Kiev Is Burning

[ink]

The parliament has voted to impeach him, which AFAIK is perfectly legal under the laws of Ukraine.

 

Also, this may well be legal but it could possibly be argued that the parliament was acting under the implied, if not direct, threat of force.

[Marcello]

Came across this article. A question to you with a good grasp of the situation, is it a decent crib notes of this whole mess?

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/understanding-euromaidan-2014-1?utm_source=slate&utm_medium=referral&utm_term=partner

 

It gives an idea but as most such pieces it glosses over whatever it may be found unpalatable in the West. Calling certain people simply "radicals" may be true in literal terms but leaves the reader in the dark about their politics, which in the case of several ukrainian nationalist organizations go somewhat beyond what is usually found tolerable in the West.

 

As a personal and more general note I am of the opinion that corruption has a strong basis in general political culture. If the general attitude is that it is ok sticking the head in the government through as long as you are the one doing it, corrupt government is what you will get and a revolution will at best only eliminate an outlier.

Edited February 23, 2014 by Marcello

[wendist]

Interesting photos of what is said to be Yanukovich "crib".

 

http://imgur.com/gallery/3ksac

[Marcello]

Stuart, let's remain honest here: american and european policy is that of hitching Ukraine to the western wagon.Or at least away from Russia. And trying to do that on the cheap, offering less money than Russia does, flashing some bling (such as access to the West) and getting behind whatever protest aimed at pro-russian governments. That the last one was led by a particularly corrupt bastard is a fortunate coincidence but the underlying political dynamic remains that.

Here in the West when the people have filled squares to protest G8 meetings or something politicos badly want they are dismissed as an unrepresentantive noisy minority, which might or might not be the case, and have riot police sent after them. They know better than escalating to lethal force, but that's it.

[Marcello]

Im not sure thats actually the case. The EU doesnt really seem to give a toss either way about the Ukraines future. They dont want massacres by any means, but as pointed out by some reporters, the EU had the ability to hitch Ukraine some time ago, and fluffed it because it had more pressing things to do (like not financially collapsing). They only got involved in negotiations because nobody wanted another civil war on the edge of Europe (look how long it took the former Yugoslavia to restablise) The US isnt very interested in Eastern Europe at all, they proved that with Georgia, and nobody is making noises about letting Ukraine into Nato. The only people really with designs on Ukraine is Putin. He really wants the Ukraine back in the fold, and to my mind hitherto has proven not too fussy about how he achieves that aim.

 

Stuart, in my view you are taking what could be described as "limited interest" as "no interest" or a selfless act. No, the USA was not willing to escalate things with Russia over Georgia (nor it would do so with Ukraine).It is a safe bet that opponents of Saakashvili did not have US NGOs with deep pockets swooning over them however. And you do not have to be Zbigniew Brzezinski to see the strategic value of keeping away Ukraine from Russia; there are some signs that such policy has been attempted, at least on the cheap and in a half arsed manner as I said.

 

Edited for further clarification.

Edited February 23, 2014 by Marcello

[swerve]

 

 

And technically he is right, it is a coup.

Is it? The parliament has voted to impeach him, which AFAIK is perfectly legal under the laws of Ukraine. He was president, recognised by opposition leaders as such, the police were obeying him, & he had signed an agreement under which he approved such things as reversion to the 2004 constitution (since voted through by the Rada), & then he disappeared, resurfacing far from Kiev saying 'It was a coup! Fascists have taken over!" He ran away & his government fell apart. With no orders, the police gave up trying to enforce his wishes. How is that a coup?

 

He's almost certainly guilty of massive theft & abuse of power. People who tried to look into his personal finances have been murdered. He's abandoned his responsibilities as president. So what's wrong with the parliament voting to impeach him, calling early elections, & setting up a transitional government?

 

There's another thing to consider. He ceased to exercise the powers of his office. If he did so because his subordinates stopped obeying him, that's not a coup, it's a collapse in his credibility & authority, which is not a coup. A leader who loses the confidence of his people & the apparatus of the state to such an extent that he can no longer exercise his powers is incapable, just as someone is who's lost his faculties. He has to be replaced. Any sensible constitution has a method for doing so, & impeachment is one of those methods.

 

If he ceased to exercise his powers because he chose to flee from them, then he has, in effect, resigned. Impeachment formalises that. Abandonment of office is usually one of the causes for replacement allowed for in constitutions.

