A couple of weeks ago, Ukraine passed an edict banning access to a host of Russian web services including VKontakte and Odnoklassniki (Russia’s Facebook, and most popular social network in Ukraine, with 13 million users; Odnoklassniki is 4th, with 9 million users; for comparison, Facebook is 8th with 5.6 million users, though tellingly it is where the country’s political elites tussle), Yandex (Google, and 5th and 11th most popular website in Ukraine for the .ua and .ru domain, respectively), Kaspersky (Europe’s foremost anti-virus software), mail.ru (an email service that is the 7th most popular site in Ukraine), and 1c accounting software (the foremost accounting software in Eurasia due to its competitive pricing and regular updates to comply with the latest labyrinth regulations of post-Soviet bureacracies).
As pretty much everyone except Ukrainian nationalists agreed, this was a stupid and self-defeating move anyway you look at it. It will create headaches for normal people and for the small businesses who rely on 1c accounting software (as if they don’t have enough problems already, what with the collapse of the Ukrainian economy and the Maidan regime’s total failure to make headway against corruption).
It doesn’t look any good from a “democratist” perspective. The only halfway comparable block in Russia is with respect to LinkedIn for its refusal to store its data in Russia. That said, sitting here in Moscow, I can open it just fine even without using VPN or other roundabout methods, which brings up another problem: Implementing such censorship is harder than it looks. It requires money that Ukraine doesn’t have. So any attempt to implement this ban seriously will have to be borne by Internet providers, which in turn will pass it onto the consumer. Not good for the country with Europe’s lowest Internet penetration rate (including Moldova).
In any case, segregating the Ukrainian Internet from Runet is doomed to failure anyway, considering that it is mostly to overwhelmingly Russophone outside the far west.
Map of Russian/Ukrainian language usage on Vkontakte in 2013.
It might work after half a century of aggressive Ukrainization, but not today, when at least 80% of intellectual culture in Ukraine is carried on in the Russian language, despite the best efforts of Soviet Ukrainianizationists.
Finally, even bad optics aside and impracticality aside, Russia remains by far Ukraine’s biggest investor – some 38% of the total as of 2016 – so scaring off the Russian companies that remain there with armed secret police raids and “treason” charges, as recently done on Yandex’s Kiev office, seems pretty stupid.
And really, if these sites are all such a big threat to Ukraine, why didn’t it ban them back in 2014?
Two possible reasons. Maybe Poroshenko was really butthurt about the Russian tax authorities finally shutting down his chocolate factory in Lipetsk. Alternatively, and more plausibly, this was done to appease svidomy Ukrainian nationalists for a few more weeks. They have a good track record of forcing the weak Ukrainian state into acceding to and formalizing actions that it doesn’t really want to do, such as the Donbass blockade. Of course as I pointed out earlier the nationalists themselves are mostly tools of oligarchic groups who are themselves opposed to Poroshenko. Online as in real life, it is ordinary people who have the pay as the high lords play their game of thrones.
I would go the theory that outsiders told him to do this, it forces Ukrainians to use American software and services. It also makes them easier to socially engineer, since Google, Facebook, Youtube are all undertaking massive censorship along with pushing ever more globalist narratives.
Looks like the Yanukovych election map. Can he run in abstentia?
Why doesn’t the Ukraine just split into 2 countries?
As a Russian, I’m pleased that yandex offices in Odessa and Kiev were finally shut down. The people that yandex used to employ in Ukraine were exactly the kind of svidomy hipster types that supported ideals of Euromaidan. And one of them was even caught cheering on Odessa massacre.
I wonder what will happen to these employees now? It will be ironic if Yandex brings them to work in Moscow.
I think their immediate motivation was to isolate Ukrainian population and reduce their access to independent media.
You see, Poroshenko has a real problem: his approval rating is in single digits, but he still wants to get reelected somehow. The millions of people who use Russian social networks get exposed to Russian news, which are critical of the Ukrainian regime.
Poroshenko has nothing to lose and maybe something to gain from occasional patriotic virtue signalling. It wouldn’t do to crack down on all economic ties with Russia at once – that’s probably even less feasible than this heroic initiative, and I doubt he really wants to run his country into the ground quite that badly yet. But landing periodic blows to remind people that he’s still defending them from the wily Moskals is not a bad tactic in his position. As for getting reelected – he has a long time before that. I doubt he can win a honest election, but there are other options out there so long as the elite is behind him.
