#2
Ukraine's interior minister calls for full blockade of Donbas

KIEV, May 28. /TASS/. Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Thursday there was a need to fully separate the territories of the East-Ukrainian Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by militia forces.

"We'll have to fully close the line of contact [separating the militia units and the forces loyal to the government in Kiev - TASS] to close it for everything," he said in an interview with LigaBiznesinform agency.

"That's my radical viewpoint," Avakov went on. "In a junta-like style, the way we do it. Let's shut the contact line. Let them cross it on foot or in small cars but without any goods. As for the goods, let them get everything from Russia."

"We'll set out two or three positions of critically vital imports Ukraine has interest in, coaking coal for instance I don't know because I'm not an expert," Avakov said. "And let's say definitive 'no' to all other things. The population will be allowed to cross over to the Ukrainian side and to buy foodstuffs, which they will then take back home in their hands or in their private cars, but no trucks!"

"You wanted independence and friendship with Russia? You're welcome, Russia is right across the border," he said. "Or do you want to live by the Ukrainian laws because you are Ukrainian? OK, we have the Minsk accords, here you are. Our border guards will take control over the border, and then we'll clear out everything ourselves."

The accords reached in Minsk in September 2014 and February 2015 say in clear terms the Kiev government is to restore all the economic and social ties with the self-proclaimed unrecognized Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.

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 #3
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
May 27, 2015
Three-quarters of Ukrainians not satisfied with government
Henry Kirby in London

A recent survey by international polling firm TNS has shown that less than a quarter of Ukrainians are currently satisfied with the government in Kyiv, while only slightly more than a third are satisfied with President Petro Poroshenko.

51% of those surveyed said they were either totally or slightly unsatisfied with Poroshenko, with his overall approval rating in April coming in at 35.1%. Since taking office in June last year - shortly after the crisis in Ukraine's eastern regions began to escalate - Poroshenko's rating has fallen by 11.7pp, from 46.8% to 35.1%.

The satisfaction rating for the overall government, led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenuk, has nearly halved since the October 2014 general election that saw it elected, from 46% down to 23.3%. Only 1% of respondents said they were confident that the government is completely fulfilling its responsibilities.

Despite the low level of faith in the overall government, respondents' belief in the ability of the government to stabilize the current situation in Ukraine has more or less mirrored Poroshenko's rating since July of 2014, with its approval currently at 35.9%, just  marginally higher than Poroshenko's 35.1%.

There was a stark regional difference to Poroshenko's rating, with nearly a third of respondents in the eastern regions of Ukraine saying they were completely unsatisfied with him, at 31%, compared to only 14% of respondents in Kyiv.

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 #4
Moscow Times
May 28, 2015
Nothing 'Hybrid' About Russia's War in Ukraine
By Ruslan Pukhov
Ruslan Pukhov is director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and publisher of the journal Moscow Defense Brief.

Russia's actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine over the past year gave rise in the West to a widespread theory about some kind of "hybrid war," an innovative form of military intervention that Moscow created specifically for this crisis. However, upon closer inspection, the term hybrid war is more a propaganda tool than hard fact and any attempt to fully define it strips the idea of any novelty.

One Western attempt at defining the term states that hybrid war is a combination of overt and covert military actions, provocations and diversions in conjunction with denial of involvement, significantly complicating any full-scale response to those actions.

A more extensive definition of hybrid war appears in the editor's introduction to "The Military Balance 2015" published by The International Institute for Strategic Studies. It describes hybrid war as "the use of military and non-military tools in an integrated campaign designed to achieve surprise, seize the initiative and gain psychological as well as physical advantages utilizing diplomatic means; sophisticated and rapid information, electronic and cyber operations; covert and occasionally overt military and intelligence action; and economic pressure."

It also points out that during the Crimean operations in February-March 2014 "Russian forces demonstrated integrated use of rapid deployment, electronic warfare, information operations (IO), locally based naval infantry, airborne assault and special-forces capabilities, as well as wider use of cyberspace and strategic communications. The latter was used to shape a multifaceted and overall effective information campaign targeted as much at domestic as foreign audiences."

In eastern Ukraine, Moscow demonstrated the ability to quickly create "pressure groups" composed of "elements of the local population" but that are managed and supported from outside, and that such a tactic can be used to defend ethnic minorities.

In this regard, the document stated that NATO considers hybrid warfare a serious challenge because it takes place in a "gray zone" of the alliance's obligations and could lead to a split between its members.

It is not difficult to see that these definitions of hybrid war, and especially the characterization of Russia's actions in 2014 as such, are out of touch with reality. For example, it is unclear which special "information" and "cyber operations" - much less which "wider use of cyber space and strategic communications" Moscow employed during its operations in Crimea. No information has come to light concerning "cyber operations" in Crimea - and what need was there for them considering the archaic condition of the Ukrainian armed forces?

Russia conducted only a sluggish propaganda campaign in support of the Crimea operation, for both foreign and domestic audiences. In fact, Moscow did not so much broadcast its actions in Crimea or the reason behind them as keep silent on the subject, concealing its end game.

As a result, the annexation of the peninsula came as a surprise to many. The de facto justification for those actions also seemed like an afterthought. The annexation of Crimea enjoyed wide popular support in Russia without much propaganda because most Russians already believed that Crimea is Russian land. On the other hand, Russian forces occupying Crimea apparently waged an active propaganda campaign aimed at the besieged Ukrainian soldiers there, proposing that they switch allegiance to the Russian side.

That effort was successful. Only about 20 percent of those Ukrainian soldiers decided to retain their allegiance and evacuate Crimea, while the other 80 percent either joined the Russian army or deserted.

At the same time, this success was due more to the fact that most of the military personnel on Crimea were residents of the peninsula and had no desire to leave than to any particular merits of the propaganda employed.

The actions attributed to so-called hybrid warfare are fairly standard to any "low intensity" armed conflict of recent decades, if not centuries. It is difficult to imagine any country using military force without providing informational support, using methods of "secret warfare," attempting to erode enemy forces, exploiting internal ethnic, social, economic, political or other divisions in the enemy camp, and without the use of retaliatory economic sanctions. These have been the fundamentals of war since antiquity.

The widely accepted definition of a hybrid war as using a combination of overt and covert actions, including the deployment in Crimea of "polite men in green" ignores the unique nature of that military operation. In Crimea, Russia relied on the nearly total support of the local population and the resultant complete isolation of the Ukrainian forces there.

It was this fact that made it possible for soldiers in unmarked uniforms to remain in place as long as necessary. However, that is also specific to the situation in Crimea. Such polite men in green would not last long if they showed up in, say, Poland or the American Midwest. In that case, simply concealing their origins would not help them.

In fact, there is a long history of soldiers concealing their identities and using unmarked uniforms for limited military actions and special operations, just as there are historical precedents for claiming that regular army soldiers are actually local "volunteers."

In essence, history shows that any external military intervention by a foreign army into another country's civil war has inevitably involved similar practices. Neither is this the first time that a government has used both regular army and rebel forces together. Such practices are standard when deploying military resources under specific conditions. Recall that one of the main tasks of the U.S. Special Forces is the organization and support of "friendly" rebel and guerrilla movements.

With this in mind, the current Ukrainian conflict bears less resemblance to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 - where, by the way, German irredentist militia were active - and more to the United States' Mexican War of 1846-48 that led to the accession of Texas and a number of other Mexican states to the U.S., and also to the Italian Risorgimento that unified Italy in the mid-19th century.

In both cases, the reason for an irredentist war is evident, as well as the fact that the "mother country"  could not openly intercede militarily on behalf of the irredentists. That is why they used the widest possible array of methods to support the irredentist cause - by supporting and replenishing their fighting formations, sending large numbers of real and alleged volunteers, as well as camouflaged units of their armed forces, and by staging limited interventions.

Thus, the novelty of this so-called hybrid war begins to fade upon a closer look at history. Russia's hybrid war is simply a modern application of an age-old set of military and political practices.

It is the presence of forces friendly to the outside power that makes it possible to employ methods that have now become known as "hybrid." In applying the term hybrid war to the conflict in Ukraine, modern observers use politically biased wording to overstate the importance of external factors in the conflict and to downplay the significance of internal factors.

That attempt to downplay the significance of internal factors in the Ukrainian conflict goes over very well in the West, and explains why it persists in suggesting that Russia's hybrid war is something new.

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 #5
AP
May 27, 2015
TV showdown in Ukraine highlights press freedom anxieties
By PETER LEONARD

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Crunch time is coming in a Ukrainian showdown that may yield clues into an increasingly asked question: How free is the press in Ukraine as it fights to stay out of Russia's orbit?

The Kiev government has enjoyed EU and U.S. support as it strives to forge a pro-Western path and battles a pro-Russian insurgency that critics say is supported by the Kremlin. But fears are mounting that in navigating these troubled times, the government is curbing media freedom as it seeks to win the battle of hearts-and-minds against Moscow.

The case in the spotlight involves a popular television station with former links to the Russian government. A moment of truth comes Thursday when the national television and radio broadcasting council meets on whether to rescind the Inter channel's broadcasting license, following accusations of "destructive behavior" by prominent members of Parliament.

Inter has faced a deluge of criticism in the legislature for its purported pro-Russia stance, and faces criminal investigations that supporters of the station call a political witch-hunt to drag it down.

Inter has not yet been explicitly accused of sympathizing with the pro-Russia rebels, but the station's perceived lack of patriotic fervor is enough to warrant its closure for some. Parliament member Andriy Levus said the legislature's national security committee, on which he sits, last week demanded that Inter and Russian-language newspaper Vesti be investigated by the authorities for the alleged destructive activities.

"The committee has found that these so-called media represent a danger to national security and are destabilizing the social situation by creating a receptive setting for Russian aggression," Levus, who served until November as deputy head of security services, wrote on his Facebook page last week.

The threat to Ukraine posed by Inter, according to Levus and likeminded figures, arises from its critical reporting. Inter and Vesti regularly dwell on the fallout of the severe austerity program being imposed by the government, as Ukraine tries to burrow its way out of penury.

This relentless parliamentary pressure led to Thursday's extraordinary broadcasting council meeting. Inter officials say they are being hounded unfairly.

"There is no basis for a negative decision," Inter chairman Yegor Benkendorf said in a statement. "Any speculation on this subject should not be based on legal grounds. This is about politics."

But the station's pedigree is enough to generate suspicion in Ukraine. The station's minority shareholder is Serhiy Lyovochkin - a wealthy former loyalist of deposed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych, and a leading figure in the staunchly anti-government Opposition Bloc in parliament.

Until February, Russia's state-controlled Channel One held a 29 percent share in the station. And suspicions flared after a New Year's Eve program featuring performers who have publicly backed the armed separatist insurgency in east Ukraine. The TV show sparked the first concerted drive for the channel's closure.

On Monday, the Interior Ministry announced it was initiating a probe into Inter on two counts. One involves the alleged unauthorized partial privatization of the station in the 1990s, which the police say incurred the state $800 million in financial damages. Police are also investigating claims that unnamed founders of the channel pressured journalists working at the station to influence their reporting.

The station has decried the probes as an assault on media liberties.

"We see these steps as pressure on freedom of speech and a systematic assault on independent media, caused by the fact that Inter's news shows feature stories on corruption in the government," the station said in a statement Tuesday.

As with much else in Ukraine, the story with Inter is in equal part about politics and money.

"In Ukraine, there has on one hand been a proliferation in the non-transparent sale of media companies, particularly television stations," said Alexander Tarasov, a lawyer with the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine. On the other, Tarasov said, Inter does now appear to have been selectively targeted for attention on political grounds.

Suspicions are rife that pressure against critics of the government in the media has also taken on more sinister forms. In mid-April, Oles Buzina, an outspoken reporter known for his sympathies to Russia, was shot dead near his home in the center of Kiev. Authorities appear no closer to cracking the case now than they there were in the days after the murder. While few have openly linked the murder to the authorities, government critics have noted the allegedly lackadaisical police pursuit as grounds for concern.

