Discuss all things Euromaidan here and vote in the poll (tick as many options as you like).
My own opinion is “Protests die down as Yanukovych reasserts control,” for reasons that I will expound upon in a forthcoming post. But I have made many of the arguments already on my Twitter feed where I, like many other East Europe watchers, have been closely following Ukraine of late.
Here it is:
If the Ukrainian president goes back on the deal with the EU, he’ll disappoint his supporters and he’s obviously not going to regain the support of those who are protesting, author and blogger Anatoly Karlin told RT.
RT:President Yanukovich is being accused of betraying national interests by turning down the EU deal, but he says it’s bad for the economy. Do you agree with Yanukovich and what are his options at this point?
Anatoly Karlin: We have to look at this objectively. What the EU was offering was $600 million for many years and perhaps some help with negotiating an IMF loan. The IMF loan was much bigger, $16 billion , but it came with some conditions such as salary freeze, spending cuts, 40 percent rise in gas prices.
With the elections coming up in March 2015, Yanukovich simply cannot afford to accede to those demands, especially since the EU is demanding a lot, but isn’t giving a lot. For instance, there is no visa-free travel; free trade between Europe and Ukraine will destroy a lot of heavy industry, especially in the eastern part of the country, where Yanukovich and the Party of Regions have a lot of their electorate.
On the other hand, young people who are more disposed against Yanukovich are not to going to get the labor movement, they are going to be able to emigrate to Athens and Dublin, they are going to vote against them instead. So it’s not surprising that Yanukovich rejected the EU deal simply because Russia is offering better conditions in terms of money, about $10 billion, when the EU says $600 million.
RT: What can Yanukovich do at this point? He has perhaps these reasoned arguments for not wanting a deal with the EU, but here are hundreds of thousands of people on the streets, he has to deal with them somehow. What do you think is the best move?
AK: I think he’s got to seek [a diplomatic way] out, there is no going back now. If he does go back, then he is also going to disappoint his system’s supporters, who support his current course and he is obviously not going to get back the support of those who are protesting. Another thing we have to bear in mind is that even the Orange Revolution in 2004 was not made by the street, it was made by a court judgment which ruled that the elections were illegitimate and called for new elections.
RT:The EU agreement could still be revisited later. Why did the opposition choose violent protests instead of having more dialogue about the pros and cons of integration with the EU?
AK: I think because, first of all, slogans work better than decent arguments about the economics, which frankly don’t interest too many people. Secondly, it appears to be basically that Eastern Ukrainians support the Party of Regions – they are more politically apathetic in general, whereas Central Ukrainians and Western Ukrainians are willing to go out, protest and make their voices heard. The opposition really has the sense to go out and galvanize people.
RT:Who do you think stands to benefit from this unrest? Is there more to these protests than just a trade deal?
AK: I don’t think anybody stands to benefit. First of all, although these protests went off peacefully, today [Sunday] they went into the other direction, we had those hilarious scenes of the bulldozer trying to plow into the police forces guarding government buildings in Kiev and Molotov cocktails being thrown at police, and although this makes good TV footage, there is also going to be a lot of people who are staying at their homes, who are witnessing this, who will be turned off by this violence.
I don’t think this will benefit the opposition in the long term, once tempers cool down. Another winter is coming, it’s getting colder, people aren’t willing to stand out in the cold to protest during January. It’s obviously not doing any good for Ukrainian economy either because it’s in a poorly enough state as it is, there’s debt repayments coming up and it would really be in its favor of Ukraine to focus more on technocratic economic side as opposed to these political games.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
This June I had the pleasure of once again attending and speaking at the World Russia Forum. The event now happens twice a year, in Washington DC and Moscow, and is intended to draw together Russian and American experts, academics, journalists, and policy-makers in an effort to improve relations between these two nations. An account of it, and the subsequent reception at the Russian Embassy to mark Russia Day, follows below:
It was raining with near monsoonal intensity when I disembarked off the train*. I have no complaints; these downpours dispel the sultry oppressiveness inherent to a city originally built on swampland, so far as I was concerned the more rain the merrier.
The Qataris sure know how to get their message out!
Four of the WRF’s speakers in the hotel dining room. From left to right: Pamela (Patrick’s wife); Martin Sieff; Patrick Armstrong; William Dunkerley; your humble servant.