US social networks share data with the NSA, etc. Russian and Chinese social networks are necessary elements of sovereignty, like nuclear weapons and locally-controlled media. So of course when the Borg takes over a country, it replaces social networks that it doesn’t control with ones that it does. I think it’s likely that this decision was made far above Porky’s level.
Hey Anatoly, is there noticeably more people using Linux over in Russia? It would make sense for several reasons if they did. One being this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux
On a related topic, I see over at Altright.com they have an article promoting open source tech for their community. That would sure change the one-worlder goofball culture of Ubuntu if enough alt-righters drifted into it.
Also, all three have massive Internet “pipes” and sophisticated, direct interfaces directly accessible to the NSA, FBI and other agencies.
Google in particular owed its early success to undercover government support and continues to rely heavily on non-enforcement of anti-trust regulations.
Google famously had a female executive meet on a weekly basis with Barry Obama to coordinate the narrative and to refine Google’s personality profiles of individual users derived from online spying for ready usability by our friends in government, e.g. IRS, FEMA, militarized local “law enforcement,” private employment screening, etc.
Over at Facebook, Mark “Winkelvoss” Zuckerberg famously likes to visit and suck up to powerful men such as Carlos Slim (de facto owner of the New York Times), China’s Xi Jinping, and especially Europe’s new woman Fuhrer, Angela Merkel.
And Russian ones do with the Russian government.
Incidentally, the map contradicts the silly notion often repeated by pro-Russians, based on some flawed Gallup study, that only 17% of Ukrainians favor the Ukrainian language. Anyone who has been around Ukraine knows that the 17% figure is absurd; the map highlights the absurdity.
The far western regions altogether are about 20% of the population. Those are all red, as no one would doubt, on the map. But the center-west (Vynnytsia, Cherkassy) is also almost all red, with quite a few red points even east of the Dnipro River. I have family from this region – it is indeed mostly Ukrainian-speaking (1/3 Russian in the city, all-Ukrainian in the villages). So it looks to be around 35% Ukrainian users in Ukraine. Remove Crimea and Donbas, and it’s around 50%.
A note for those hoping to split Ukraine across linguistic lines: Russian-speaking doesn’t equal pro-Russian. Kiev is Russian-speaking. It is certainly not pro-Russian.
The Russian government and Putin have ordered the Russian bureaucracy to switch over to Linux on several different occasions.
I have yet to see a single non-Windows OS on any government institution computer.
. Is there any evidence that any Russian government actually pays Microsoft for the privilege?
Just curious. Microsoft has always seemed to be fairly lax about people who would never pay for its software to essentially steal it. Note that excludes businesses.
Gallup did a study in 2008, and, when given the choice to fill out the survey form in Ukrainian or Russian, 83% of the population chose Russian.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/109228/russian-language-enjoying-boost-postsoviet-states.aspx
I suspect that one of the reasons might be that the official ‘Ukrainian’ language is quite different from the dialects (formerly known as ‘Ukrainian language’) spoken by villagers on most of the territory. In the cities, obviously, most of everyone speaks Russian.
So, I don’t think it’s just the “intellectual culture”. Quite simply, Russian is the preferred language of an overwhelming majority of the population on the territory of the former state of Ukraine.
Yes. It’s exceedingly hard and extremely dangerous for Russian organizations to use pirated software. I doubt any government institution is using anything pirated.
On the flip side, Microsoft actually opened its source code to Russian government audit, so the security angle is (seemingly) not so pressing.
That would nicely solve Ukraine’s problem, but unfortunately for them, it wouldn’t do anything for Russia or NATO.
I wholeheartedly agree with your conclusion here. The Maidan and the actions of Russian speaking Ukrainians that formed the bulk of the anti-Russian militia groups that were instrumental in fending off the Russian sponsored proxies in Donbas for the first year and a half of fighting, clearly show that this group is not attracted to the pro-Russian (Putlerite), ‘Russian world (Ruskij Mir project)’. This very salient fact is something that seems to go way over the head of Karlin and his loyal fan base here.
The map contradicts the debunked Gallup poll results.
‘Overwhelming majority’?…’Russian’?…Nonsense! Not according to this article that just came out five days ago:
Your opinion is clearly flawed and seems to be based on long eroding stereotypes that are clearly rapidly changing in Ukraine.
http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/70098
They speak dialects that they identify as ‘Ukrainian’ – dialects of Malorossia, and, to a degree, of Southern Russia in general.
They do NOT speak official ‘Ukrainian’. They don’t understand a whole bunch of words in that language. Russian, they understand it much better.