Russian Foreign Ministry representative Konstantin Dolgov suggested Buzina's killing was part of a broader wave of political terror in Ukraine being leveled against dissidents. Ukrainians scoff at the notion that complaints should come from a country that regularly scores near the bottom of international press freedom rankings.

But the trend in Ukraine seems inexorably veering toward restrictions instead of the freedoms that many had hoped would flourish after Yanukovych was toppled in a mass uprising last February.

A law came into effect earlier this month that criminalizes the act of positively assessing the era of Soviet rule in Ukraine from 1917 to 1991.

Dunja Mijatovic, media representative for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said in a statement issued after the legislation was approved that the rules set a worrying precedent.

"Disproportionate restrictions on media freedom can never be justified in a democratic state," Mijatovic said. "Potentially problematic speech should not be banned, on the contrary, it should be addressed through an open debate."

 #6
ICTV television (Kyiv)
May 27, 2015
Ukrainian detained for antistate propaganda via Internet

[Presenter] The Security Service of Ukraine [SBU] has detained a 41-year-old resident of Dniprodzerzhynsk for anti-Ukrainian internet propaganda. He run several social network groups and spread the materials there, in which he openly encouraged readers to support terrorists of so-called DPR and LPR [Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics], called on people to take part in riots and to change the state border of Ukraine. The detained man confessed that the leaders of this social [network] groups were users from Russia. They edited texts and even sent ready-made materials to publish.

[Uncaptioned man with blurred face] The unknown person addressed me with a request to become an administrator of these pro-Russian groups, to spread and collect on my page the information supporting DPR and LPR. At the moment I repent doing this.

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 #7
Counterpunch.org
May 27, 2015
The Reality of the Repression
Kiev's Repression of Anti-Fascism in Odessa
by ERIC DRAITSER

There is a common misconception in the West that there is only one war in Ukraine: a war between the anti-Kiev rebels of the East, and the US-backed government in Kiev. While this conflict, with all its attendant geopolitical and strategic implications has stolen the majority of the headlines, there is another war raging in the country - a war to crush all dissent and opposition to the fascist-oligarch consensus. For while in the West many so called analysts and leftists debate whether there is really fascism in Ukraine or whether it's all just "Russian propaganda," a brutal war of political repression is taking place.

The authorities and their fascist thug auxiliaries have carried out everything from physical intimidation, to politically motivated arrests, kidnappings, torture, and targeted assassinations. All of this has been done under the auspices of "national unity," the convenient pretext that every oppressive regime from time immemorial has used to justify its actions. Were one to read the Western narrative on Ukraine, one could be forgiven for believing that the country's discontent and outrage is restricted solely to the area collectively known as Donbass - the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics as they have declared themselves. Indeed, there is good reason for the media to portray such a distorted picture; it legitimizes the false claim that all Ukraine's problems are due to Russian meddling and covert militarization.

Instead, the reality is that anger and opposition to the US-backed oligarch-fascist coalition government in Kiev is deeply rooted and permeates much of Ukraine. In politically, economically, and culturally important cities such as Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kherson, ghastly forms of political persecution are ongoing. However, nowhere is this repression more apparent than in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. And this is no accident.

Odessa: Center of Culture, Center of Resistance

For more than two centuries, Odessa has been the epicenter of multiculturalism in what is today called Ukraine, but what alternately was the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. With its vibrant history of immigration and trade, Odessa has been the heart of internationalism and cultural, religious, and ethnic coexistence in the Russian-speaking world. Its significant populations of Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Greeks, Tatars, Moldovans, Bulgarians and other ethnic and national identities made Odessa a truly international city, a cosmopolitan Black Sea port with French architecture, Ottoman influence, and rich Jewish and Russian/Soviet cultural history.

In many ways, Odessa was the quintessential Soviet city, one which, to a large extent, actually embodied the Soviet ideal enumerated in the state anthem - a city "united forever in friendship and labor." And it is this spirit of multiculturalism and shared history which rejects the racist, chauvinist, fascist politics which now passes for standard political currency in "Democratic Ukraine."

When in February 2014, the corrupt, though democratically elected, government of former President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in a US-backed coup, the people of Odessa, just as in many other cities, began to organize counter-demonstrations against what they perceived to be a Western-sponsored oligarch-fascist alliance seizing power over their country. In the ensuing weeks and months, tens of thousands turned out into the streets to air their discontent, including massive rallies held in February, March, and April.

This inchoate movement against the new dispensation in Kiev, handpicked by the US and its European allies, culminated in two critical events: the establishment of an anti-Maidan movement calling for federalization and greater autonomy for the Odessa region, and the massacre at the Trade Unions House carried out by fascist thugs which resulted in the deaths of more than fifty anti-fascist activists and demonstrators. As a protest organizer and eyewitness recounted to this author, "That was the moment when everything changed, when we knew what Ukraine had really become."

The brutality of the pogrom - an appropriate word considering the long and violent history of this region - could hardly be believed even by hardened anti-fascist activists. Bodies with bullet wounds found inside the burned out building, survivors beaten on the streets after their desperate escape from the flames, and myriad other horrific accounts demonstrate unequivocally that what the Western media dishonestly and disgracefully referred to as "clashes with pro-Russian demonstrators," was in fact a massacre; one that forever changed the nature of resistance in Odessa, and throughout much of Ukraine.

No longer were protesters simply airing their grievances against an illegitimate government sponsored by foreigners. No longer were there demonstrations simply in favor of federalization and greater autonomy. Instead, the nature of the resistance shifted to one of truly anti-fascist character seeking to get the truth about Ukraine out to the world at large. Where once Odessa had been the site of peaceful demands for fairness, instead it became the site of a brutal government crackdown aimed at destroying any semblance of political protest or resistance. Indeed, May 2, 2014 was a watershed. That was the day that politics became resistance.

The Reality of the Repression

The May 2, 2014 massacre in Odessa is one of the few examples of political repression that actually garnered some attention internationally. However, there have been numerous other examples of Kiev's brutal and illegal crackdown on dissent in the critical coastal city and throughout the country, most of which remain almost entirely unreported.

In recent weeks and months, the local authorities have engaged in politically motivated arrests of key journalists and bloggers who have presented a critical perspective on the developments in Odessa. Most prominent among them are the editors of the website infocenter-odessa.com, a locally oriented news site that has been fiercely critical of the Kiev regime and its local authorities.

In late 2014, the editor of the site, Yevgeny Anukhin, was arrested without any warrant while he was attempting to register his human rights organization with the authorities. According to various sources, the primary reasons for his arrest were his possession of video evidence of illegal shelling by Ukrainian military of a checkpoint in Kotovka, and data on his computer which included a compilation of names of political prisoners held without trial in Odessa. With no evidence or warrant, and in breach of standard legal procedures, he was arrested and charged with recruitment of insurgents against the Ukrainian state.

In May 2015, the new editor of infocenter-odessa.com Vitaly Didenko, a leftist, anti-fascist activist and journalist was also arrested on trumped up charges of drug possession which, according to multiple sources in Odessa, are entirely fabricated by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) secret police in order to create a pretext upon which to detain him. In the course of his arrest, Didenko was seriously injured, incurring several broken ribs and a broken arm. He is currently sitting in an Odessa jail, his case entirely ignored by Western media, including those organizations ostensibly committed to the protection of journalists.

Additionally, just this past weekend (May 24, 2015) there was yet another sickening display of political repression on the very spot of the May 2, 2014 massacre. Activists and ordinary Odessa citizens had been taking part in a memorial service for the victims of the tragedy when the demonstration was violently dispersed by armed men in either military or national guard uniforms (see here for photos). According to eyewitnesses, the military men instigated violence at the gathering and broke it up, all while both local police and OSCE monitors stood aside and watched. Naturally, this is par for the course in "Democratic Ukraine."

Aside from journalists, a large number of activists have been detained, kidnapped, and/or tortured by Ukrainian authorities and their fascist goons. Key members of the Borotba (Struggle) leftist organization have been repeatedly harassed, arrested, and beaten by the police. One particularly infamous example was the detainment of Vladislav Wojciechowski, a member of Borotba and survivor of the May 2nd massacre. According to Borotba's website, "During the search of the apartment where he lived, explosives were planted. Nazi "self-defense" paramilitaries participated in his arrest. Vladislav was beaten, and it is possible that a confession was beaten out of him under torture.  Currently, he is in SBU custody." He was ultimately charged with "terrorism" by the authorities after having been beaten and tortured by both Nazi goons and SBU agents.

Upon his release more than three months later in December 2014 in a "prisoner exchange" between Kiev and the eastern rebels, Wojciechowski defiantly stated, "I am very angry with the fascist government of Ukraine, which proved once again with its barbaric acts that it is willing to wade through corpses to defend its interests and those of the West. They failed to break me! And my will has become tempered steel. Now I'm even more convinced that it is impossible to save Ukraine without defeating fascism on its territory." Wojciechowski was also the editor of the website 2May.org, a site dedicated to disseminating the truth about the Odessa massacre.

It should be noted though that Wojciechowski was arrested along with his comrades Pavel Shishman of the now outlawed Communist Party of Ukraine, and Nikolai Popov of the Communist Youth. These arrests should come as no surprise to observers of the political situation in Ukraine where all forms of leftist politics - the Communist party, Soviet symbols and names, etc. - have been outlawed and brutally repressed.

Kiev is not only engaged in an assault on political freedoms, but also a class war against the working class of Odessa and Ukraine generally. That the events leading up to the massacre took place at Kulikovo Field - a famous staging area for Soviet era demonstrations of working class politics - and the massacre itself took place in the adjacent Trade Unions House, there's a symbolic resonance, the significance of which is not lost on the people of Odessa. It is the attempt to both erase the legacy of working class struggle and leftist politics, as well as the sacrifices of previous generations in a place where historical memory runs deep, and the scars of the past have yet to heel.

Aside from these shameful attacks on leftist formations, multicultural institutions too have been repressed under the pretext of "Russian separatism." A multiethnic, multi-nationality organization known as the Popular Rada of Bessarabia (PRB) was founded in early April 2015 in order to push for regional autonomy and/or ethnic autonomy in response to the legal and extralegal attacks on minorities by the Kiev authorities. It was reported that within 24 hours of the founding congress, Ukraine's SBU had detained the core leaders of the organization, including the Chair of the organization's presidium Dmitry Zatuliveter whose whereabouts, according to this author's latest information, remain unknown. Within two weeks 30 more PRB activists were arrested, including founding member Vera Shevchenko.

While the Western media and its armies of think tanks and propaganda mouthpieces steadfastly deny that an organization such as PRB can be anything other than "a project of Russian political consultants," the reality is that such moves have been a reaction to repressive legislation and intimidation by the US-backed regime in Kiev which has done everything from outlawing the two most popular political parties of the Russian-speaking South and East (The Party of Regions and the Communist Party), to attempting to strip the Russian language of official status within Ukraine, a move interpreted by these groups as a direct threat against them and their regions where Russian, not Ukrainian, is the lingua franca.

As Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation and former Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (read CIA front) contributor Vladimir Socor wrote last month in an article entitled Ukraine Defuses Pro-Russia Instigations in Odesa Province, "In the spirit of preventive action, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies have arrested some 20 members of a centrifugal organization in Odesa [sic] province..The timely intervention also stopped the publicity bandwagon that had just started rolling from Moscow in support of the Odesa [sic] group." Interestingly, the author deceptively frames his apologia for so called "preventive detention" as merely a "timely intervention," conveniently glossing over the blatant illegality of the action by Kiev, which has eschewed the rule of law in favor of brute force and repression.

