Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Opponents of the EU-Ukraine association agreement made up 61% of the voters who took part in the Dutch referendum. The turnout was 32%. That works out to 20% of the eligible voters opposing the agreement. Potentially, a powerful minority, but a…
The Guardian published a long article by Peter Pomerantsev on the Kremlin’s information warfare last week, along with a Russian translation. While it reads smoothly in English, the Russian version requires a little effort to take in, but I still hope it…
Paul Goble has summarized a piece by the Ukrainian journalist Bogdan Butkevich, 10 Reasons Why the Donbass Will Not Become Ulster. I’ve been saying some of these things here and elsewhere but a Ukrainian perspective is more valuable. Some quotes – first, on…
More from Peter Pomerantsev’s Ukrains’ka Pravda interview (his text, translated by me, is in blue). I think he cuts to the heart of the problem but I detest the idea of a “global BBC” financed by a group of governments. There…
Peter Pomerantsev speaking to Ukrains’ka Pravda. Excerpt One (dark blue, translation mine), no comment for now: It’s not that the Kremlin has built a political system around Baudrillard’s ideas. Russia arrived at postmodernism via post-Soviet cynicism. It followed its own…
Last weekend, on the first anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Russian TV aired a propaganda “documentary” called Krym: vozvraschenie na rodinu, which can be translated as Crimea: Homecoming or literally Crimea: The Return to Motherland. Let’s do a simple…
Last week, The Interpreter ran a story by Paul Goble that emphasized the importance of the urban-rural divide for understanding today’s Ukraine. The story was largely based on an interview with Sergey Koshman, a coordinator of We Are Europeans, a Ukrainan civil movement, published…
I’m not going to watch that documentary but there seems to be little discrepancy over its content between the state-controlled and independent media and from what I have read so far, I believe this title and subtitle, by the Ukrainian UNIAN, area…
I have written on the “squeeze Iran, disarm Ukraine” line of geopolitical thinking in this post, and JCass discussed it in the comments to this entry. In three sentences, the logic in question is this: “Putin has nukes, thus must…
In The Guardian, Elena Savchuk on female nurses and fighters with the Ukrainian volunteer battalion Aidar. My two cents in the comments, edited: The author reports that fighters of the Aidar battalion “have a reputation for fierce nationalism” and writes…
“Never has so much been written about a speech that hasn’t been given,” said Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu of his address to US Congress scheduled for today. True: it’s been on the front pages for weeks. Some argue that Netanyahu…
Kommersant‘s February dispatches from Donbass mentioned “Buryats,” apparently Russian servicemen from the republic of Buryatia. Yesterday, Novaya Gazeta published an interview with a young man, apparently an ethnic Buryat from Chita, wounded in a tank fight against the Ukrainian army.…