Some of the Russian-speakers are, many are not. The fact that most of the nationalist militias are Russians-speakers (Azov battalion seems to be dominated by Kharkivites), or that the so-called Odessa massacre was mostly the work of Russian-speaking Ukrainian nationalists from Odessa and Kharkiv, doesn’t mean that most or all of this group are Ukrainian nationalists. But contrary to Russian dreams, it means that a lot of them are – and probably a slim majority of the young are.
2014 was a test of the Ukrainian territory: with no real central government control or army and Russia with its seasoned volunteers from Transnistria and Crimea willing to help out wherever possible, the true limits of the Russian idea in post-1991 Ukraine were revealed. And that limit was basically just half of the Donbas oblasts. Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv just didn’t go for it.
Anatoly Karlin, is there really no way remove this obnoxious troll? It’s not the first time I saw him peddling propaganda – basically that’s all he does here. I wish this website had ignore function.
Throwing around a term like “Putlerite” — a rather clumsy and not catchy aspersion, at that — is namecalling, not argument. Kinda like lefties who liked to spell the word “Amerikkka.”
From what I’ve been reading, you may be right that there are many mainly Russian speakers in Ukraine who do not favor secession and joining Russia.
Would you support a referendum where the people of each oblast vote on the issue? I understand that the USA wouldn’t go for it and Russia probably wouldn’t either, but what do you think?
Are you serious? 200 “seasoned veterans” – and that was the size of Strelkov’s original group were not going to carve Ukraine in 2. But a limited involvement of the Russian army certainly would, and still can.
The Strelkov’s group was, in fact, ~20 people, two thirds of them Ukrainian citizens. The first thing they did was taking light arms from a police station and arming local population in Slavyansk.
From his interview with Завтра: Strelkov arrived in Slavyansk with a group of 52 people. He says 150-200 local activists joined his group right away.
http://zavtra.ru/blogs/kto-tyi-strelok
Since that was all it took to seize chunks of Ukrainian territory one sees how easy adherents of the Russian Idea could have taken more, had there been widespread support for it.
But it wasn’t just Girkin’s 200. In the beginning, the Donbas PM and one of two vice PMs were russian citizens with experience in Crimea and Transistria. About 15%-20% of the fighting force were volnteerrs, many (like Motorola) with military experience in Chechnya. Ukraine meanwhile was largely helpless.
The only limit to the expansion of the Russian Idea within Ukraine in 2014 was the attitude of the locals. And that limit was reached within the Donbas Oblasts.
The usual nonsense. In the real world, it’s just Ukrainian in those villages.
I hope you don’t mistake passivity and apathy for a quiet embrace of Ukrainian nationalism? It does appear that outside involvement is needed to make Ukrainian state fall apart, and Putin has been unwilling to go there so far, but future Russian leaders might.
I was kind to you above when I said that your opinion was ‘flawed’. With this latest homespun salvo of yours. I’ll just tell you like it really is – total, 100% BS! Your insinuation that those that speak some sort of Ukrainian dialect can more easily understand literary Russian better than literary Ukrainian is pure hogwash! Even young Galician immigrants speak perfect literary Ukrainian, and you’d be hard pressed to detect any regional variance, something that couldn’t be said about their grandparents. If you really did some homework on the subject (instead of blurting out nonsensical ideas), you’d know that the vast majority of Ukrainians are bi-lingual (I don’t know how much longer this situation will exist, as many younger Ukrainians are by-passing Russian for other European languages within their school curriculum).
Since so much of Russia’s current political system is shaped by Putin, I use ‘Putlerite’ to describe the man. There’s a real, official word to describe the phenomenom, it’s called Putinism’, see for yourself (it’s really quite an informative entry):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_under_Vladimir_Putin
Sure, I have nothing against a referendum.
Oh, boo hoo…butt-hurt Keverich is spouting his big alligator tears (again), all depressed because somebody is posting a different point of view from the typical vatnik opinions he’s used to…:-(
No, and I hope you don’t mistake passivity and rejection apathy for quiet rejection of Ukrainian nationalism.
The reality for those regions is general apathy with Ukrainian orientation being slightly more popular than Russian among the young, Russian/Soviet a lot more popular than Ukrainian among the old.
Putin has provided a flow of expert “state-builders”, arms, ammo, and volunteers. It was enough to cause the more pro-Russian region of Donbas to leave, but only that region.