And what is the PRB's great crime in the eyes of Mr. Socor and the US interests for which he speaks? As he directly states in the article with typical condescension:

[BPR's program and manifesto] include demands for: greater representation of ethnic groups in the administration of Ukraine's Odesa [sic] province; promotion of the ethnic groups' cultural identities and schools; conferral of a "national-cultural special status" to Bessarabia; a free economic zone, with specific reference to local control over Ukraine's Black Sea and Danube ports; no integration of Ukraine with the European Union, the "enslavement practices of which would ruin the region and its agriculture"; and reinstatement of Ukraine's [recently abandoned] international status of nonalignment, or else: "In the event of Ukraine moving close to NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization], we reserve the right to implement the self-determination of Bessarabia."

A careful reading of these demands reveals that these are precisely the demands that any right-minded anti-imperialist position should espouse, including rejection of NATO integration, rejection of EU integration, rejection of opening up Ukraine's agricultural sector to the likes of Monsanto and other Western corporations, and protection of ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities, among other things. While Socor writes of these demands derisively, the reality is that they constitute precisely the sort of program that is essential for defending both Ukraine's sovereignty, and the rights of the people of Odessa and the region. But of course, for Socor, this is all just a Russian plot. Instead, he kneels to kiss the chocolate ring of Poroshenko...and perhaps other parts of Victoria Nuland and John Kerry, while vigorously cheer-leading further political repression.

A Message for the Left

The question facing leftists internationally is no longer whether they believe there are fascists in Ukraine, or whether they are an important part of the political establishment in the country; this is now impossible to refute. Rather, the challenge before the international left is whether it can overcome its deep-seated mistrust of Russia, and consequent inability to separate fact from fiction, and unwaveringly defend its comrades in Ukraine with the conviction and aplomb of its historical antecedents.

There is a whole history that is under assault, a whole people being oppressed, a leftist tradition being ground to dust under the heel of an imperialist agenda and comprador oligarch bourgeoisie. Some on the left choose to snicker derisively at this struggle, aligning themselves once again with the Empire just as they so often have in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. And then there those who, like this author, refuse to be cowed by the baseless slur of "Russian apologist" and "Putin puppet"; those of us who choose not to look away while our comrades in Ukraine are beaten, kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and disappeared.

For while they speak out in the face of reprisals, in the midst of brutal repression, under threat of prison and death, the least we can do is speak out from our comfortable chairs. Anything less is moral cowardice and utter betrayal.

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 #8
www.rt.com
May 28, 2015
Ukraine humanitarian crisis 'one of the world's worst' - UN refugee agency

The rise in the number of refugees in the Ukrainian conflict is resulting in one of the world's "worst humanitarian crisis" today, the UN has confirmed, as sporadic fighting and a lack of aid forces civilians flee to neighboring countries, mainly Russia.

The number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and those seeking refuge abroad is reaching catastrophic proportions despite the February-implemented Minsk II ceasefire agreement which barely holds ground with intermittent fighting continuing in the Donbass region.

The latest statistics from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) show that some 857,000 Ukrainians have sought asylum in neighboring countries. That is an increase of about 23,000 people in the last two weeks.

"The situation seems to be getting worse," William Spindler, UNHCR Senior Communications Officer for Europe, West Africa, Statelessness told RT. He says that the number of IDPs and refugees from Ukraine has surpassed 2 million people. He added that people in Donbass continue to live in "substandard accommodation" as a result of the ongoing fighting.

"1.2 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine and over 800,000 people have gone to neighboring countries," Spindler said, confirming the latest figures disclosed by his office. He added that those fleeing to neighbouring countries have gone "mainly to the Russian Federation" as well as Belarus, Poland, Germany and France.

In the latest report on the Ukraine conflict, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that between mid-April 2014 and 14 May 2015, at least 6,334 people were killed and 15,752 wounded. It also reported a danger posed to civilians by "unexploded ordinance and landmines" that are still left in Donbass.

"The situation is very serious, very worrying. This is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today," Spindler said.

The lack of medicine and medical equipment in conflict areas in Ukraine poses great danger, OCHA reported earlier. Both humanitarian and political efforts on the ground by the parties involved need to be "stepped up," Spindler says, in order to reverse the dire situation that resulted from Kiev's ongoing so-called "anti-terrorist operation" in eastern Ukraine.

"We are distributing essential aid but our efforts are not sufficient to deal with the needs," said Spindler, stressing that more funding is needed to continue humanitarian aid work as the current financing covers only some 40 percent of the organization's mission to Ukraine.

One of the main areas of concern for the UN refugee agency is the "difficulty" civilians have crossing the conflict line, Spindler told RT. He said that in some cases people were "separated" at the crossing line between Ukrainian and rebel controlled territories, as they tried to join their relatives or "obtain benefits that they are entitled to."

Russia meanwhile continues to receive refugees from Ukraine, accommodating those seeking shelter in refugees camps before helping them settle all across the federation. "During multiple visits to a refugee center for Ukrainians we did not notice any problems with accommodation, food, medical services and education. Everything is organized as it should be, on the same level as for Russian citizens," UN Refugees Agency (UNHCR) representative in Russia Baisa Vak-Voya told journalists Monday.

At the same time, Federal Migration Service chief Konstantin Romodanovsky called the situation in Ukraine a humanitarian disaster, as up to 600 Ukrainians cross into Russia daily.

"It is a catastrophe, of course. Homes have been ruined there. People vote with their feet, leaving their home country and entering Russia, where they get the status of temporary refugees - not because this is something Russia wants, but simply because there is no place they can live in," Romodanovsky told Interfax on Monday.

Russia meanwhile estimates that over a million of Ukrainians have entered Russia since the conflict began last year, according to Valentina Kazakova, head of the Federal Migration Service's Department for Citizenship.

Out of that number some 350,000 have applied and most of them granted temporary refuge status. "Another 105,000 have applied for entrance onto the state program for assisting the voluntary resettlement of compatriots from foreign countries," Kazakova told Interfax earlier this month.

Since the conflict began another 195,000 Ukrainians requested temporary residence permits in Russia, while 40,000 applied for permanent residence cards and 88,000 for citizenship.

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 #9
Sputnik
May 28, 2015
Russia Ramps Up Border Security As Ukraine Conflict Rages On

Russia is fortifying its border with Ukraine amid the ongoing conflict in the neighboring country, the head of the country's Border Guard Service said Thursday.

"The hostilities in southeastern Ukraine, taking place as part of Kiev's military crackdown on the pro-independence militia, necessitated additional measures to step up the defense of our state border", General Vladimir Kulishov told RIA Novosti news agency without elaborating.

He said the measures were being taken amid the growing influx of Ukrainian refugees and the growing threat of rightwing radicals and other extremists crossing into Russian territory and weapons and ammunition smuggled in from Ukraine's war-torn Donbass region.

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 #10
Reuters
May 28, 2015
Exclusive: Russia masses heavy firepower on border with Ukraine - witness
BY MARIA TSVETKOVA

Russia's army is massing troops and hundreds of pieces of weaponry including mobile rocket launchers, tanks and artillery at a makeshift base near the border with Ukraine, a Reuters reporter saw this week.

Many of the vehicles have number plates and identifying marks removed while many of the servicemen had taken insignia off their fatigues. As such, they match the appearance of some of the forces spotted in eastern Ukraine, which Kiev and its Western allies allege are covert Russian detachments.

The scene at the base on the Kuzminsky firing range, around 50 km (30 miles) from the border, offers some of the clearest evidence to date of what appeared to be a concerted Russian military build-up in the area.

Earlier this month, NATO military commander General Philip Breedlove said he believed the separatists were taking advantage of a ceasefire that came into force in February to re-arm and prepare for a new offensive. However, he gave no specifics.

Russia denies that its military is involved in the conflict in Ukraine's east, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting forces loyal to the pro-Western government in Kiev.

Russia's defence ministry said it had no immediate comment about the build-up. Several soldiers said they had been sent to the base for simple military exercises, suggesting their presence was unconnected to the situation in Ukraine.

Asked by Reuters if large numbers of unmarked weaponry and troops without insignia at the border indicated that Russia planned to invade Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a conference call with reporters:

"I find the wording of this question, 'if an invasion is being prepared', inappropriate as such."

The weapons being delivered there included Uragan multiple rocket launchers, tanks and self-propelled howitzers -- all weapon types that have been used in the conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kiev's forces and separatists.

The amount of military hardware at the base was about three times greater than in March this year, when Reuters journalists were previously in the area. At that time, only a few dozen pieces of equipment were in view.

Over the course of fours days starting on Saturday, Reuters saw four goods trains with military vehicles and troops arriving at a rail station in the Rostov region of southern Russia, with at least two trainloads travelling on by road to the base.

A large section of dirt road leading across the steppe from the Kuzminsky range to the Ukrainian border had been freshly repaired, making it more passable for heavy vehicles.

The road leads to a quiet border crossing typically only used by local residents. On the other side is Ukraine's Luhansk region, which is controlled by separatists and has been the scene of intense fighting.

MARCHING ORDERS

Valentina Melnikova, a human rights campaigner who works closely with families of Russian servicemen, said she had information that Rostov region was being used as a staging post for troops on their way to Ukraine.

She said the information came from the mother of a serviceman stationed in the town of Totskoye, in the Orenburg region near Russia's border with Kazakhstan.

Melnikova said the serviceman heard from commanders that "they are going to be transferred to Rostov region after May 20 and then to Ukraine. They signed papers about non-disclosure of information and about acting voluntarily.

"Of course it was an order. How could it be voluntarily? They are servicemen," said Melnikova, who runs the Moscow-based Alliance of Soldiers' Mothers Committees.

Her account could not be independently verified by Reuters.

In some cases where Russian citizens have been captured in Ukraine by forces loyal to Kiev, Russian officials have said they were there of their own accord and were either on leave from the armed forces or had quit the military.

More military hardware trundles into the Matveev Kurgan railway station on goods trains every day.

A train that pulled in on Tuesday was carrying 16 T-72 tanks, and a number of military trucks.

A local woman who was at the station with a pre-school age girl looked at the tanks on flat-bed rail cars, sighed, and said: "Nothing surprises me any more."

Over the four days, trains arrived delivering a total of at least 26 tanks, about 30 Uragan launchers, dozens of trucks as well as several armoured personnel carriers and self-propelled howitzers.

On two occasions, after the trains had been unloaded, reporters followed the column of vehicles to the firing range -- a location that has already been linked indirectly to the fighting in Ukraine.

Bellingcat, a British-based group of volunteers who use social media to investigate conflicts, analysed postings by Russian soldiers on social network accounts, including geo-location tags on photos, and concluded that some of those in Ukraine had earlier been at the Kuzminsky range.

A former Russian soldier said last year, when he was on active military service, that he underwent training at the range and was later sent up to the Ukrainian border. Once at the border he was ordered to fire Grad rockets, although he said he could not be certain they were fired into Ukraine. He also said some members of his unit had crossed into Ukraine.

"That's a very big firing range. We studied for two weeks, we had a quick course. After that we got the order and went to the border," said the former soldier, who did not want to be identified because the operation has not been made public.

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 #11
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
May 26, 2015
Bloomberg Claims Russia Is Burning Dead Soldiers in Ukraine
Bloomberg cites unnamed Ukrainian and U.S. intelligence sources, claiming that Russia is using mobile crematoriums in Ukraine. Sounds legit!
By RI Staff

This is really just embarassing:

"The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them," House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry told me. "They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement."

Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. "What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others," he said.
-
 
Yes. Classified information. Like Saddam's aluminum tubes.

What's funny is that the rebels have made similar claims about Ukrainian mobile crematoriums. Except the western media never reported it - because there's no real evidence to substantiate the claim. But if we're talking about Russia...

What's next, Putin has a secret space base on the dark side of the Moon?

Step up your game, Bloomberg.

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 #12
Moscow Times
May 28, 2015
Russia and Ukraine Trade Turnover Falls by Two-Thirds

Russian trade turnover with Ukraine fell by around 60 percent in the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year, according to a recent study by researchers at the World Trade Center Moscow, news agency RBC reported Wednesday.

Russian exports to Ukraine fell 63.5 percent, from $8.1 billion to $2.9 billion, while imports of Ukrainian goods fell 60 percent from $4 billion to 1.6 billion between January and April of this year.

