Putin plans to repeat the Crimean election farce in the May 11 referendum on the status of the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk. He will use the same tricks to produce an overwhelming vote for “independence” and a high turnout. The few international election monitors will object, but Putin counts on repetition of his Big Lie to convince his own people and sympathetic politicians and press in the West that the people of east Ukraine actually want to separate from Ukraine. Will the West let Putin get away with it again?

#23 Statement of Concerned Scholars ------on the Current Predicament of the Crimean Tatars http://scholarsforqirim.com/ ------

The Crimean Tatars are a nation with a long and rich history going back many centuries. Because of their origins and the significance of their early modern state—the Crimean Khanate, established in the early fifteenth century—their history and culture has many connections with the histories and cultures of Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Middle East. We, the undersigned, are scholars whose work relates to these regions. We would like to express our concern at the situation of the Crimean Tatars since the Russian Federation’s intervention into and illegal annexation of Crimea.

1) Unlike Russians and Ukrainians, the Crimean Tatars have no homeland other than Crimea. Ever since the Crimean Khanate was invaded and abolished by Russia in 1783, in violation of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kajnardja of 1774 in which Russia pledged to respect the khanate’s independence, the Crimean Tatars have been the object of systematic and wholesale oppression. They suffered successive waves of ethnic cleansing and subsequent forced migration to the Ottoman Empire at the hands of imperial Russia throughout the nineteenth century. On 18 May 1944 the entire Crimean Tatar nation was deported to Central Asia, the Urals, and Siberia. The mass

55 UKL #470 6 June 2014 deportation constituted an act of genocide as during and after it about half of the deportees perished from hunger, dehydration, and disease. It was only after the breakup of the USSR and attainment of Ukrainian independence in 1991 that the majority of the surviving Crimean Tatars and their descendants were able, with great effort and hardship, to return to their homeland. Today their population there is about 300,000. Because of their catastrophic history under the rule of St. Petersburg and Moscow, which has resulted in massive national trauma, the vast majority of Crimean Tatars are loyal to Ukraine and remain adamant in their opposition to the Russian annexation of Crimea.

2) The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 was achieved through a covert military operation under cover of which a coup occurred on 27 February, installing a new local government in Simferopol and declaring a referendum that was at first concerned with increased autonomy, and a few days later, secession of Crimea from Ukraine and accession to Russia. This was done contrary to the Constitution of Ukraine and that of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and without even a clear option to vote for the status quo, as one option was to join Russia and the other virtual independence from Ukraine. The referendum was held contrary to all norms for referenda of this importance—such as the possibility for free public discussion of the ramifications of a vote to secede. Moreover, instead of monitoring certified by internationally recognized agencies, it was carried out under the watchful eyes of masked Russian troops and armed local “self-defense” vigilantes. The result, an official 83% turnout and 97% vote to join Russia, was clearly falsified, as virtually the entire Tatar population and much of the Ukrainian and Russian population boycotted the vote. There is considerable evidence that the turnout was no more than 30-50% and that only half of those who actually turned out voted for secession. A survey made by two respected polling companies just prior to the Russian intervention indicated that at most 41% of the Crimean population would opt for joining Russia. In any event, since the vote was carried out without strict adherence to accepted norms, it is impossible to determine what the true turnout and result was. The actual annexation of Crimea by Russia a few days after the illegal referendum of 16 March was in violation of numerous treaties and agreements, and of international law.