 

 

It certainly isn't a coup. That's the wrong word. What is certain is that the government was overthrown violently. Maybe that's a revolution then but it certainly isn't a democratic, peaceful change of government.

 

Also, as someone who has little faith in revolutions as a force for good, I would also add that it isn't likely to be very beneficial to the people of the Ukraine in the long-run.

 

Anyway, it isn't over yet so we'll just have to wait and see.

 

Overthrown violently? To me, it looked as if the government over-reacted to a pretty harmless demonstration (it had been going on for three months without having much impact on state business) by attempting to crush it violently, using plain-clothes thugs to beat up demonstrators. This is a government whose critics kept being abducted & beaten, & on a few occasions, murdered.

 

The violence against the few hundred occupiers of the square provoked a mass reaction, with much larger numbers (tens to hundreds of thousands) turning out to protest. The government over-reacted again, killing several dozen people. There was also violence on the other side, but much less. It then became apparent that the government had shot its bolt. It had reached the limit of the violence it could use, with the army being unwilling to intervene, & the force the police could or would use not being sufficient to quell the protests. The opposite, in fact: they'd killed enough to provoke revulsion, without killing enough to suppress the demonstrations.

 

So the government had to back down. It had played the violence card, & had lost. By killing Ukrainians, it had lost much of its own support. A large part of its parliamentary support defected, police were defecting in large numbers, & the army wouldn't obey. It had forfeited legitimacy.

 

That isn't a violent overthrow of the government. It's a government discovering the limits of its power in a civil society. It tried to overstep the mark, & failed. The apparatus of the state stopped obeying it, because it tried to use that apparatus illegitimately. That is good. It is a lesson to others.

[Marcello]

Im not taking any view other than what the US and EU has demonstrably done, ie nothing. Yanukovich had Tymoshenko in prison on trumped up charges for 2 years and did absolutely nothing.

 

Ive sympathy with the Ukraine and its desires for the future. So perhaps does the EU and America. But you dont have to be a Bismark or a Kissinger to see that they dont exactly have lots of friends lined up behind them to stop further Russian pressure being applied in the future.And the reasons are not hard to see, they dont want to upset Russia, and in particular President Putin. America because they want Russia to be strategic partners, particularly in the middle east where they still seem to have some influence. And the EU because they probably have the idea in the back of their mind their cheap supply of Russian gas is going to get turned off.

 

Looked at like that, what Ukraine has done is historic and important. But nothing really has changed because the powerplay will clearly continue. Short of removing Putin or convincing Russia to cut their losses, I cant possibly see how we wont be back here in 10 years time, or even sooner.

 

 

1) Tymoshenko was not worth the bother. Applying foreign pressure to overturn court decisions, politically motivated as in fact they may be, is a costly move anyway.

2) US and Russia aren't exactly on best speaking terms over middle eastern issues either. Syria and perhaps Egypt come to mind.

3) We were back there ten years ago, you might want to read a bit on the background of that. Suffice to say it would appear the color revolution got a bit of help from the West; which is not say everybody involved was a pawn and the opponents good guys but there you go.

4) Ukraine is naturally a bigger priority for Russia than everybody else. That's natural. If Canada became increasingly closer to the PRC expect some US reactions; it might be subtler than Russia but it will happen.

5) Putin is a class A bastard. It is not clear to me that Russia can come up with something better for Russia however, perhaps everybody would have been better under President Limonov? That would have been fun to watch, from Mars or further away though... Of course one gets the impression that some oligarch that bended over for western interests and treated russians the same would have been preferable for us but so it goes.

[swerve]

 

The parliament has voted to impeach him, which AFAIK is perfectly legal under the laws of Ukraine.

 

Also, this may well be legal but it could possibly be argued that the parliament was acting under the implied, if not direct, threat of force.

 

And they weren't before, when you could be murdered for asking too many questions about the president's personal finances?

 

Some of Yanukovich's MPs left. If all of them had walked out, the votes to re-adopt the 2004 constitution, depose Yanukovich, call an early election, appoint the speaker acting president etc. would not have been legal, because there would have been too few MPs present. By staying & voting, MPs of his party have made the process possible.

[swerve]

There's a significant factor which is being ignored in many of the posts here: the legitimacy of government.