Trade is expected to continue to fall this year, according to report contributor and head of the All-Russian Scientific Market Research Institute, Andrei Spartak.

"We predict a sharp fall in 2015. A turning point in this tendency is only possibly in 2017-18," said Spartak, RBC reported.  

Trade between Russia and Ukraine began shrinking last year when relations between the two countries drastically worsened after the February overthrow of Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych's ouster was then followed by Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and armed conflict between Kiev and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine's east.

Russia's total foreign trade turnover dropped 41.8 percent during the first four months of 2015 to $54.1 billion, RBC reported, citing data from Russia's Federal Customs Service included in the World Trade Center's report. Russian exports dropped 35.2 percent to $110.4 billion against $170.4 billion last year as low oil prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis tightened access to financing.

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 #13
Forbes.com
May 27, 2015
In Kyiv Vs Moscow Fist Fight, Russia (Barely) Holding Up As Ukraine Against Ropes
By Kenneth Rapoza

Nearly 16 months into the bitter divorce between Kyiv and Moscow, Ukraine is in worst shape and Russia is limping along. When will these two kiss and make up?

While the two old Soviet besties may never be cozy again, Ukraine has managed to go from being dependent on Russia to dependent on the E.U.  Sure, one may very well be a better friend to lean on than the other, but the takeaway here is that Ukraine cannot yet stand on its own two feet.

This week, prime minister Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk said he would turn to Washington in hopes the U.S. government can lobby its domestic corporations into buying up Ukrainian assets on the cheap. Yats wants to privatize hundreds of state owned enterprises. But with asset prices deteriorating, particularly in industrial hubs in separatist controlled east Ukraine, privatization may be akin to given away the family store to the lowest bidder. It is hard to see how this is truly beneficial to Ukraine as it is unlikely it could raise enough money to make the sales worth its while. The problem with Ukraine is that it may not have a choice.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk promised to be one of the least popular leaders in Ukrainian history. He's well on his way, with polls showing less than 40% approve of his work as PM. Yats has been busy courting U.S. and German politicians in hopes to keep them interested in helping Ukraine come out of its crisis.  Like it or not, Yats will also need to talk to Russia. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

The country's debt is rated CCC-, or basically super-duper junk.

Parliament recently approved legislation that gives the government the option to impose a moratorium on repayment of its foreign debt. A moratorium means the government can take a unilateral decision to stop paying interest and principal on its bonds.

The bill gives the government a tool that it may or may not choose to employ in ongoing negotiations with bond holders, led by European governments, Russia and investment giants like Templeton Asset Management, one of the biggest foreign investors in Ukrainian bonds.

A moratorium would immediately reduce payments on foreign debt - good for Ukraine short term - but it could have high costs over the longer term.

Argentina is an example of what can happen. Argentina has been locked in a legal dispute for nearly 15 years with increasing financial and credibility costs. The Western world has forgotten Argentina exists. This is the worst case scenario for Ukraine, with the hell-case being increasing violence in the east between the Ukrainian military and Russian backed separatists.

And then there's Russia. The country has been sanctioned since annexing Crimea in March 2014. The biggest sanctions came in July and September, hitting energy and financial firms. Russian equity was sharply reduced, attracting foreign investment into its stock market.

The Market Vectors Russia (RSX) exchange traded fund is up 32.%, second only to the Deutsche China A-Shares (ASHR) ETF, up 42.7%.

The economic fallout from last year's triple-whammy of sanctions, oil prices and Ukraine is clearly being felt. Last week's economic data showed wages in Russia down 13.2% on a yearly basis versus consensus estimates of a 9% drop. Retail sales fell 9.8% on a yearly basis compared with consensus estimates of 8.1%.

But Russia, at least, has some good news. Sure there is also good news in Ukraine as reforms move slowly forward. But Russia's news is more than anecdotal; it's actually measurable.

Both employment and investment held up better than expected. The unemployment rate was 5.8% versus 6.0% consensus. Investment fell 4.8% year over year, but everyone thought it would decline by at least 6%. Industrial production fell, but weakness was concentrated in manufacturing and not in mining and utilities, which are also important economic sectors.

"The logical way to interpret this data is that prices in Russia's economy are quite flexible, so that the adjustment in domestic demand can occur via wages rather than just via large reductions in capacity utilization on the supply side," says Jan Dehn, an economist with the Ashmore Group in London.

If Russia gets the sectoral sanctions removed in July and September, the market will start to look at this country differently.

"Sanctions are a very important topic if you want to see the recovery in the Russian equity market keep going," says Martin Charmoy, director of Prosperity Capital Management in London, a $2.4 billion money manager.

"Some of the largest Dutch pension funds told me that they want to see sanctions lift before they start to look again at Russia. And we see more and more European countries that are against these sanctions," Charmoy says. "We have around a third of Europe against, though Germany and France are still in favor of keeping sanctions in place. But the way they have been drafted, if you want to extend them you need all 28 countries to agree on extending them and we are far from that today."

That's also good news for Russia. Ukraine can use some more good news of its own.

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 #14
Moscow Times
May 27, 2015
Russia-Ukraine Debt Dispute Threatens IMF
By Max Hess
Max Hess is a political risk analyst with AKE Group, specializing in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

On May 19, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law authorizing the government to cease payment to foreign debt holders. Ukrainian officials have indicated that the $3 billion bond held by Russia may be a target of the new law.

The controversy and conflict over the debt could have major implications not only for the two countries directly involved but for the International Monetary Fund. As with Russia's annexation of Crimea, the fallout of such a challenge could pose a major threat to the post-Cold War global order.

The bond is formally due in December 2015, although a much-debated technicality that Russia imposed on the agreement when former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych approved it means that Russia could demand repayment at any time.

Pushing the issue to the fore, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned the day after the law was passed that Russia would take Kiev to court in the event of any delays or failures to make a $75 million interest payment in June.

The bond was intended to be the first part of a total $15 billion worth of purchases of Ukrainian debt by Russia. The bond purchases were made as the Euromaidan protests began to show the first signs they posed a fatal risk to Yanukovych's regime and a pro-Russian path.

After the Euromaidan protests caused Yanukovych to flee to Russia and Ukraine's path jerked decisively toward Europe, Russia immediately dropped plans to buy any more Ukrainian debt. Less than a month later, it took Crimea instead.

The political nature of the bond is undeniable. As a result many in Ukraine have called for the bond to be challenged in court. Kiev's strategy would rest on challenging the bond's validity due to its political nature.

While it is unlikely that a court would find the bond invalid, proving the political nature of the debt purchase could affirm Kiev's claim the bond should not be viewed as official debt.

Official debts are defined as those owed to international organizations, governments and governmental agencies, and Ukraine's $17 billion IMF bailout would be effectively frozen if the country is found to have defaulted on any official debt.

A Ukrainian default on the bond would immediately put the IMF in an extremely difficult position.

Ukraine's need to tap IMF funds will continue throughout any legal action on the bond and if Ukraine formally announces its intention to default on the bond, the IMF would have to decide what action to take.

Yet were a legal challenge or default to occur, Russia would no doubt respond forcefully. Russian politicians have regularly lambasted the IMF as an institution captured by Western interests and a dramatic show of support by the IMF for Russia's position is unlikely.

Even a statement by the IMF that it would await a court's ruling on the status of the debt would be seen in the Kremlin as confirmation of the IMF's Western-centric nature.

The Kremlin has become increasingly hostile to established international institutions in recent years. Moscow has trumpeted alternative proposals such as the BRICS bank and China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Were this to escalate to a direct challenge to the IMF, to which Russia is the 10th-largest contributor, it could pose a significant risk to the long-term prospects of the institution.

The potential fallout from such a challenge would have far-reaching implications reaching well beyond the Fund itself. The IMF is among the international institutions that are central to the post-Cold War order and a significant challenge to it could have a major impact on the durability of that order.

Russia taking on a global financial institution - one that together with the World Bank provided Russia with its own $22.6 billion bailout in 1998 - would have been unthinkable a little over a year ago.

However, as a result of likely irreversible antagonism between Putin's Russia and the West since Russia's annexation of Crimea, challenging the global order has become a central component of the Kremlin's agenda.

Post-Maidan Ukraine poses a serious long-term challenge to Putin's leadership. This is why he has risked sanctions, economic growth and war.

It would be unwise to think that Putin is not willing to turn the friend of an enemy into an enemy.

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 #15
Business New Europe
www.bne.eu
May 26, 2015
Will Ukraine's bondholders force a default on purpose?
Ben Aris in Moscow

Will Ukraine's private bondholders force the country to default on its debt on purpose by refusing to negotiate on the restructuring, or "haircut", that Kyiv is demanding on $10bn worth of debt?

It's not such a crazy question, because it has happened before. In 2009, Morgan Stanley, which held a lot of the bonds of troubled Kazakh lender BTA Bank, suddenly called the loans in, causing the bank to default - despite both the Kazakh government and the bank itself bending over backwards to treat creditors well, and negotiate in good faith to get through an extremely sticky patch.

It transpired later that Morgan Stanley had bought a lot of credit default swap (CDS) contracts, a financial instrument that in effect insures bondholders against the possibility of the issuer defaulting on a bond. It emerged that Morgan Stanley had bought CDS to a value greater than the value of its investment in the bonds, so the US bank made money on the trade. In the world of finance it is, in effect, perfectly legal to take out life insurance on your wife and then murder her for the money. The bank has never commented on the deal, but it caused a great deal of comment on the shortcomings of CDS in the aftermath.

Analysts in Kyiv believe it is unlikely the same thing will happen this time, simply because the amount of money involved is so large: the creditor committee that is negotiating with the government on the possible haircut hold over $10bn of debt, whereas the BTA bond was worth a few hundred million dollars. "No one knows for sure, but the amount of money is so large it is unlikely that the creditors could buy enough CDS to cover the whole outstanding amount," says Alexander Paraschiy, a fixed-income analyst with Concorde Capital in Ukraine.

CDS spreads on Ukraine's bonds have been soaring as negotiations between Ukraine and the bondholder committee become increasingly tense as a mid-June deadline set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) requiring final agreement on terms draws close. As bne IntelliNews reported, Ukraine's finance ministry took its dispute over the debt restructuring public, criticising bondholders over the secrecy of their identities. They in turn attacked Kyiv's insistence on forcing a haircut on the debt.

US-born Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko has said that the government is "concerned" about the approach taken by the ad hoc committee, which has refused to meet the minister face to face for talks. The committee made a concession on May 20 by revealing some of their names - it comprises funds managed or advised by BTG Pactual Europe, Franklin Advisers, TCW Investment Management Company and T. Rowe Price Associates - but serious talks still do not seemed to have started. "The Committee and their advisers are in regular contact with additional holders of the Notes who, together with the Committee, represent in excess of $10 billion of Ukrainian debt," a statement from the bondholders said, but gave no details on talks, if any, with Ukraine's finance ministry.

In other words, the bondholders are being difficult as the clock runs down, making it increasingly likely the government will simply refuse to pay them by the IMF deadline. In an ominous sign, Ukraine passed a law allowing the government to impose a moratorium on the payment of bond coupons on May 20. "To protect the interests of Ukrainian people, the Government of Ukraine submits to the Verkhovna Rada today the draft laws, those enabling the Government to suspend payments on certain external public debts and guaranteed by the government debts, as specified in the Annex to the relevant Regulation of the Cabinet of Ministers," the government said in a statement. "But by adopting this law we appeal to our foreign lenders with a request to support Ukraine and share the heavy burden with us."

The talks between the two sides have been described as "deadlocked", but they don't seem to be happening at all. About $23bn worth of sovereign and sub-sovereign debt is earmarked for restructuring in total over five years, out of a total of about $40bn outstanding.