Were the events at Bolotnaya Square, Moscow, on May 6, 2012, the results of a police provocation, or were “opposition” provocateurs, either willingly or unwittingly acting in the interests of foreign powers, responsible? Kommersant’s Grigory Tumanov and Vyacheslav Kozlov try to find out.
Could it have been calculated beforehand what would happen at Bolotnaya?
On Wednesday the case of 12 persons accused of rioting on May 6 at Bolotnaya Square during the “March of millions” was presented in court. It is expected that the proceedings will begin to be take place in June. As evidential material, which is also at the disposal of “Ъ” [Translator: Russian alphabet hard sign indicating the newspaper “Kommersant” that has its name spelt archaically in Russian using such a sign thus: Коммерсантъ], concerning the “big Bolotnaya case”, indicating that something rather more than a peaceful rally had been planned to take place on the square, and that not only factions of oppositionists knew about this, but also the authorities, defense lawyers are saying that the authorities have decided to take advantage of this matter in order to launch a major political counterattack.
By May 6, 2012 the euphoria that had gripped the protest movement since its emergence in the winter had markedly diminished. The rallies on Bolotnaya Square that had raised tens of thousands who were unhappy at the outcome of the State Duma elections had come and gone and the authorities had even expressed their willingness to liberalize the political system. But for the protesters their chief disappointment was still to come. In March, Vladimir Putin won the presidential election, and the only thing that the opposition leaders were ready and willing to do as regards this matter was to come out onto the streets on May 6, the eve of the inauguration, and to assemble on Bolotnaya Square under the slogan “Don’t Let A Thief Into The Kremlin!” The peaceful rally ended with criminal proceedings as a result of the riot. The defendants in this case number almost 30 people. Many members of the protest movement, Ilya Yashin for example, still say that the battle on the square was started by unidentified masked provocateurs who were members of movements close to the Kremlin. But, as shown by the presented case evidence, which “Kommersant” has managed to see, the fight at Bolotnaya was the result of a delicate game played by the authorities against the opposition leaders, who now appear discredited, and their supporters in the protest movement, who will now think twice about going to rallies – if indeed they ever attend another one at all..
Natalia Zubarevich’s concept of “The Four Russias” is one of the most reasoned and perceptive political analysis from the liberals, and as such I think it important enough to translate it (mostly I disagree with its core assumptions and conclusions though I do think it is a useful way of envisioning Russian politics). As such I am translating Четыре России from Vedomosti (there is also a longer version, translated here).
Natalia Zubarevich
The events of 2011 demonstrated that the authorities’ habit of looking at the country through a “vertical incision” played a cruel joke on them. In reality, there is not one Russia, but rather three or even four. And this is a reality with which both the government, and the opposition, will have to come to terms with.
The Four Russias: First Russia – urban, educated (white); Second Russia – urban, industrial (blue); Third Russia – rural, apolitical (green); Fourth Russia – ethnic, poor (red).
The First Russia is a country of big cities. They aren’t great in number, but the 12 city-millionaires as well as Perm and Krasnoyarsk, which have close to a million residents, constitute 21% of the country’s population, i.e. every fifth Russian, while Moscow and Saint Petersburg by themselves account for 9%. In the past 20 years, the biggest cities cities ceased being industrial – only in Ufa, Perm, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, and Volgograd do Soviet industrial enterprises continue to dominate the economy. Although the fastest post-industrial transformations are observed in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Rostov-on-Don, all the city-millionaires have seen a change in employment patterns: The percentage of qualified “blue collar” workers rose, there appeared more employees of small businesses, and even the public sector attracted more qualified workers. There is quick adoption of the metropolitan model of consumer behavior, even though earnings are 1.5-2x lower than in Moscow. It is precisely in the bigger cities that we see a concentration of those middle class “disgruntled urbanites.” Migration flows in Russia are directed towards these bigger cities, so their share of the population is growing. The only difference is that the two federal cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and their adjoining agglomerations, attract migrants from all over the country, accounting for up to 80% of net migration in Russia, while the other big cities for the most part draw migrants from their own regions.
The above photo, part of a photo report by Ridus, shows the Anti-Orange protest at Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow on February 4th. Does that look like 35,000 people to you, let alone 20,000 or 15,000? Because those were the most commonly cited figures in the Western media, apart from those cases where they ignored them altogether (The Guardian) or even tried passing them off as a ANTI-Putin rallies (e.g. Le Parisien).