 

The legitimacy of rulers derives, ultimately, from the acceptance of their rule by the people. Rulers in any legitimist or democratic state have an implicit (& sometimes explicit) contract with the people. They will be selected & will govern according to rules (e.g. in a democracy, they will submit themselves to regular free & fair elections), & in return, the people will give their consent to be governed. As long as the government follows the rules, it can do things which are unpopular, & they will be grudgingly accepted. But if the governors break the rules, the governed have the right to withdraw their consent. IMO, that's what happened here. Yanukovich overstepped the line. As a result, the state stopped obeying him, & his position became untenable.

 

Rather comically, he likens what's happened to him as akin to Hitler's takeover of Germany. In reality, his subversion of the state to his own ends was more like Hitler's use of democratic processes to gain power, before discarding them. Not that he's another Hitler. He's a corrupt thug, but not in Hitler's class when it comes to evil.

[Yama]

Overthrown violently? To me, it looked as if the government over-reacted to a pretty harmless demonstration (it had been going on for three months without having much impact on state business) by attempting to crush it violently, using plain-clothes thugs to beat up demonstrators. This is a government whose critics kept being abducted & beaten, & on a few occasions, murdered.

Generally speaking, few, if any, authorities anywhere tolerate demonstrations which go on months and months, no matter how 'harmless' they are. Occupy Wall Street-demonstration was eventually ended by force, even though it was non-violent and harmless. Things didn't go ugly there, but could have if the demonstrators had been able & willing to response to force.

[bojan]

Psst, in never happens in the west. Get a memo.

[Yama]

The legitimacy of the protest goes a long way to define the response to it. You usually find the more legitimate the protest, and therefore the potentially more threatening it is, the more violent the response, and the more violent the backlash. At least in near dictatorial regimes. For all the occupy wallstreet protests, and G8, and the anti Iraq war protests that occured, the response was for the most part peaceful, because there was no threat to the powerbase of the state. The state was not run by dictators. And not insignificantly, most of the complaints were diffuse and ill defined. How can a protest be a threat if it doesnt have a cohesive argument?

Well, the difference between Occupy Wall Street and Kiev was that Wall Street has worse crooks than Yanukovich, and the protesters did not try to hang them from the lamp-posts, although they should have.

 

Also, it's pretty annoying how freely the word 'dictator' is thrown around in Western parlance, generally to describe any foreign leader who is not liked at the moment. Yanukovich is not a dictator - he was democratically elected leader. Sure, he may have worn out his welcome, but the manner he was ousted alone makes it pretty clear he didn't have anywhere close to dictatorial powers. Same goes for Ahmadinejad, who was frequently described as a 'dictator' even though he was elected and had very limited powers. Sure, those guys may not have been particularly great leaders, or ruled the most democratic regimes, but throwing the word around so lightly sounds naive and propagandish.

[DB]

One of the things that stands out for me was the way that the shiny new palace of the President was thrown open to visitors.

 

If this had been a traditional riotous revolution, the place would have been looted and burned to the ground. In this case, people were taking the family along for a quiet walk around the gardens and a look inside.

 

By the standards of violent overthrow, that's pretty weak. And really rather admirable.

[BansheeOne]

The legitimacy of the protest goes a long way to define the response to it. You usually find the more legitimate the protest, and therefore the potentially more threatening it is, the more violent the response, and the more violent the backlash. At least in near dictatorial regimes. For all the occupy wallstreet protests, and G8, and the anti Iraq war protests that occured, the response was for the most part peaceful, because there was no threat to the powerbase of the state. The state was not run by dictators.

 

Mass protests in the West have been answered with plenty force in recent years, though not typically with live ammunition - but G 8 protestors were shot in Italy and, of all places, Sweden, because the latter's belief in de-escalation left police with a gap in the escalation continuum. The main difference is that it didn't significantly strengthen the protest movements because apparently a sufficient portion of society considered the protestors' grievances not serious enough and/or the government's response appropriate. Once either belief is lost by a critical mass of population, the government gets a legitimacy problem quickly.

[Yama]

So was Hitler. Its not what your Democratic mandate is, its what you try do with it when you have power thats the issue. We had Kings who were supposedly installed by God, but that didnt stop them being ousted as soon as they exceeded their traditional and agreed powers. Look at the fall of Richard II, Edward II and Charles 1st and you will see what I mean.

Given that the guy who deposed Charles I turned out to be worse than he was, I'm not sure that is a great argument.

 

And hey, the Nazi card!

 

Look, Wall street might have an unenviable quota of crooks, Id not necessarily disagree with you on that point. But whatever the flaws of Wall street and the Western economic model, they don't make a habit of shooting peaceful protesters. If this tell us anything, you cant get away with it in the Ukraine either, which seems to indicate they are rather closers to the Western political model than even their own leaders have seemed to understand.