So the issue isn’t one of involvement but extent of involvement. Under conditions of Ukrainian State vacuum and substantial Russian support, pro-Russians could only get half of Donbas (and 2/3 its population).
Other regions would require a large-scale invasion and military occupation.
I’m touched by your kindness.
What I said was that a majority of people on the territory of the former state of Ukraine are more comfortable with Russian than with the official language, based on Galician dialect.
This is not particularly controversial, but you don’t need to trust me: just check out the Gallup study I linked above.
And that’s all there is to it; I don’t see what else we could chat about here. Oh, wait: I hear your boss, Mr Stets, at the Ukrainian Ministry of Truth resigned recently. Could you comment on that?
Well, now you’re just being a typical Hohol reinventing (recent) history. The fact is rebels in Donbass only started getting Russian help since mid-June 2014, after Maidanist regime launched a full-scale military offensive against them.
Strelkov was a private citizen, acting on his own initiative. He arrived in Slavyansk in mid-April with 52 men, and withdrew 2 months later leading a militia force of 2000 people. This tells me that potential for anti-Kiev rebellion in the South-East was definitely there, the locals just needed someone to organize them.
Unfortunately, the Russian state made no effort to organize them. Putin’s “Novorossia” was a just bluff, he wasn’t willing to commit resources of the Russian state to make it real in places like Kharkov, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk.
3 years later, sure, you could say that the moment to partition Ukraine with minimal amount of violence was lost. That doesn’t mean that everyone in the South-East is happy to live under Maidanist regime, and that Russia couldn’t assemble a loyal local proxy force if it wanted to.
I think that Ukrainians clearly show their European orientation by banning Russian language websites. Not wanting to offend tender European sensibilities, they realized that Russian language has one glaring shortcoming – it’s not the language of obedience. Ukrainian, on the other hand, is much better suited for this purpose.
Who is reinventing recent history?
Russian Borodai, veteran of Crimea, was appointed PM of Donetsk People’s Republic in May 2014.
Arsen Pavlov, Motorola, was in Ukraine in March 2014. He tried to stir something up in Kharkiv, failed, and moved to Donbas where his type of activities were more possible.
~4 million locals and not a single one could be found to lead them. Not a lot of potential. More than in Odessa or Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk – just enough for substantial Russian support to make a state possible.
As I said, Ukraine in 2014 was a blank slate. The only limit to Russian success was local attitudes. Those attitudes enabled the separation, with Russian support, of 1/2 of Donbas. And nothing more.
Correct.
There were local communist parties in Poland, eastern Germany, etc. serving Moscow, so this correct statement doesn’t mean much.
Official language is based on the speech of Poltava and created mostly by central and Eastern Ukrainian. Village-speak in central Ukraine resembles the standard language more than does the speech in Galician villages.
Consuming Russian fairytales about Ukraine has not done well by you.
That you write nonsense is indeed not controversial.
Gallup study claims 17% speak Ukrainian as a first language. The map on this article already contradicts this.
The 7 western oblasts annexed in 1939, about 95% Ukrainian speaking, are themselves a little over 20% of the population. If Gallup was correct, nobody outside of those regions speaks Ukrainian. I think even you are not stupid enough to believe that. But I could be wrong.
The Gallup study ‘claimed’ no such thing. They offered people a form in official Ukrainian and the same form in Russian, and 83% chose Russian.
The map in this article doesn’t contradict that. People use Russian, people use Malorossian dialects and various surzhyks that they identify as ‘Ukrainian’, and a few use the official language.
Yeah, and a series of polls using the same methodology but with about ten times more participants showed that 40.5% chose to use the form in Ukrainian, 43.1% in Russian, and the rest were indifferent.
Page 4:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/articles_HVE/16_linguaethnical.pdf
So explain how it can be that even though 20% of the country is fully Ukrainian-speaking – only 17% choose Ukrainian and 83% use Russian on Gallup. Hmmm…could the small Gallup sample have been skewed by urban people?
The Gallup results obviously don’t reflect what actually happens in the country. The best purpose for that study is to point out those who know nothing of Ukraine. The ones who know nothing of Ukraine claim the Gallup poll accurately reflects language usage, those who know something about the country, have traveled in it, do not.
Although it was already obvious, you have successfully demonstrated your ignorance of Ukraine by citing the results of the Gallup study as “proof” that 83% of the country uses Russian rather than Ukrainian.
The map nicely matches the larger study, and further discredits the claims from the Gallup study.
I didn’t realize those were options on vkontakte.