Betting on a default

At this point investors seem to be assuming that the bondholders are playing chicken with Ukraine's government and some sort of deal will be thrashed out at the last minute. "Of course it is not clear what will happen, but our working assumption is that there will be a debt writeoff of about 50% and a deal will be done," says Charlie Robinson, head of research at Renaissance Capital. Many commentators are putting the chances of default at about 50/50.

However, the prices of CDS imply a 95% chance of default on its one-year bonds at least, according to data provider Markit. The CDS spreads over par (0% change of default) have soared in the last two years. Ukraine's bonds were always seen as a bit iffy and have not traded below 500 basis points (bp) since August 2011, which means it would cost $500,000 a year to insure $10mn worth of bonds over five years.

But CDS spreads have soared in the last couple of years on the back of the drama being played out in Ukraine. Spreads shot up to 1,325bp on the day after former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted on February 19, 2014, before sinking back to under 1,000bp after the new government came in.

More recently, the spread has been climbing again after the IMF and government in Kyiv announced their desire to impose a "haircut", topping 3,239bp as of May 20, according to data provider Markit, which suggests the insurers at least have little faith in an amicable settlement.

Ultimately, the IMF will play the decisive role on deciding what is to be done about the bonds - whether the government will place a moratorium on the coupon payments, which counts as a default, or a deal is cut to delay the payments and leave the principle amount untouched, as the Russians did to their bondholders following the 1998 ruble crisis. "Currently, the IMF is the key creditor to the whole Ukrainian economy so everything will depend on the IMF's position," says Paraschiy. "If they think that a moratorium will not affect the fund's loan programme, then everything will be fine with Ukraine."

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 #16
UNIAN (Kyiv)
www.unian.info
May 22, 2015
Russians know perfectly well what's going on
By Roman Tsymbalyuk

There is a popular opinion in Ukraine that there is a need to open the eyes of the Russians to the actions of their government in Ukraine. To tell them about a direct armed invasion of the regular Russian army; the deployment of the so-called Russian volunteers in the Donbas for the sake of glorifying and saving the "Russian world"; the unlimited supply of tanks, "Grad" missile launchers, and ammunition. Some think that the Russians are being fooled, while they are ground downby the propaganda, having no opportunity to see an alternative point view.

I hate to disappoint you, but that would be a complete waste of time. All of your arguments or calls to reason will be met with a careful or emotional (depending on the manners of your counterpart) lecture about the Nazis/fascists in Ukraine, while any Ukrainian ready to defend their country will be lumped into this category. They will argue for some time about the infringement of the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, while this debate will be exclusively in Russian.

Don't think that the Russians are stupid, or they don't understand anything because of the influence of their TV. This is absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of Russian citizens are well aware of the fact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and... they support it. However, not all of them have enough courage to admit it (even to themselves). Some say that it can't be happening "because we are fraternal nations," some say that the soldiers go to the Donbas "unofficially", someone insists they are fearless "volunteer militants". They just prefer not taking one thing into account: citizens of the Russian Federation in this status shoot and kill people in the Donbas as effectively as Russian soldiers would. Some think that this doesn't directly concern them, and they can just fantasize about a victorious war in Ukraine against the United States. It's easy to believe in such things - on the TV they don't show stories about Russian citizens who die in Ukraine. They only incite interest by speaking on camera about the crimes of the Kyiv "junta."

In Russia, it is impossible to know the number of the fallen Russian "volunteers," not to mention actual soldiers. This question is always defelected by the same response: "We are concerned about the terrible human rights record in Ukraine."

Unfortunately, the report by Boris Nemtsov "Putin. War", published by his friends and supporters, or any other future publications of this kind, will not change the situation. The Russians will still pretend that they have nothing to do with it and will keep talking about a "civil war" in Ukraine.

The situation can only be changed with a statement by the Russian president, the kind he has already given once. First, Putin was telling about the "self-defense forces" in Crimea, and then he acknowledged the fact of the invasion by the Russian regular army. And hundreds of talking heads on Russian TV suddenly found plenty of arguments to explain why it had actually been necessary for Putin to lie. It's the same story with the Donbas - everyone who is zealously proving today that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine, will argue exactly the opposite if the story coming from the main tower of the Kremlin changes.

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 #17
www.rt.com
May 26, 2015
Poroshenko presidency, one year on: Can peace be achieved amid heightened nationalism?
By Al Gurnov
Al Gurnov is an award-winning Russian journalist and political analyst, and won Best Interviewer of 2014 (RSPP). He has hosted his own show on RT since 2005.

As Ukrainian President Poroshenko celebrates his first year in power, the truce in Donbass is fragile and ceasefire agreements are violated daily. Can Poroshenko become a 'president of peace' and can a peacekeeping party be formed in Kiev?

What is worrying is that after the first and second effort to grab the Donbass region failed, there's no visible sign that cool heads are prevailing in Kiev. Indeed, it appears that the desire to come to a lasting agreement is still remote, as both sides accuse one another of violating the agreements. At the same time, there are reports that the two sides are accumulating forces, equipment, and even deploying field hospitals. Although both sides say they will not be the first to attack, who would ever be able to prove who fired the first shot in a civil war that has never really ended?

It is important to note that Kiev's modern elite is diverse. There are forces that want to fight with Donbass, and those who are willing to negotiate. Unfortunately, however, it seems that the "party of war" is making most of the decisions. So the question arises as to whether the situation can change. Is there hope that peace will be given a chance? Hope always exists, but what makes Donbass so important is that it really is an outpost that has the ability to restrain the forces of separatism in other regions of Ukraine - in Odessa, Kharkov, Zaporozhye. Therefore, Kiev simply cannot afford to retreat from Donbass. At least there is no talk about peace in the parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, which has heaped all the blame on Russia, accusing it of being an aggressor. Although there were some signs of popular protest during the May 9 Victory Day celebrations, the authorities did everything to silence the voices for peace. Some activists were killed, many arrested, and the National Guard was posted to Odessa and other cities.

The roots of today's tragic events lie in August 1991, when the former Soviet Union disintegrated into many republics, some ruled by a local junta, some still at war with one another and with their integral provinces. For many it looks like a geopolitical game between the Kremlin and the United States. If so - it is a game of total substitution of concepts. The development of electronic media and social networks made it possible to manipulate the consciousness of large numbers of people. Including intellectuals. Take YouTube, which seems to provide an accurate picture of what is happening. But we know that many video sites of acute confrontation and conflicts have been heavily edited, if not staged! This leaves us with more questions, rather than answers.

Will Ukraine be prepared to reverse its position? Will they ever recognize that the artificial Ukrainization of Donbass, Lugansk and Crimea is not worth the enormous sacrifices? The Russians are appealing to the common sense of Ukrainians, but it appears they refuse to listen. Why? Why has there been this tragic divergence of views on the history and the present among fraternal Slavic nations, once friendly to one another and sharing a common language and a common history? The answer may be quite surprising.

The reader may be unaware that the most violent battles between the government and the opposition in Ukraine have always been for the post of Minister of Education. It may not be as profitable and prestigious a position in the power hierarchy as the posts of heads of customs, fiscal services and security agencies, but it is the Ministry of Education that approves the school curriculum. And if the textbooks will pronounce that the first humans on Earth were Ukrainians, then so be it! Today, after several generations of students have passed through the educational system, a chasm has formed between Russia and Ukraine. Although it may be still possible to talk about the same events and in the same language, our perception of these events greatly depends on what we have learned at school.

A quick perusal of Ukrainian Wikipedia is all it takes to realize that over the last two decades Ukraine has been set up to go to war with Russia. The new generations of Ukrainians are ready to believe the assertion that in 1945 Berlin was taken by Ukrainians. Now Ukrainians are killing each other in the Donbass region just because they have been raised on different textbooks and consider their opponents ignoramus enemies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, schools in eastern Ukrainian regions, where the population mainly speaks Russian, continued to use Russian textbooks unlike those in other regions, which switched to newly printed Ukrainian books - in which history was rewritten.

Therefore, although it may be disappointing for Moscow, Ukrainians just cannot give up. Russia will not be able to open the minds of at least two generations of Ukrainians who have grown up on American history textbooks, where there was simply no place for Russia and the Soviet Union.

The story of the Russian bikers who were prevented by Kiev officials from travelling through Ukrainian territory on their memorial tour to Berlin occurred for the same reasons: Europe is trying hard to forget who liberated them from the Nazis. Poland, Lithuania and other countries were opposed to the idea of Russian victory flags being carried along their tidy highways in order not to wake up the historical memory of the people, which they have managed to silence through years of anti-Russian propaganda. The new history being sold is that Washington, Canada and Australia, together with their European allies, emerged victorious in the battle against German and Russian fascism. Of course this is nonsense. But this is exactly what the Americans are steadily and systematically hammering it into the heads of the Europeans and Ukrainians.

But despite the obvious success in propaganda, the coup in Ukraine showed that the inspirers of that bloody event are in the minority. Otherwise, they would have quietly gone to the polls! Only after the secession of the Crimea and the breakout of war in Donbass and Lugansk, did pro-Western forces in Ukraine gain the majority - the main pro-Russian regions no longer take part in the elections. Which means, theoretically, the nationalists may emerge victorious in a referendum. The recent parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine were held under the same circumstances. Those who could vote for pro-Russian candidates have fled the country, intimidated, and no longer go to the polls. This created great opportunities for ballot box stuffing, as was the case a year ago when Poroshenko won the election in the first round. This happened against the backdrop of torched offices of the Region and Communist Parties, vandalized homes of pro-Russian politicians, and the plundering of President Yanukovich's residence.Elections unde such circumstances cannot be considered a priori legitimate, but both Europe and Russia found it wiser to recognize the results and communicate with those appointed by Washington.

That's why the local elections to be held in Ukraine in October this year, will hardly make any difference. Because of the catastrophic decline in the living standards of Ukrainians they will hardly be a "landslide", but they will not resurrect a political alternative to the neo-Nazis in power in Ukraine. And those who are now criticizing the government and may seem to even be fighting against the ruling elite, very often turn out to be its appointees.

In fact, the government and the opposition - are just the two sides of the same coin.And even if the opposition wins the election - it may change the cabinet but nothing will change in the policy of Ukraine. Most alarming is the fact that the Ukrainians like that. It is what they call their way towards Europe and democracy. And as for fascists - they were bred to scare the public and help the nationalists stay in power. But Ukrainian fascism has grown, matured and become power itself. This is the definition of what president Poroshenko has achieved.

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 #18
www.rt.com
May 28, 2015
NATO keeps pinning blame on Moscow, pushing Kiev to military resolution--Russian envoy

NATO is destabilizing the Ukrainian crisis by turning blind eye to Kiev's aim for a military solution, Moscow's envoy to NATO said, warning that alliance's rhetoric of shifting all responsibility onto Russia is not consistent with real state of affairs.

"NATO continues to position Russia as a participant in the conflict, which is far from reality and has a serious confrontational potential because, in essence, it gives Kiev carte blanche to seek a military solution to the conflict," Russian envoy to NATO Aleksandr Grushko told Rossiya 24 TV channel.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced earlier on Wednesday that the alliance will create up to eight new command and control units on its eastern borders.

"We are establishing six command and control units in the three Baltic countries [Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia] and in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. And probably also [there will] be two more of those in two more countries," Stoltenberg said.

Calling the alliance's belligerent rhetoric towards Moscow an "outdated" tune, Grushko added that NATO's approach is not consistent with the real state of affairs in Europe. The envoy hinted that NATO's perceptions of a threat is artificially created with the help of the Baltic countries which beef up an anti-Russian stance with baseless accusations of security threats.

"It seems like some states, for various reasons, including internal political, enjoy being in the front-line, requiring special attention, special protection. And what is most important, [these countries] continue to search for more enemies and to write off their own mistakes whether in foreign policy or internal under the guise of some mythical threat from Russia," Grushko said.

The exaggeration of the "Russian threat" and the buildup of NATO forces along its borders does not correlate with the real needs of security in the region, Grushko said, calling the situation "completely inadequate to the risks that exist in this region."