 

Maybe Yanukovich was right to to side with Russia. Maybe he was even right to put Tymoshenko in jail. Maybe he was even right to have the novelty toilet and the private menagerie. After he started sending in armed police to shoot protesters (whom as far as I can tell did not start shooting until shot at) it kind of invalidates any good he might had done.

As far as I see, police began with rubber bullets (as any Western police force would have done in same situation) and it escalated from there. It is not at all clear to me that the police threw the first stone, as you imply. Yanukovichs' spontaneous supporters seem more likely culprit.

 

Also, I can't fail to notice that much of this outrage about killing demonstrators was notably absent when Egyptian government crushed non-violent Islamist demonstrators. But I guess killing hundreds of people there was ok, because the islamist are wrong.

[mnm]

 

Well, the difference between Occupy Wall Street and Kiev was that Wall Street has worse crooks than Yanukovich, and the protesters did not try to hang them from the lamp-posts, although they should have.

 

 

Another difference is that in Occupy Wall Street the target was not the State, but it was in Kiev. I'll grant you that in the first instance the target could be identified with the State, but the attack was so muddled and the snake bit its own tail so glaringly that the threat to the State was minimal hence no need to overreact.

[Yama]

Sky says a US security advisor says 'it would be inadvisable for Russia to send troops into the Ukraine' and that there has been a recent phonecall between the German Government and Russia. Now I wonder what all that implies?

Apparently, some Eastern regions haven't been all that happy with the colour of the new wallpapers and have or may have considered a rebellion of some sort.

 

If/when new government resorts to force to put them down, I wonder how that will go over in the West...?

 

Lets put it this way, if you had people throwing molotov cocktails at police, how many Western Police forces have resorted to making their own and throwing them back? Not many ill warrant.

I'd bet a rather handsome sum of money (but I won't since I don't have it) that on every Western police force there are people who would do exactly that.

[sunday]

Mass protests in the West have been answered with plenty force in recent years, though not typically with live ammunition - but G 8 protestors were shot in Italy and, of all places, Sweden, because the latter's belief in de-escalation left police with a gap in the escalation continuum. The main difference is that it didn't significantly strengthen the protest movements because apparently a sufficient portion of society considered the protestors' grievances not serious enough and/or the government's response appropriate. Once either belief is lost by a critical mass of population, the government gets a legitimacy problem quickly.

 

 

The Italian case was a quite evident case of self-defense.

 

 

The Wikipedia entry has more than its fair share of tinfoil-hattery, but it's enough for getting a idea.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Carlo_Giuliani

[BansheeOne]

Yes, shots fired at demonstrations in the West is usually due to individual cops being overwhelmed by protestors, or a lack of preparedness by police. This is the Swedish 2001 incident:

 

On the evening of 15 June at 8 o’clock, a party was arranged by Reclaim the Streets at Vasaplatsen.

 

Heavy rioting broke out and a smaller group of police officers were subjected to a massive attack in which one of them was hurt. While defending their colleague, the other officers fired warning-shots with their sidearms. This halted the bulk of the attack. One lone attacker continued to throw smaller rocks in the direction of the fallen policeman. Two officers fired at the rioter who was critically injured. Two other people received light injuries by ricochets.

 

A criminal investigation against the police officers was opened but later closed as it found that they had acted in defence of the injured officer. When more evidence became available in the form of video recordings, the investigation was re-opened twice and both times closed again as the ruling remained the same.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_during_the_EU_summit_in_Gothenburg_2001#The_shootings_at_Vasaplatsen

 

Even with non-lethal means, police deployments can run out of hand, with consequences for the government. In 2010, four people protesting the cutting of trees for a long-agreed reconstruction of Stuttgart Central Station - not dissimilar to the situation that started the Turkish protests - suffered eye injuries from water cannon, one almost completely blinded permanently. The Baden-Württemberg state government was subsequently voted out in part over this issue, replaced with the first-ever Green-led government in a German state; a parliamentary investigation is still ongoing. Though it should be noted that after an unprecedented public mediation and popular referendum, the construction project itself was eventually upheld and continues; it turned out the protestors had actually no majority for their cause in society.