The problem with this is that there are many countries in the world with such not very sizable secessionist pockets and what are you gonna do – dismantle all those countries? Changing a country’s borders is a very, very serious affair (yes, that includes in the E.Europe!). Why does it have to be Ukraine? Why not other countries? Even the US could have a civil war (with terrible consequences for big parts of the population the way Americans have not seen before in the modern times). The people in the east of Ukraine should have their rights, but are you suggesting that Ukraine be partitioned just because a small part of them support secession. What about the rest of the people in Eastern Ukraine who do not support it or who are indifferent. Why rile them up? By your logic, even if a small part of the population of a given country doesn’t support the current government or even the state constitution, then we break up the country? By that logic, many countries should be broken up, incl. Russia, Spain, possibly the US. It just doesn’t make sense.
That’ll just mean more Russian deaths.
Yes! Please let this happen! Countries are too big. Peoples should not be forced to share a country with peoples that they hate.
Why did it have to be USSR?
Brrr. I am sure the Russians are shaking in their boots. From what I hear, those Ukrainians are scary warriors, especially against defenseless civilians.
The losers will only be the folks in Donbass. They are paying for this. And the sad thing is – nobody really needs them, if they secede they become total nobodies. No state will protect them and nobody will recognize their “republics” (sure, they might be given Russian passports, but where are they going to go? To Russia?). It would take a long time for Russia to rebuild that place and the Russian public aren’t even all that eager about it.
Russia’s aim is to continue her “salami slicing” strategy, not to financially support the people of Donbass.
Yep, that’s exactly who I was talking about, as many of them are Russian speakers and probably to a large extent ethnically Russian. They will take the biggest hit. Or do you think continuing their torment is worth it….
I think you are missing the bigger picture. What Felix was trying to say is that Ukraine might need a help to fall apart. I am not sure in such scenario the good folks from Donbass will bear the biggest brunt of helping Ukraine dissolve into history. Ukraine is like a trashy wife of Russia, every once in a while they need a good beating, otherwise they start believing that their devoted spouse doesn’t love them anymore.
Another classic Putin fanboy remark! Congratulations, you’re not only a Ukrainophobe, but a misogynist too. 🙁
Of course, that wouldn’t be anything new. Russia sometimes tries to become loved by force but even their proverb states that you cannot become loved that way. I sense that you are not from the region, so I would caution you to be careful – Ukrainian nationalism is a serious phenomenon. You don’t wanna push them too far and threaten their space. It might just end up like in Odessa. With pictures posted online afterwards with captions “Burn, Colorado beetle, burn!”. Or like the cute 20 year old Russian boy who arrives home from Ukraine…. without his legs.
People are territorial. It is easy for you and guys like RadicalCenter to babble about this online, because it’s not your country or town, or kinsmen. But those are real people’s lives.
But that just means that it’s not falling apart because its people don’t want it to (and that what you are implying… can actually be considered aggressive). Even Russian officers know that by now (there was a bit of a surprise element a couple of years back). AP already said everything very clearly – only a fraction of the East is ready to fight to secede.
Actually, that statement is deeply Russophobic – бьет значит любит (he’s beating me, it means he loves me) – the infamous Russian saying, which if perpetuated, makes it seem like Russian men are intrinsically wife beaters.
If I had a slutty wife like Ukraine, I would not only beat her regularly, I might have to resort to drinking to drown my sorrow too. Ukraine behaves like they have an open marriage with Russia, where they are allowed some action on the side (EU and USA), without realizing that they are really not that attractive to anyone anymore, including Russia. They should be thankful that at least they have someone that cares about them, because their “beauty” is fading away very fast and not even massive plastic surgery (loans from the west) can make them look young and beautiful again.
Has it never occurred to you that Ukraine is not here to please anybody…
Ever seen the movie: “Streetcar named desire?” Great movie. Blanche, a faded mentally unstable woman, way past her prime is delusional about her physical attractiveness. One of the famous lines from the movie is: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Ukraine would be Blanche, because it has to depend on the kindness of strangers, but it’s pretty much a goner. It’s beyond the point where it can be saved by a stranger. Stanley Kowalski would be US, Mitch would be Russia and Stella Kowalski would be EU. You have to see the movie, then you’ll know what I am talking about.
http://www.shmoop.com/streetcar-named-desire/ending.html
Imagine you are the Ukrainian establishment. What is better and more profitable: to rule a land-locked agrarian country with 20 million people, or as twice as a bigger country with the other half having industries and the sea? The choice is obvious, even if they have to rule the other half with violence.