3) The Crimean Tatar national assembly, the Qurultay, and its representative-executive body, the Mejlis, have reaffirmed the will of their people to remain in Ukraine and categorically condemn the Russian takeover. The Crimean Tatar population is currently under huge pressure to accept Russian citizenship—refusal can mean loss of work, pension, access to schooling, and other social benefits. In addition to their fundamental distrust of Russia, which is today widely recognized to be an authoritarian state, the Crimean Tatars are at risk of a decline in basic freedoms and increased violations of their human rights. They are fearful that should they continue to reject the new regime they could face mass repression and even the violence and trauma of another mass deportation. These concerns have been expressed in a recent resolution from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). In the first days of May the human rights situation of the Crimean

56 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Tatars deteriorated drastically. The Russian authorities banned their leader, Mustafa Jemilev, from entering Crimea for five years and declared protests against this ban to be extremist acts while heavily fining participants. The chief prosecutor in Crimea officially warned the head of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, that it will be “liquidated and banned” should it continue to organize “extremist” activities. The Russian authorities prohibited the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatar nation on 18 May 2014. For the past 22 years 30-35 thousand Crimean Tatars and others would gather on this date in the central square of the Crimean capital of Simferopol to mourn the deported and the dead. This time tens of thousands of paramilitary police were brought into Simferopol to prevent this traditional gathering in the center of the city. Attack helicopters hovered overhead to drown out and intimidate gatherings that were held on the outskirts of Simferopol and in Bakhchysarai. Searches were carried out in the homes of prominent Crimean Tatar activists and Mejlis head Chubarov was threatened with criminal prosecution.

4) The international community has condemned the seizure of Crimea and does not recognize the legality of its annexation (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262, 27 March 2014 and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Resolution 1988, 9 April 2014).

5) The Qurultay, the elected assembly of the Crimean Tatars, and its representative- executive body, the Mejlis, (a) condemn the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea and refuse recognition of Crimea as part of the Russian Federation; (b) demand recognition of the indigenous status of the Crimean Tatars; (c) demand the establishment of Crimean Tatar national and territorial autonomy, and self-government in Ukrainian Crimea; (d) demand the full rehabilitation and restoration of the rights of the Crimean Tatars and provision of aid for the return of those who still remain in exile in former Soviet territories, including restitution of their property and compensation for their national trauma.

We, the undersigned, urge all states, agencies, organizations, and individuals to join us in our support for the national and human rights of the Crimean Tatars— including their cultural, social, political, and economic rights—and to hold the Russian authorities in illegal occupation of Crimea accountable for the violation of these rights.

57 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #24 Ukrainian Director Arrested by Russian Secret Service in Crimea, Accused of Terrorist Act ------by Nick Holdsworth Hollywood Reporter, 17 May 2014 ------

Director Oleg Sentsov, who denies any wrongdoing, is due to be defended in Moscow by Dmitry Denze, a Russian lawyer who worked on Pussy Riot case.

CANNES -- The head of one of Germany’s leading regional film funds is calling for the release of a Ukrainian director seized from his home last week by Russian secret service officials.

Kirsten Niehuus, head of Medienboar Berlin Brandenburg, says director Oleg Sentsov was arrested at his home in Simferopol, Crimea and accused of organizing a terrorist attack.

Niehuus, whose fund is among the European backers of Sentsov’s new feature Rhino, says Sentsov’s only “crime” is his opposition to the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

An ethnic Russian, Sentsov had been involved in supporting the Euro Maidan protests in Kiev during the winter.

More recently he was involved in helping Ukrainian military officers who do not support Russia’s annexation of Crimea leave the territory.

Sentsov was arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning by officials from Russia’s Federal Security Service, a successor body to the KGB. He sent a message to a local journalist in the early hours that day but has not been heard from since.

Members of the Ukrainian Filmmakers Union, which has protested his detention along with the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, understand he has been accused of organizing a terrorist attack and had been flown to Moscow to face trial there. He is believed to have been taken to the city’s notorious 19th century Lefortovo prison.

Niehuus said: “It is extremely scary; if there are rules, however stupid, you may make a choice about your actions. But when the rules change day to day that makes it impossible for any thinking person.”

She first met the award-winning director at the Odessa International Film Festival, where she was impressed by his debut feature Gaamer. Medienboard agreed to support Rhino after German producer Alexander Ris picked up the project.