 

The German protests of the late 60s are instructive insofar as the reaction of the government - including Berlin police standing aside while imported Iranian cheerers including SAVAK agents beat up German demonstators protesting the 1967 visit of the Shah, and the unresolved shooting of a student by a police officer who was recently found to have been on the Stasi's payroll, but claimed not to have acted on their orders - radicalized the movement to the point of terrorism that lasted until after German reunification, but never gathered sufficient public support to really put the government at risk. The latter just had to realize that and avoid to turn the country into the police state its opponents expected.

[X-Files]

I'm sure this is just a precaution and not based on any sattelite imagery or any other indicators.

 

 

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, said on Sunday it would be a "grave mistake" for Russia to send military forces into Ukraine and that it is not in the interest of Russia, Europe or the United States to see Ukraine split apart.

Speaking on the NBC program "Meet the Press," Rice was asked about a possible scenario in which Russia would send forces into Ukraine to restore a government more friendly to Moscow.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/u-says-39-grave-mistake-39-russia-send-154700499.html

Edited February 23, 2014 by X-Files

[swerve]

 

So was Hitler. Its not what your Democratic mandate is, its what you try do with it when you have power thats the issue.

Given that the guy who deposed Charles I turned out to be worse than he was, I'm not sure that is a great argument.

 

And hey, the Nazi card!

Legitimate. Yanukovich started it, by likening the protestors & the Ukrainian parliament to the Nazis, & his own deposition by the Rada as akin to Hitler coming to power.

 

It's like standing up in court & saying "I am a person of good character". It frees the other side in the case to bring out any dirt on you they have, however irrelevant.

[swerve]

 

Overthrown violently? To me, it looked as if the government over-reacted to a pretty harmless demonstration (it had been going on for three months without having much impact on state business) by attempting to crush it violently, using plain-clothes thugs to beat up demonstrators. This is a government whose critics kept being abducted & beaten, & on a few occasions, murdered.

Generally speaking, few, if any, authorities anywhere tolerate demonstrations which go on months and months, no matter how 'harmless' they are. Occupy Wall Street-demonstration was eventually ended by force, even though it was non-violent and harmless. Things didn't go ugly there, but could have if the demonstrators had been able & willing to response to force.

It's not the use of force per se, but the amount of it, & how it's applied. Yanukovich went too far. The force used was disproportionate, & the means by which it was deployed. E.g. men in plain clothes attacking the occupiers with no attempt to move them on, as happened earlier in the protests, before the shooting began, & snipers shooting protestors trying to carry away their wounded.

 

Oh, & the 'occupy this & that' protests haven't been completely non-violent. In come cases there's been a fair bit of property damage, much of it apparently done for fun, & some attacks on vehicles with people in them, & throwing stuff at police, before any police force has been used..I recall reading on one protestors website about windows breaking & other damage, described as if it was spontaneous & a thing of joy.

Edited February 23, 2014 by swerve

[Marek Tucan]

As for the "dictator" discussion, Czechoslovakia under Commies was certainly a totalitarian state, "Dictatorship of the proletariat" and all that built in... Yet it folded generally without resistance after mass demostrations and other changes - it folded neatly, with govt stepping down instead of running into hiding, but then again it might have been because nobody got the bloody silly idea to shoot.

 

So...

 

Yes, dictators can fall down quickly. If they stand on clay feet... In this case, if the army and police are not entirely convinced about going the whole Tien-an-men hog.

 

As for the Western counter-demonstration tactics... How many OWS protesters were kidnapped, beaten and tortured? How many government-criticising journalists were vanished or imprisoned on trumped up charges in UK recently? Or in Finland?

 

Therein lies the difference.

[swerve]

Indeed.

 

East Germany also folded without shooting demonstrators (though by all reports it was a close-run thing), & the leadership stayed around to face the music. Ditto Bulgaria.

[Ivanhoe]

Keep in mind that the OWS folks are at the same end of the political spectrum as the current resident of the White House, and of the vast federal bureaucracy (including law enforcement and prosecutors). Just a bit further left, though it can be argued that the current Attorney General is pretty much in the bomb-throwing section.

 

It was mainly local LE that cracked down on the Occupy X camps, due to violence (several murders, countless sexual assaults, one child molestation), theft and vandalism, traffic blocking, and in some camps a public health issue due to some sort of infectious disease (some kind of bacterial, viral, or fungal thing that generated respiratory distress; never did hear of any definitive ID). Its a tiny bit surprising that the federal Justice Dept didn't go after those local PDs, but the majority of cities where there were problematic OWS activities are deep blue cities, so own goal either way.