I wonder, if not for the current wild Ukrainian propaganda, what makes the inhabitants of Kharkov be hostile to the inhabitants of Belgorod. What makes them strongly believe that living in one country with the inhabitants of Belgorod would make their lives worse if not utterly terrible and unbearable? It must be the opposite, it must be the inhabitants of Belgorod very skeptic about living together with 20 odd millions (at least) of the “poor cousins”. I think the terms “pro-Ukrainian” and “anti-Ukrainian” are used in a wrong way. “Pro-Ukrainian” are exactly those who think positive about Ukrainians and that Ukraine (at least a half of it) must be incorporated into Russia, while “anti-Ukrainian” are those who think the opposite, that Russians have nothing to do with those Ukrainian mongrel degenerates.
Do not expect much from him for he is a typical Ukrainian propagandist. And he is a relatively moderate type, you have not see the others, who mostly speak only Russian so you’ve been spared from being acquainted with their unbelievable idiocies.
You wouldn’t either if you had been bombarded with anti-Russian propaganda 24/7 for 25 years. There is a certain schizophrenic type of Ukrainians who have Russian as their native and everyday language but who will furiously argue for Ukrainian to be the only and the sole state language in Ukraine to the point of a total exclusion of Russian. It is a unique type of an oppressed minority who is wholeheartedly for the oppression. You won’t find that type of ethnic schizophrenia anywhere in the world. One may even argue that Ukraine as a whole is based on ethnic schizophrenia and self-denial. Belarus is a similar phantom construct but the people there seem to be much more sane.
Why are Bavarians comfortable with literally German, and Neapolitans comfortable with literary Italian, and Gascons are comfortable with literary French, while Ukrainians are not comfortable with literary Russian? (In fact they were comfortable before 1917 and learnt and spoke the language at equal with Great Russians). Are Ukrainian that stupid and imbecile? No illiterate Great Russian peasants spoke literary Russian as their native language and had to learn it at school as Ukrainians perfectly did. This obsession with “mova” is a total farce, creating a problem from nothing.
The vast majority of Ukrainians are quite comfortable with using the literary Russian language, and are in fact bi-lingual So, why should this preclude them from taking an even greater interest in their own native Ukrainian language? Why shouldn’t they support the usage of their own language, rather than embrace one that has strong connotations of imperialistic chauvinism?
Where’s the problem? You can still hear plenty of Russian in the halls of the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv, and no one is being cited with any tickets or fines? It’s good that Russian peasants finally learned their own literary language in schools that helped to coalesce the Russian nation. Why shouldn’t Ukrainians have the same opportunity?
Nonsense! Ukraine as a whole is actually waking up to the notion that their own national language, which has undergone centuries of Russian discrimination, is a language worthy to use, and propogate in all spheres of national life (not just at home anymore). The notion that Ukrainins are unique in favoring their own language over others is ridiculous. Go to Quebec sometime and try to buy some gasoline at a gas station using any other language other than French (including English) and see how far you’ll get, even though 99% of Quebecois know and understand English.
Both ‘AP’ as well as the aptly named ‘Mr. Hack’ are well-known Maidan trolls here. Take them with a grain of salt, or just ignore them.
Yes. Following Sakera few years ago while these events were occurring, this was the original story I heard.
Ah, but Russia does support the people of the Donbass, and not only through voentorg. Pretty much all the economic and humanitarian aid Donbass gets comes from Russia.
True. But you left something out: pretty much all of Ukraine’s industry–mining and manufacturing–is in the east. The rest of the country is mostly service sector, or else agrarian.
I don’t know why Ukraine is freaking out so much over the language issue. I know that they want to impress Europe with how much they want to distance themselves from Russia that they are even willing to ban the “hated language of the invader”. I don’t think it’s necessary for Ukraine to go that far. A simple human gesture of bending over is something that I am sure Europe can understand and appreciate much better.
Funny, old Seamus Padraig, you seem to take the side of the old imperial masters in this fight, if you did that back home in Ireland, they’d either string you up,or laugh you off the stage!
Here’s one for you, and any of your other imperial lackey chums here:
https://youtu.be/8KfmvRKYMII
Are you shocked that Danes or Norwegians aren’t comfortable with replacing their local native languages for Swedish?
