Category Ukraine

An incongruous claim III

Following parts I and II, I repeat parts of Putin’s “true history of Ukraine“: Perhaps you are not aware that in 1922, part of the land that you just named, land that historically always bore the name of Novorossiya… Why…

An incongruous claim II

Continuing from part I, I’m going to focus on a misstatement that may not be important compared with Putin’s other claims but I’d still like to talk about it. “This land [Novorossiya] included Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Nikolayev, Kherson and Odessa…

An incongruous claim I

President Putin said this during the Valdai club meeting about ten days ago: Perhaps you are not aware that in 1922, part of the land that you just named, land that historically always bore the name of Novorossiya… Why this…

On the way down

According to Vyacheslav Volodin, first deputy chief of staff to the president, “attacks against Putin are attacks against Russia”, and Russia’s people understand “that if there is no Putin, there is no Russia.” According to his boss Sergei Ivanov, chief of…

Budzhak, Budjak, Bucak, Bugeac

Like his parents, Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko was born in the area between the estuaries of the Dniester and the Danube known by its old Turkic name, Budzhak, spelled Bucak in modern Turkish, where it means “corner“or “nook”. Located in the southwest of Ukraine, it…

In Donetsk, you had a real junta

Keith Gessen, a co-editor of the NYC journal n+1, a novelist, and a brother of Masha Gessen, sent this dispatch from Donetsk last August or September. It is an insightful piece, although colored by Gessen’s New-Yorker prole-o-philia. He seems to dislike…

Waiting for Poroshenko’s new government

Ukraine’s President Poroshenko has fired the minister of defense, a career policeman who started service in the late Soviet Union and rose through the ranks in a post-Soviet environment. Not to deny Heletey’s achievements as minister, I wonder whether a graduate of a Soviet…

Who is Professor Lorenz Haag?

Google “Lorenz Haag” agency or “Lorenz Haag” Agentur, preferably using the Verbatim option, and you’ll get results like this: Western leaders “must abandon anti-Russian rhetoric, lift sanctions imposed on Russia and closely analyze and understand motives behind Russia’s actions,” in…

Leave if you’re not determined to fight

Mikhail Khodorkovsky speaking at the Le Monde anniversary celebration at the Opéra Bastille on 21 (?) September. An excerpt in my translation: Q. Let us discuss Ukraine, our European disaster. This year, you have visited Ukraine several times. You were…

The second anti-invasion rally

The peace march in Moscow today probably drew no fewer people than the one in March. The picture probably shows the tail of a long line of people marching, that is walking briskly, along a section of the Boulevard Ring in Moscow.…

Putin and Solzhenitsyn

Miriam Elder and Robert Coalson argue that Putin has been influenced by Solzhenitsyn’s view of Russia’s proper borders. That’s plausible, but Solzhenitsyn was a proponent of grassroots democracy of the sort he witnessed in Vermont. He probably had in mind an honest…

Better stories

Peter Pomerantsev’s latest in The Atlantic is a great read. The author, a UK TV producer, knows what he’s talking about: he used to sell British TV shows to Russian channels, which rely heavily on these imports. I’ll limit myself…