According to the diplomat, NATO has been boosting its activity in the region that for decades was absolutely safe in terms of "conventional threats." The alliance is now hosting over 30 jets in the Baltics, while before 2004 the region did not host any NATO air power, Grushko stated, also noting the increase in surveillance flights.

"Russia has increased its air activity by around 50 percent, so that is one of the reasons we have increased air policing on the NATO side," Stoltenberg explained during a conference at the Center for Strategic International Studies. The NATO chief also stated that the alliance's "security measures" also include a doubling of NATO Response Forces, and a creation of a spearhead rapid reaction force as well as the increasing the size and frequency of military exercises.

Meanwhile the prospects for NATO's further expansion to the east are bleak, believes Grushko, despite Kiev's plans to join the North Atlantic Alliance as mentioned in Ukraine's new national security strategy. Stoltenberg said eventually it's up to Ukraine "and 28 allies to decide if NATO's going to enlarge and have a new member" after Ukraine announced it "will implement a reform program and then aim at applying for membership."

But there are not many "enthusiasts" in NATO who really believe there are prospects for Ukraine to become a member, according to Grushko . This scenario is "virtually impossible" because everyone understands what a dangerous and unpredictable "mine" that would lay under European security, said Grushko.

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 #19
http://gordonhahn.com
DID PUTIN REALLY TELL BUSH 'UKRAINE IS NOT EVEN A STATE'?
By Gordon M. Hahn

An unconfirmed myth that at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest Russian President Vladimir Putin told the US President George W. Bush that "Ukraine is not even a state." This has become part of legend, coming into higher demand since the onset of the Ukrainian crisis last year. It was last mentioned in The National on August 17th. (Stephen Blackewell, "Putin is prepared to alienate the West to suit his agenda," The National, 17 August 2014, www.thenational.ae/putin-is-prepared-to-alienate-the-west-to-suit-his-agenda).

The original claim that Putin made such a statement was published in the Russian media, citing an unidentified source. Thus, Time reported in May 2009 that, "In April 2008, a source told Russia's Kommersant newspaper how Putin described Ukraine to George Bush at a NATO meeting in Bucharest: 'You don't understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us'" (Time, 25 May 2009, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1900838,00.html).

The original Kommersant article covered Putin's comments in a speech at a closed NATO-Russia Council meeting held after the general meeting on April 5th.  Putin was not invited to speak at the general meeting and thus did not attend. Then Ukrainian President Viktor Yushenko was invited to speak and did so. The original Kommersant article cites an unidentified "source in the delegation of one of the NATO countries" as its documentation of Putin's remark. The section covering Putin's alleged statement reads: "Turning to Bush, he (Putin) said: 'You do understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? A part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but a part, a significant (part) was given as a gift from us.' And here he (Putin) very transparently implied that if Ukraine is all the same accepted into NATO, (then) this state will simply cease its existence. That is, he (Putin) in fact threatened that Russia can being to tear away Crimea and Eastern Ukraine" (Olga Allyonova, Yelena Geda, and Vladimir Novikov, "Blok NATO razosholsya na blokpakety," Kommersant, 7 April 2008, www.kommersant.ru/doc/877224). To reiterate, the claim that Putin said this comes from an unidentified source who was in the delegation of an unidentified NATO member-state. There is no claim in the article that the authors sought corroboration from another source.

On the day after the Kommersant publication, the claim went global at least in the Western press. For example, The Moscow Times published an article signed 'Unknown' under the title "Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine," in which it related as fact the conjecture from the undisclosed source. The Moscow Times referred to the source as "an unidentified foreign delegate" ('of a NATO country' was left out) and quickly promoted him in the next sentence to "diplomat." The relevant section of the article reads:

"President Vladimir Putin hinted at last week's NATO summit in Romania that Russia would work to break up Ukraine, should the former Soviet republic join the military alliance, Kommersant reported Monday. Putin 'lost his temper' at the NATO-Russia Council in Bucharest during Friday's discussions of Ukraine's bid to join NATO, Kommersant cited an unidentified foreign delegate to the summit as saying. 'Do you understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state!' Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush at the closed meeting, the diplomat told Kommersant. After saying most of Ukraine's territory was 'given away' by Russia, Putin said that if Ukraine joined NATO it would cease to exist as a state, the diplomat said. Putin threatened to encourage the secession of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where anti-NATO and pro-Moscow sentiment is strong, the diplomat said, Kommersant reported. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who accompanied Putin at the summit, said Monday he did not hear Putin's purported remarks about Ukraine and could not confirm the report." (Unknown, "Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine," Moscow Times, 8 April 2008, www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-hints-at-splitting-up-ukraine/361701.html). Thus, MT broke up Putin's sentences as reported by the 'diplomat' and inserted presuppositions from which inferences would be made in order to give the statement a more sinister veneer, with Putin appearing to directly threaten that Russian actions would aim to dismember Ukraine.

Equally as interesting is that MT sought to corroborate the source's information only with Putin's presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov and not with other members of NATO member-state's delegations present at the speech. Peskov "said Monday he did not hear Putin's purported remarks about Ukraine and could not confirm the report," MT reported ("Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine," Moscow Times, 8 April 2008, www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-hints-at-splitting-up-ukraine/361701.html).

As far as I am able to confirm, Putin has never refuted the claim in the Kommersant report. Niether Bush nor anyone else has confirmed or denied the report.

Therefore, these reports might have been part of a strategic communication (stratcomm) or propaganda operation. Since most reporters and news writers do not read or speak Russian, they would be forced to rely on the MT version of the event and so it has been repeated many times without an effort to corroborate.

If you are wondering whether stratcomm ops are relevant to the present Ukraine crisis, you might look at a recent event involving Radek Sikorski. In October of last year Sikorski was caught lying about the very same Ukraine. In a Politico article, Ben Judah joyously reported that Sikorski told him in an interview that in a meeting with Polish President Donald Tusk, Putin had proposed Poland and Russia divide Ukraine between themselves - ala the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This fit nicely into the 'Russia as the USSR of today' narrative. Soon Tusk said that no such conversation took place, and Sikorski was forced to retract his words. He had been once been a leading candidate for the position of NATO Secretary General.

To conclude, it is very likely that Sikorki was Kommersant's 'unidentified member of a delegation of a NATO member-country' in 2008, that his claim regarding Putin's 'Ukraine is not even a state' remark was false, and that he was carrying out a stratcomm op to discredit Putin and heighten urgency regarding Georgia's and Ukraine's entries into NATO.

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 #20
Newsweek.com/Brookings
May 18, 2015
Why Putin Is Afraid of Ukraine
By Chrystia Freeland
Chrystia Freeland is a journalist, author and politician. She was a stringer in Ukraine, deputy editor of The Globe and Mail, and has held positions at theFinancial Times ranging from Moscow bureau chief to U.S. managing editor. As an activist Ukrainian-Canadian, she has written several articles criticizing Russia's interventionism and supporting Ukrainian independence. Freeland is author of Sale of the Century, a book about Russia's transition from communism to capitalism, and the award-winning book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Since 2013, Freeland has been a member of Canada's Parliament, representing Toronto Centre in the House of Commons. This article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website.bThis article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website.

On March 24 last year, I was in my Toronto kitchen preparing school lunches for my kids when I learned from my Twitter feed that I had been put on the Kremlin's list of Westerners who were banned from Russia. This was part of Russia's retaliation for the sanctions the United States and its allies had slapped on Vladimir Putin's associates after his military intervention in Ukraine.

Four days earlier, nine people from the U.S. had been similarly blacklisted, including John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Harry Reid, then the majority leader of the Senate, and three other senators: John McCain, a long-time critic of Putin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Dan Coats of Indiana, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany. "While I'm disappointed that I won't be able to go on vacation with my family in Siberia this summer," Coats wisecracked, "I am honored to be on this list.''

I, however, was genuinely sad. I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college. I loved living in Moscow in the mid-1990s as bureau chief for the Financial Times and have made a point of returning regularly over the subsequent 15 years.

I'm also a proud member of the Ukrainian-Canadian community. My maternal grandparents fled western Ukraine after Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact in 1939. They never dared to go back, but they stayed in close touch with their brothers and sisters and their families, who remained behind.

For the rest of my grandparents' lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine, which had last existed, briefly, during and after the chaos of the 1917 Russian Revolution. That dream persisted into the next generation, and in some cases the generation after that.

My late mother moved back to her parents' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the 13 other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.

My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany before the family immigrated to western Canada. They were able to get visas thanks to my grandfather's older sister, who had immigrated between the wars. Her generation, and an earlier wave of Ukrainian settlers, had been actively recruited by successive Canadian governments keen to populate the vast prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Today, Canada's Ukrainian community, which is 1.25 million strong, is significantly larger as a percentage of total population than the one in the United States, which is why it is also a far more significant political force. And that in turn probably accounts for the fact that, while there were no Ukrainian-Americans on the Kremlin's blacklist, four of the 13 Canadians singled out were of Ukrainian extraction: in addition to myself, my fellow Canadian Member of Parliament James Bezan, Senator Raynell Andreychuk and Paul Grod, who has no national elective role but is head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

I made the Russian list of the unwelcome as a three-fer: an activist Ukrainian-Canadian, a politician (I was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 2013 to represent Toronto Centre) and a journalist with a long paper trail that frequently displeased the Kremlin, since I covered Moscow's brutal war in Chechnya in the 1990s and also wrote a book about the rise of the Russian oligarchs.

I interviewed Putin himself in 2000, shortly after he took over as president. When, in 2011, he decided to take the presidency back from his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, I wrote a column in The New York Times arguing that Putin's Russia was on its way to becoming a full-fledged dictatorship that would eventually be vulnerable to a popular uprising.

Until March of last year, none of this prevented my getting a Russian visa. I was, on several occasions, invited to moderate panels at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin's version of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Then, in 2013, Medvedev agreed to let me interview him in an off-the-record briefing for media leaders at the real Davos annual meeting.

That turned out to be the last year when Russia, despite its leadership's increasingly despotic and xenophobic tendencies, was still, along with the major Western democracies and Japan, a member in good standing of the G-8. Russia in those days was also part of the elite global group Goldman Sachs had dubbed the BRICs-the acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China-the emerging market powerhouses that were expected to drive the world economy forward.

Putin was counting on the $50 billion extravaganza of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to further solidify Russia's position at the high table of the international community.

President Viktor Yanukovych's flight from Ukraine in the face of the Maidan uprising, which took place on the eve of the closing day of those Winter Games, astonished and enraged Putin. In his pique, as Putin proudly recalled in a March 2015 Russian government television film, he responded by ordering the takeover of Crimea after an all-night meeting.

That occurred at dawn on the morning of February 23, 2014, the finale of the Sochi Olympics. The war of aggression, occupation and annexation that followed turned out to be the grim beginning of a new era, and what might be the start of a new cold war, or worse.

Putin's big lie

The crisis that burst into the news a year-and-a-half ago has often been explained as Putin's exploitation of divisions between the mainly Russian-speaking majority of Ukrainians in the eastern and southern regions of the country, and the mainly Ukrainian-speaking majority in the west and center. Russian is roughly as different from Ukrainian as Spanish is from Italian.

While the linguistic factor is real, it is often oversimplified in several respects: Russian-speakers are by no means all pro-Putin or secessionist; Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers are geographically commingled; and virtually everyone in Ukraine has at least a passive understanding of both languages.

To make matters more complicated, Russian is the first language of many ethnic Ukrainians, who are 78 percent of the population (but even that category is blurry, because many people in Ukraine have both Ukrainian and Russian roots). President Petro Poroshenko is an example-he always understood Ukrainian, but learned to speak it only in 1996, after being elected to Parliament; and Russian remains the domestic language of the Poroshenko family.

The same is true in the home of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine's prime minister. The best literary account of the Maidan uprising to date was written in Russian:Ukraine Diaries, by Andrey Kurkov, the Russian-born, ethnic Russian novelist, who lives in Kiev.