Literacy was much lower in Russian-ruled Ukraine than it was in Austrian-ruled Ukraine, where Ukrainians were taught in their own language (the speech of Poltava that served as the basis of the Ukrainian literary language was closer to Galician than the Russian language was to Ukrainian), and also lower than in most Russian-speaking areas where people were taught a standardized version of their own language. Bolsheviks may have promoted the Ukrainian language in the beginning in part because it was easier to boost literacy more quickly in the peasants’ own language.
Although many Russian-speaking areas have indeed turned away form Russia over time, Russian-speaking Kiev was voting for pro-independence or pro-Western parties soon after independence, before “Anti-Russian propaganda 24/7 for 25 years.” so post-Soviet “propaganda” is not the only explanation for this phenomenon.
Clueless Russians, many of whom are actually quite intelligent, can’t deal with reality so they have to invent conspiracy theories to explain why Ukrainians consistently choose a Westward orientation.
Who says they are hostile?
Most Canadians would not want their country to be annexed by the USA. This doesn’t mean that someone from Vancouver believes that his life would be “utterly terrible and unbearable” if he was in the same country as Seattle. He simply wants to be in his own country.
Most inhabitants of Kharkiv want Ukraine to be a separate country and do not want their city to be annexed by Russia. This does not imply hatred towards Russia.
You don’t say! lol
Unfortunately, since this site lacks any kind of ignore function, you’ll be seing their posts occasionally, wheither you like it or not. At least AP generates some “original content”. The other guy is literally posting spam.
akarlin could have taken care of this problem for us, but he would not for some reason.
IMO this dumb move will just increase the ethno-linguistic-religious fracture of the country, shattering its already fragile unity. Just see the book of Huntington: the “border” between the Western civilization and the Slavic-Orthodox civilization is almost perfectly represented by the map of the current article.
Here’s a tasty morsel of ‘spam’ indicating that at least for this group of performers, Poroshenko’s experiment with social engineering has no significance:
https://youtu.be/UUXWcnS16D0
Still experiencing that same old butthurt, Keverich? If Karlin allows the incessant and purely Ukrainophobic rants of the likes of Cyrano, why wouldn’t he allow my comments here?
Perhaps, Karlin values the comments of those that are not necessarily Putin fan-boy supporters, and offer another point of view. I think that he’s trying to cater more to a Western audience, something that probably isn’t practiced in whatever part of outer Vatnikland you hail from. If you want only one point of view expressed (purely Putin fanboy stuff), I suggest that you move to Mark Chapman’s blog, ‘The Kremlin Stooge’. There you’ll find a solid base of 10 readers who all mimick the same party line, and wholeheartedly slap each other appreciatively on the back after each and every comment. That’s the place for you! 🙂
Do you need a safe space? You can’t even?
I don’t remember if you’re one of them, but there is plenty or Russian spam you probably don’t object to. Their message is something about “legitimate president overthrown by a neo-Nazi coup.”
The pro-Ukrainian propaganda of the Soviet times is just another side of the Ukrainian propaganda. So when I said 25 years I was rather modest. I actually think it has been 100 years (or even 150 if we consider Ukrainiphiles like Kostomarov at al. responsible – in fact they are, they started that all).
No, I didn’t. This is why to let the eastern part go away is not an option for them.
Начались стандартные псевдоисторические обидки, которые вы сами выдумали, чтобы оправдать свою русофобию. Вы вообще можете что-нибудь новенькое придумать? Спор с украинцами постоянно напоминает какое-то дежавю и начинает надоедать.
Скажи, а почему тебе нравятся именно такие аналогии? Почему тебе не нравятся другие, где очень разные народности живут вместе и стали одной нацией? Ты шокирован, что французы и итальянцы говорят на одном, на фр. и ит. яз. соответственно, а не на трех-пяти схожих языках в каждой стране? Как же вам прямо очень хочется доказать, что русские и украинцы вообще такие разные-преразные ещё с каменного века. И обидки ещё исторические выдумаете в стиле “прото-москальский Каин убил прото-украинского Авеля”. Почему же вы так уверены, что исторически мог быть только один путь, только разъединение и вражда, а не наоборот, как более умные нации делали, объединение?
Как это вообще говорит о сложности русского для украинцев? Низкая грамотность, потому что так везде было, а не потому что учили на “чужом” языке, сам же говоришь, что в вел.-русских губерниях такая же грамотность.
Можно долго гадать, почему большевики двигали украинский (хотя ответ очевиден – они были украинскими националистами), но почему-то на Кубани и вообще в РСФСР русский украинцам давался, а в УССР прямо совсем сложно было. А так ведь можно было и вел.-русских крестьян учить падонкафскаму, явно намного быстрее бы выучились.