58 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Hrovje Hribar, head of the Croatian Audiovisual Center, which is also supporting the film, told The Hollywood Reporter that industry professionals need to raise awareness for Senstov’s plight at the highest levels.

“This is very disturbing news,” he said.

Sentsov, who denies any wrongdoing, is due to be defended in Moscow by Dmitry Denze, a Russian lawyer who worked on Pussy Riot case.

Ukrainian filmmakers say they believe Sentsov’s arrest is part of a campaign of intimidation against those who disagree with Russian’s annexation of Crimea last March. Around two dozen other people have also been detained.

British producer, Mike Downey, deputy chair of the European Film Academy, who helped broker funding for Rhino and is currently working with Sentsov’s producer, Olga Zhurzhenko, issued a statement.

“Sentsov is one many people arrested in Crimea and carted off to Moscow on trumped up charges. I would hope that we can use his position as a public figure to draw attention to this. I urge our brave friends and colleagues in the Russian industry to speak out,” Downey said.

If convicted, Sentsov faces up to 10 years in prison under Russian law, the minimum term for those involved in terrorism.

The filmmaker’s wife and two children, who are still in Crimea, are understood to have been moved by family friends to a safe place.

Russia’s state-run media has been silent on the case, but opposition and independent news outlets have expressed support for the jailed director.

“Crimea seems to have become a testing ground for a crackdown on those with dissident opinions,” online magazine Colta.ru reported. “And what is happening is really a terrorist attack; one of its victims is Oleg Sentsov.”

Sergei Loznitsa, whose documentary about Ukraine’s revolution, Maidan, is showing in Special Screening in Cannes, called upon filmmakers to join the campaign for Sentsov’s “immediate release.”

“Oleg actively participated in political protests and this is why he is being persecuted now,” Loznitsa added.

59 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #25 UJE Graduate Student Symposium ------University of Toronto, 24 September 2014 ------

Ukrainian Jewish Encounter in collaboration with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies (University of Toronto) is pleased to announce a call for proposals for a graduate student symposium entitled “Ukrainians, Jews, and the Euromaidan” held on the 24 September 2014 at the University of Toronto.

This symposium intends to bring together young scholars for one day of presentations and discussion regarding the ongoing situation in Ukraine. The goal of this symposium is to engage in scholarly debate and present new research that explores the relationship between ethnicity, nationality, and political unrest in Ukraine.

The symposium is open to graduate students and recent PhD holders from North America and Europe. Submissions can focus on a variety of topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Protests, demonstrations, and civil unrest in contemporary Ukraine (particularly the Euromaidan and Orange Revolution) • Ukrainian-Jewish relations - Ethnicity, identity, regionalism - Language • Sociopolitical and economic development • Anti-Semitism, fascism, nationalism, communism - National history and the politics of memory • Foreign relations, diaspora communities - Ethnic minorities in Ukraine • Media and propaganda in Ukraine, Russia, and the diaspora

Proposals should be sent to [email protected] by 31 July 2014 and must include a presentation proposal (500 words maximum), a current CV, and a brief biography. Successful candidates will be notified by the end of August 2014. Travel costs, accommodations, and a stipend will be provided. For more information on Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, please see: www.ukrainianjewishencounter.org

60 UKL #470 6 June 2014 #26 L’espace politique ukrainien : conflits et recompositions ------Colloque de recherche Lyon (France), 26-27 juin 2014 http://ukraine2014.sciencesconf.org/program/graphic/date/2014-06-26 ------

For information : Valentyna Dymytrova ([email protected])

Jeudi 26 juin

Session plénière Andrei Kourkov, écrivain ukrainien, auteur du Journal de Maidan

Session 1—Histoire et mémoire de l’Ukraine Animatrice : Iryna Dmytryshyn (INALCO, Paris)

Giuseppe Perri (U Libre de Bruxelles) Viaceslav Lypyns’kyj et la composante polonaise de l’identité politique ukrainienne