In this last respect, my own family is, once again, quite typical. My maternal grandmother, born into a family of Orthodox clerics in central Ukraine, grew up speaking Russian and Ukrainian. Ukrainian was the main language of the family refuge she eventually found in Canada, but she and my grandfather spoke Ukrainian and Russian as well as Polish interchangeably and with equal fluency.

When they told stories, it was natural for them to quote each character in his or her original language. I do the same thing today with Ukrainian and English, my mother having raised me to speak both languages, as I in turn have done with my three children.

For individual Ukrainians, though less often for the country as whole, this linguistic kinship has sometimes been an advantage. Nikolai Gogol, known to Ukrainians as Mykola Hohol, was the son of a prosperous Ukrainian gentleman farmer. His first works were in Ukrainian, and he often wrote about Ukraine.

But he entered the international literary canon as a Russian writer, a feat he is unlikely to have accomplished had Dead Souls been written in his native language. Many ethnic Ukrainians were likewise successful in the Soviet nomenklatura, where these so-called younger brothers of the ruling Russians had a trusted and privileged place, comparable to the role of Scots in the British Empire.

But familiarity can also breed contempt. Russia's perceived kinship with Ukrainians often slipped into an attempt to eradicate them. These have ranged from Tsar Alexander II's 1876 "Ems Ukaz," which banned the use of Ukrainian in print, on the stage or in public lectures and the 1863 Valuev ukaz that asserted that "the Ukrainian language has never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist," to Stalin's genocidal famine in the 1930s.

In short, being a Russian-speaker in Ukraine does not automatically imply a yearning for subordination to the Kremlin any more than speaking English in Ireland or Scotland means support for a political union with England. As Kurkov writes in his Diaries: "I am a Russian myself, after all, an ethnically Russian citizen of Ukraine. But I am not 'a Russian,' because I have nothing in common with Russia and its politics. I do not have Russian citizenship and I do not want it."

That said, it's true that people on both sides of the political divide have tried to declare their allegiances through the vehicle of language. Immediately after the overthrow and self-exile of Yanukovych, radical nationalists in Parliament passed a law making Ukrainian the sole national language-a self-destructive political gesture and a gratuitous insult to a large body of the population. However, the contentious language bill was never signed into law by the acting president.

Many civic-minded citizens also resisted such polarizing moves. As though to make amends for Parliament's action, within 72 hours the people of Lviv, the capital of the Ukrainian-speaking west, held a Russian-speaking day, in which the whole city made a symbolic point of shifting to the country's other language.

Less than two weeks after the language measure was enacted it was rescinded, though not before Putin had the chance to make considerable hay out of it.

The blurring of linguistic and ethnic identities reflects the geographic and historic ties between Ukraine and Russia. But that affinity has also bred, among many in Russia, a deep-seated antipathy to the very idea of a truly independent and sovereign Ukrainian state.

0515_Ukraine04A general view shows Lenin square and a statue of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine April 15, 2014. A blurring of linguistic and ethnic identities reflects the geographic and historic ties between Ukraine and Russia. MARKO DJURICA/REUTERSRussians see Ukraine as the cradle of their civilization. Even the name came from there: the vast empire of the tsars evolved from Kievan Rus, a loose federation of Slavic tribes in the Middle Ages.

The ties that bind are also contemporary and personal. Two Soviet leaders-Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev-not only spent their early years in Ukraine but spoke Russian with a distinct Ukrainian accent. This historic connectedness is one reason why their post-Soviet successor, Vladimir Putin, has been able to build such wide popular support in Russia for championing-and, as he is now trying to do, recreating-"Novorossiya" (New Russia) in Ukraine.

In selling his revanchist policy to the Russian public, Putin has depicted Ukrainians who cherish their independence and want to join Europe and embrace the Western democratic values it represents as, at best, pawns and dupes of NATO-or, at worst, neo-Nazis. As a result, many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.

Airbrushing the truth

This subterfuge is, arguably, Putin's single most dramatic resort to the Soviet tactic of the Big Lie. Through his virtual monopoly of the Russian media, Putin has airbrushed away the truth of what happened a quarter of a century ago: the dissolution of the USSR was the result not of Western manipulation but of the failings of the Soviet state, combined with the initiatives of Soviet reformist leaders who had widespread backing from their citizens.

Moreover, far from conspiring to tear the USSR apart, Western leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s used their influence to try to keep it together.

It all started with Mikhail Gorbachev, who, when he came to power in 1985, was determined to revitalize a sclerotic economy and political system with "perestroika" (literally, rebuilding), "glasnost" (openness) and a degree of democratization.

These policies, Gorbachev believed, would save the USSR. Instead, they triggered a chain reaction that led to its collapse. By softening the mailed-fist style of governing that traditionally accrued to his job, Gorbachev empowered other reformers-notably his protégé-turned-rival Boris Yeltsin-who wanted not to rebuild the USSR but to dismantle it.

Their actions radiated from Moscow to the capitals of the other Soviet republics-most dramatically Kiev. Ukrainian democratic reformers and dissidents seized the chance to advance their own agenda-political liberalization and Ukrainian statehood-so that their country could be free forever from the dictates of the Kremlin.

However, they were also pragmatists. Recognizing that after centuries of rule from Moscow, Ukraine's national consciousness was weak while its Communist Party was strong, they cut a tacit deal with the Ukrainian political leadership: In exchange for the Communists' support for independence, the democratic opposition would postpone its demands for political and economic reform.

By 1991, the centrifugal forces in the Soviet Union were coming to a head. Putin, in his rewrite of history, would have the world believe that the United States was cheering and covertly supporting secessionism. On the contrary, President George H.W. Bush was concerned that the breakup of the Soviet Union would be dangerously destabilizing. He had put his chips on Gorbachev and reform Communism and was skeptical about Yeltsin.

In July of that year, Bush traveled first to Moscow to shore up Gorbachev, then to Ukraine, where, on August 1, he delivered a speech to the Ukrainian Parliament exhorting his audience to give Gorbachev a chance at keeping a reforming Soviet Union together: "Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred."

I was living in Kiev at the time, working as a stringer for the Financial Times,The Economist and The Washington Post. Listening to Bush in the parliamentary press gallery, I felt he had misread the growing consensus in Ukraine. That became even clearer immediately afterward when I interviewed Ukrainian MPs, all of whom expressed outrage and scorn at Bush for, as they saw it, taking Gorbachev's side.

0515_Ukraine05Then-U.S. President George H. W. Bush, left, and then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev shake hands in front of U.S. and Soviet flags at the end of the press conference in Moscow in this file image from July 31, 1991. RICK WILKING/FILES/REUTERSThe address, which New York Times columnist William Safire memorably dubbed the "Chicken Kiev speech," backfired in the United States as well, antagonizing Americans of Ukrainian descent and other East European diasporas, which may have hurt Bush's chances of re-election, costing him support in several key states.

But Bush was no apologist for Communism. His speech was heavily influenced by Condoleezza Rice, not a notable soft touch, and it echoed the United Kingdom's Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who, a year earlier, had said she could no more imagine opening a British embassy in Kiev than in San Francisco.

The magnitude of the West's miscalculation, and Gorbachev's, became clear less than a month later. On August 19, a feckless attempt by Russian hardliners to overthrow Gorbachev triggered a stampede to the exits by the non-Russian republics, especially in the Baltic States and Ukraine. On August 24, in Kiev, the MPs Bush had lectured three weeks earlier voted for independence.

Three months after that, I sat in my Kiev studio apartment-on a cobblestone street where the Russian-language writer Mikhail Bulgakov once lived-listening to Gorbachev's televised plea to the Ukrainian people not to secede. He invoked his maternal grandmother who (like mine) was Ukrainian; he rhapsodized about his happy childhood in the Kuban in southern Russia, where the local dialect is closer to Ukrainian than to Russian. He quoted-in passable Ukrainian-a verse from Taras Shevchenko, a serf freed in the 19th century who became Ukraine's national poet. Gorbachev was fighting back tears as he spoke.

That was November 30, 1991. The next day, 92 percent of Ukrainians who participated in a national referendum voted for independence. A majority in every region of the country including Crimea (where 56 percent voted to separate) supported breaking away.

Two weeks later, Ukraine's President Leonid Kravchuk met Yeltsin, who by then was the elected president of the Russian Federation. The two of them, along with the president of Belarus, signed an accord that formally dissolved the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev, who'd set in motion a process that he could not control, had lost his job and his country. Down came the red stars on the spires, up went the Russian tricolor in place of the hammer-and-sickle. Yeltsin took his place in the Kremlin office and residence that Putin occupies today.

Therein lies a stunning double irony. First, Yeltsin-who plucked Putin from obscurity and hand-picked him as his successor-would not have been able to engineer Russia's own emergence as an independent state had it not been for Ukraine's eagerness to break free as well.

Second, the world would almost certainly never have heard of Putin had it not been for the dissolution of the USSR, which Putin has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."

Little reform, big corruption

Then came the hard part. Having broken up the Soviet Union, Moscow and Kiev both faced three immediate, vast and novel challenges: how to establish genuine statehood and independence for their brand new countries; create efficacious democracies with checks and balances and rule of law; and make the transition from the Communist command economy to capitalism.

Accomplishing all three tasks at once was essential, but it proved impossible. As a result, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, Russia and Ukraine each failed in its own way.

Post-Soviet Russia's wrong turn came in the form of the Faustian bargain its first group of leaders-the Yeltsin team of economists known as the young reformers-was willing to strike in order to achieve their overriding priority: wrenching Russia from central planning to a market economy.

They accomplished a lot, laying the foundations for Russia's economic rebound in the new millennium. But along the way they struck deals, most stunningly the vast handover of state assets to the oligarchs in exchange for their political support, which eventually transformed Russia into a kleptocracy and discredited the very idea of democracy with the Russian people.

Ukraine's path to failure started with the 1991 compromise between democratic reformers and the Ukrainian Communist establishment. That tactical alliance proved to be both brilliant and doomed. Its value was immediate-Ukraine became, as long as Russia acquiesced, a sovereign state. The cost was revealed only gradually, but it was staggeringly high.

Like Russia's Yeltsin, a former candidate-member of the Politburo, Ukraine's new leadership was made up overwhelmingly of relics of the Soviet-era leadership: Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine's first president, had been the ideology secretary of the Communist Party in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; his successor, Leonid Kuchma, had been the director of a mega-factory in Dnipropetrovsk that built the SS-18 missiles, the 10-warhead behemoth of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces.

Once the superpower they had thrived in disappeared, these men, and most of those around them, adopted Ukrainian patriotism, soon proving themselves to be enthusiastic, determined and wily advocates of Ukrainian independence. Their conversion was intensely opportunistic-it allowed them to preserve, and even enhance, their political power and offered the added perk of huge personal wealth.

But because many of the leaders of post-Soviet Ukraine had a genuine emotional connection to their country, they also took pride in building Ukrainian sovereignty, which put them at odds with some of their former colleagues in Russia, including, they would eventually discover, Vladimir Putin.

Unfortunately, their commitment to statehood was not matched by any coherent vision of economic reform, and they followed the usual post-Soviet project of enriching themselves and their comrades. The result, in addition to massive corruption, was gross mismanagement of the economy. Russia's economic performance in the two decades following the collapse of communism was mixed at best; Ukraine's was absolutely dire.

But when it came to democracy, the tables were reversed. Even though the pact between Ukrainian reformers and the Communist Party left the nomenklatura, as the Soviet leadership class was known, essentially intact, it turned out to be remarkably-and mercifully-inept at authoritarian governance.

The Ukrainian Communist Party and the KGB, with their formal ties to Moscow severed, were unprepared to act effectively on their own. Instead of closing ranks to rule the country, the power elites broke into competing clans associated with the major cities and regions. The result was a newborn country that was accidentally pluralistic, allowing democracy to spring up through the cracks in the regime's control.