Так кто же вам мешал и мешает наслаждаться своей мовой. Вон в Баварии даже книги какие-то на баварском есть, а во Франции было движение фелибров примерно как украинофилы в РИ. Правда, французы же явно умнее, разрушать Францию надвое-натрое только ради возможности учить свою южнофранцузскую мову они не додумались. Я как-то даже с одним итальянцем общался, который участвовал в составлении серьёзного академический словаря своего “диалекта”, но сепаратизма от него даже намёка не слышал, литер. итальянский он в равной степени любил и всегда рад был помочь с ним. Даже каталонский сценарий в разы лучше украинско-белорусского. Но вам же вам надо всё и сразу, а москалив геть.
You could go further back to 1790-1810. History of Rus or Little Russia. Circulated widely by the Little Rusisan/Ukrainian elite 200 years ago.
Transcipt is here
“They called Eastern Slavs Scyffians or Scythians with sharp…eyes, and Rus or Rusnaks by their hair, Variags along the sea were named for their predation…and in the middle living the descendants of Afetov, who were called Prince of Rus roksoliany or Rossy, and by the Prince of Moscow Mosokhy, nomads along the Moskva River also known as Moskvyty and Moskh, from whom was descended a Tsardom that obtained the name Muscovy and eventually Russian.”
” [About Moscow princes:] In 1547 they renamed themselves from Princes and Autocrats of Moscow, and from that time the tsardom of Moscow and its owners…eventually changed from Tsardom of Moscow to Tsardom of Russia, which in order to distinguish itself from Black and White Russia was called Great Russia, and the Rus were called Little Russia.”
Name wasn’t “Ukrainian” but the story was the same as the Ukrainian nationalist one – Ukrainians (Little Russians) are the real Rus, Russians are not, they just took the Rus name. Two different peoples.
I didn’t invent the facts that rule from Moscow meant under the Tsars, the elimination of autonomy and special status for the local elite (who, in their resentment, formulated the Little Russian and later Ukrainian nationalist idea), expansion of serfdom for the peasants; under the Soviets, rule from Moscow and deaths of millions.
It isn’t rocket science to guess why Ukrainians did not acquiesce to becoming “all-Russians” as Bavarians did, in becoming Germans.
I harbor no Russophobia. If someone says a Swede is not a Dane, he does not bear ill will towards Denmark.
If my people, guided by their native elites, had collectively decided to follow the path of the Provencal people who became French, and would have become Russians, I would have gone along with them too. Indeed I had ancestors who were pro-Russian activists as well as pro-Ukrainian ones.
But my people did not, in the end. Blaming this on a conspiracy of outsider troublemakers such as Communists, or Zionists, or Poles, or Austrians, or Germans is inadequate and desperate.
I’m not sure why you think that Provencal people are smarter for having lost their unique culture and united with the French, than are the peoples of Scandinavia, or the Dutch, who kept their native identities and turned them into “national” ones.
I’m not sure if only one path was inevitable – but it was more likely, for various reasons. The Ukrainian idea and language are closer to the local traditions and speech than was the Great Russian one. This made it easier to adopt. In Galicia, before the Austrian authorities eventually took the Ukrainian side, Russophiles and Ukrainophiles competing in teaching the peasants Russian vs. Ukrainian in reading houses they each organized. The latter was far easier to learn, and the organizers were more successful (in fact, among some members of the Galician nobility, the Russian idea was favored because it created a linguistic separation between them and the bydlo). As I mentioned earlier – outside of Galicia, rule from Moscow brought with it very negative experiences.
Another factor is length of separation. Russian myth-makers claim that Ukrainians and Russians were united for 1,000 years but this is nonsense. Most of France was ruled by the French kings by the 15th century; Eastern Ukraine joined Russia at the end of the 17th, central (Right Bank) at the end of the 18th century, and Galicia only in the 1940s. A place that joined France at the time that central Ukraine joined Russia was Corsica. Corsicans don’t think of themselves as Frenchmen.
Literacy in Russian-ruled Ukraine was much lower than literacy in Austrian-ruled Ukraine (where schools were in Russian), and also lower (though not to the same extent) than literacy in Russia. Ease of learning probably made a difference.
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This is an English-language website, btw. It’s cute that you choose to write in Russian to Ukrainians, but some non-Russian speaking people may want to read the discussion; I don’t write only for you. Write in English, or I may not respond.