Boris Czerny (U de Caen Basse-Normandie) L’Ukraine: un enjeu ethnographique. Le cas du pays houtsoule

Nikolay Koposov (Georgia Institute of Technology) Une mémoire-agression

Session 2—Identités politiques en Ukraine Animatrice : Ioulia Shukan (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Olha Ostriitchouk (Université d’Ottawa) Mobilisations mémorielles et exacerbation du clivage régional : Le rôle décisif de l’extrême-droite dans la “Révolution nationale”

Julien Paret (INALCO, Paris) La révolution n‘aura pas lieu : la gauche radicale ukrainienne au confluent de deux courants contraires

Dmytro Reshetchenko (Archives nationales d’Ukraine, Kyïv) La diaspora ukrainienne et le soutien à l’Ukraine (novembre 2013-décembre 2014)

61 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Session 3—Économie et politique en Ukraine Animateur : Alexandre Baiov (Université Lyon 3)

Apoli Bertrand Kameni (Institut d’études politiques de Lyon) L’enjeu du Donbass dans l’affrontement russo-ukraine

Irina Barilo (Université nationale V. N. Karasine, Kharkiv) Les problèmes démographiques en Ukraine sous l’aspect des processus géopolitiques

Abel Polese (Tallinn University) From informal practices to informal governance: reflections on Ukraine

Table ronde journalistes - chercheurs à l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lyon

Vendredi 27 juin

Session plénière La politique extérieure de l’Ukraine avant et après Euromaidan Grygorii Perepelytsia (Académie diplomatique, Kyïv)

Session 4—L’Ukraine et l’Union européenne

Xavier Follebouckt (Université Catholique de Louvain) Le Parlement européen dans la crise ukrainienne

Bartłomiej Zdaniuk (Université de Varsovie) L’influence de la crise ukrainienne sur le processus d’intégration européenne de la République de Moldavie

Session 5—L’Ukraine et la Russie Animatrice : Valentyna Dymytrova (Université Lyon 2)

David Zdrojewski (Ecole européenne de Luxembourg) L’Ukraine : un enjeu crucial dans la rivalité polono-russe

Natalya Shevchenko (Université Lyon 2) Le rôle de la langue dans la crise ukrainienne d’aujourd’hui : le problème du bilinguisme

Sebastian Huluban (Romanian Government) Ukraine 2014: bringing imperial borderlands back in

62 UKL #470 6 June 2014 Session 6— Débat politique, médias et nouveaux médias Animatrice : Valentyna Dymytrova (Université Lyon 2)

Andrii Chuzhykov (Kyiv National University of Economics) Determination of TV airtime in Ukraine (late 2013 - early 2014): A compromise between social responsibility and new market laws

Oksana Lychkovska (Université Nationale d’Odessa d’I.I. Metchnikov) Les médias sociaux et les tendances de la coopération nationale et culturelle en Ukraine

Alexander Kondratov (Université Stendhal - Grenoble III) La couverture des événements ukrainiens de l’hiver-printemps 2014 dans les réseaux sociaux russes : les « nouveaux » médias au service de la propagande étatique

Session 7— Rhétorique et esthétique des identités en Ukraine Animateur : Paul Bacot (IEP de Lyon)

Bernard Lazimet (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lyon) Rhétorique de l’alientité

Maryna Zholud Py (Université Rennes 2) Recompositions politiques et reconfigurations esthétiques en Ukraine aujourd’hui

Nadiya Trach (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) Political and Civil Rhetoric of “Euromaidan” Protest

Grande Conférence d’Actualité « UKRAINE. MAIDAN. 2014 » Amphithéâtre Laprade, Université Lyon 2

------UKL 470, 5 June 2014 ------

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63 UKL #470 6 June 2014 ------Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Ottawa 559 King Edward Ave. Ottawa ON K1N 6N5 CANADA tel 613 562 5800 ext. 3692 fax 613 562 5351 ------

64 UKL #470 6 June 2014