Proof of that came in 1994 when Kravchuk lost his reelection campaign. The very fact that he could be voted out of office was an early but important milestone for a fledgling democracy. It is one that Russia, with its more deeply rooted absolutist political system, has yet to reach.

That said, what followed was not exactly encouraging. Kravchuk's successor, Leonid Kuchma, began to turn back the clock, harassing the opposition and the media. After serving the constitutionally maximum two five-year terms, Kuchma was able to rig the 2004 election in favor of his dauphin, Viktor Yanukovych, who was prime minister.

But Kuchma and Yanukovych overestimated their power to manipulate the electorate-and they underestimated civil society. In what became known as the Orange Revolution, Ukrainians camped out in the Maidan-the central square in Kiev-and demanded a new election. They got it.

Then came a truly tragic irony. Yanukovych's opponent and polar opposite was Viktor Yushchenko, a highly respected economist and former head of the central bank. He was the champion of Ukrainian democracy. Largely for that reason, he was hated and feared by many in Russia, notably in Putin's inner circle.

Yushchenko was poisoned on the eve of the ballot. The attempt on his life left him seriously ill and permanently scarred, yet he triumphed in the election. However, Yushchenko then did such a poor job in office that Yanukovych, who had failed to become president by cheating in 2004, ended up being elected fair and square in 2010.

Over the next four years of Yanukovych's rule, the Ukrainian state became more corrupt and abusive of political rights than it had been even in the last years of Kuchma's presidency. Nonetheless, the legacy of the 1991 compromise between the democrats and the apparatchiks lived on through the success of at least two of its main goals: peace and survival.

When, two years ago, Ukraine celebrated its 22nd anniversary as an independent state, the longest period in modern history, it had-for all its troubles-at least avoided violent separatism within its own borders, not to mention a war with Russia.

Then, in November of that year, came the first tremors of the cataclysm.

The Maidan and the return of history

According to Putin's propaganda, the original fault line was within Ukraine, in the form of ethnic tension, and only later did the conflict take on a geopolitical dimension and disrupt relations with Russia.

A more objective and accurate version is that the unremitting and escalating crisis of the last year-and-a-half erupted in two stages: first, when Yanukovych reneged on a promised trade deal with Europe, part of a general turning away from the West, which set off a massive demonstration of people power; and then when, with Moscow's support, he unleashed bloody force on the demonstrators.

But that drama has its own origin in 1991. Back then, the leaders and many of the people of Ukraine and Russia shared the dream of joining the political West, a choice that was about much more than geopolitics-it meant choosing the rule of law, democracy and individual rights over authoritarian kleptocracy.

Now Russia, at least as represented by the most powerful Kremlin leader since Stalin, has turned its back on that dream, while Ukraine's leader, with the backing of most of his people, is determined to keep it alive.

Sitting on my uncle Bohdan's couch in central Kiev, 10 days after Viktor Yanukovych's flight from Ukraine, I began to grasp what was at stake. Bohdan is my mother's brother, an agronomist who was born in and grew up in Canada, but moved to Kiev during the 1990s, around the same time my mother did. He married a bilingual Ukrainian and, after two decades living there, is comfortable in both Ukrainian and Russian.

When I arrived at Bohdan's high-ceilinged, post-war apartment on March 4, 2014, he and his wife, Tanya, like so many Kievites, were glued to their television and its coverage of the political tumult that followed Yanukovych's ouster.

The previous three-and-a-half months had been an emotional whipsaw. In the past two weeks alone, the citizens of the capital had suffered the bloodiest conflict on their streets since World War II. They had also watched their reviled president, Yanukovych, flee to Russia, a provisional government take charge, Russian troops assert control over part of their country and Putin insist on his right to take further military action.

Ukrainians were simultaneously celebrating their eviction of Yanukovych, mourning the victims of the slaughter on the Maidan, horrified by the invasion of Crimea and fearful of the possibility of a long, grinding war fanned and often directly waged by their giant neighbor to the north.

During my evenings on my uncle's couch, I watched a number of extraordinarily dramatic events playing out on the TV screen, including many profiles in heroism. Some dramatized the complexity of the ethnic and linguistic issue that Putin was exploiting to his own cynical advantage.

In those first days of March, for example, Maksym Emelyanenko, captain of the corvette Ternopil in the Ukrainian navy, was ordered by the commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet to hand over control of his vessel. Captain Emelyanenko answered: "Russians do not surrender!"

The surprised Russian vice-admiral asked the Ukrainian seaman what he meant. Captain Emelyanenko replied that, although he was ethnically Russian (his Ukrainian last name notwithstanding), he had given his oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian state and he would not betray it.

My aunt Tanya, who'd grown up in Ukraine, recalled that the slogan "Russians do not surrender" ("Russkiye ne sdayutsa") was a famous battle cry of the Red Army during the Second World War, in which Ukraine bore the second most Soviet casualties in absolute numbers and suffered an even greater loss than Russia in proportional terms. She found Captain Emelyanenko's valor to be both poignant and a stinging rebuke to the Kremlin leader who was now unleashing war on the Soviet fatherland's own children.

My uncle and aunt, along with many Ukrainians, hoped that passive resistance would prevail as it had in the Maidan demonstrators' stand-off with Yanukovych. But, as the covert occupation of Crimea, ordered by Putin and spearheaded by "little green men"-as the Russian soldiers without insignia who took over the peninsula were called-inched toward outright annexation, it quickly became apparent that peaceful tactics would not succeed against the near-term objectives of Putin.

That said, I could sense, even in those early days, that Putin's use of overwhelming Russian force to crush Ukrainian resistance was backfiring against his ultimate goal, which was to bring Ukraine back under Russian sway.

The day after I arrived in Kiev I met Yegor Sobolev, a 37-year-old activist, over cappuccinos at a cafe on the Khreshchatyk, Kiev's central boulevard. An ethnic Russian who was born and raised in Russia, Sobolev was one of a group of young, politically engaged Ukrainians who were the backbone of the Maidan movement starting back in November 2013.

He was a confidant of Mustafa Nayyem, a Muslim refugee from Afghanistan who was celebrated for launching the protests through a Facebook call to action. Sobolev and Nayyem are both former journalists who had tried to uncover the skullduggery and looting of the Yanukovych regime, and then had been motivated to political action by their revulsion at Yanukovych's brutality. (Both men would be elected to Parliament several months later, as advocates of democratic and economic reform.)

"For many years, a big social problem was the passivity of people in the building of the nation," Sobolev told me. "Yanukovych forced us, not just during the Maidan but before, to get angry and finally to fight, even with weapons. People have learned that the country is them."

I heard similar sentiments wherever I went in Kiev that week. The capital was, almost literally, grievously wounded. The air was thick with smoke from bonfires, reeking with the stench of burning tires. The once-elegant Khreshchatyk was a grimy tent city, the avenue itself denuded of its cobblestones because protesters had pulled them up to throw at the armored special forces who were firing tear gas and live bullets at them.

A steady stream of Kievites, many of them stylish matrons in long fur coats and high-heeled leather boots, made their way to Institytska, the steep street leading up from the Maidan. Their mission was to lay bouquets on the two-story-high mountain of flowers in tribute to the victims of police and snipers, known as the Heavenly Hundred (it sounds less mawkish in Ukrainian).

But Kiev also felt invigorated and united. The city was experiencing the kind of we're-all-in-this-together feeling familiar to anyone who lived through the London Blitz, or 9/11, or other times of national crisis and tragedy.

"Yanukovych freed Ukraine, and Putin is uniting it," Sobolev told me. "Ukraine is functioning not through its government but through the self-organization of its people and their sense of human decency."

I found myself harking back to 1991, when Ukrainian democrats I interviewed felt they had to choose between democracy and sovereignty. Now, in the wake of the Maidan and in the midst of the Russian land grab, Ukrainians had come to see that both are critical and that they are mutually reinforcing.

By early March of last year, as it became glaringly obvious that Ukraine was fighting not just for its political soul but for national survival, support for the agenda of the pro-Maidan provisional government and the sense of solidarity under pressure started to flow south and east-into the very regions that both Putin and simplistic international media coverage had characterized as pro-Russian.

A comprehensive poll done in April by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, one of the country's most respected polling firms, found, for instance, that in those regions of Ukraine 76.8 percent of respondents opposed the seizure of government buildings by separatist protesters; only 11.7 percent supported it. Nearly 70 percent were opposed to the unification of their region of Ukraine with Russia; only 15.4 percent were in favor.

An overwhelming 87.7 percent said that Ukraine should make its own decisions about internal affairs, such as constitutional structure and official language, without any involvement from outside powers, specifically Russia. (Interestingly, 71.5 percent said the rights of Russian language speakers were not under any threat in Ukraine.) It is worth underscoring that these strong views are the opinions of the lands Putin has claimed as "Novorossiya," the largely Russian-speaking southern and eastern regions of Ukraine.

0515_Ukraine01A fighter with the separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic Army stands guard at a checkpoint along a road from the town of Vuhlehirsk to Debaltseve in Ukraine, in this picture taken February 18, 2015. BAZ RATNER/REUTERS

"People in Odessa, Mykolaev, Donetsk, and Dnipropetrovsk [all cities with large Russian-speaking populations] are coming out to defend their country," Sobolev said. "They have never liked the western Ukrainian, Galician point of view. But they are showing themselves to be equally patriotic. They are defending their country from foreign aggression. Fantastical things are happening."

Western Ukraine, known as Galicia, had long seen itself as the most nationally conscious region, the one that would lead a broader effort to knit the nation together and build a sovereign state. Culturally, historically, linguistically and even religiously, southern and eastern Ukraine were quite different, and did not always appreciate the Galician assumption that the western Ukrainian version of Ukraine was the best and truest one.

One of the paradoxical consequences of the Russian invasion was that southern and eastern Ukraine were proudly asserting their versions of Ukrainian identity as equally authentic and powerful.

Four days after I arrived in Kiev, Serhiy Zhadan, described by The New Yorkeras Ukraine's "best-known poet" and "most famous counter-culture writer," was beaten by pro-Russian agitators at a Maidan demonstration. But that protest didn't take place in Kiev's Maidan. It happened 500 kilometers east in Kharkiv, the capital of eastern Ukraine where Zhadan, who was born in the Donbass, now lives and works.

His writing-think Irving Welsh's Trainspotting set against a grim post-Soviet backdrop-is very popular in Russia, but he writes in Ukrainian, partly, he says, as a political act. When his attackers asked him to kneel and kiss the Russian flag, Zhadan recalled on his Facebook page-"I told them to go fuck themselves." (Zhadan's English-language translator happens to be another uncle of mine.)

Before I left Kiev in March, I took a final walk along the Khreshchatyk. Two hand-written signs, taped to the walls of buildings, stood out. "Russian people, we love you," one said, in Russian. "Putin, Ukraine will be your grave," another, written in Ukrainian, warned.

Blue and yellow versus the "little green men"

I saw the transformation Sobolev had told me about first-hand 10 weeks later, when I returned to Ukraine for the presidential election. I spent a day in Dnipropetrovsk, a city just 150 miles from the Russian border, whose citizens are largely Russian-speaking and whose industry was vital to the Soviet Union (to wit: those SS-18 missiles Kuchma built for a living). Leonid Brezhnev was born and educated there, and it remained his lifelong political powerbase.

But on election day, Dnipropetrovsk was wreathed in symbols of Ukrainian statehood. Apartment buildings were draped in blue and yellow, the colors of the national flag; every second car sported the same colors; many election officials wore shirts worked with traditional Ukrainian embroidery.

Dnipropetrovsk had resisted the little green men-the governor had offered a $10,000 bounty for any captured Russian soldier-and was scornful of the "Soviet" mentality of neighboring Donetsk, which was suffering from a so-called hybrid war (waged by Russian-backed locals armed with Russian equipment and artillery and supported by undercover Russian officers, advisers and soldiers who were, according to the Russian government, "volunteering while on holiday").

This political shift provoked another twist of Ukraine's linguistic kaleidoscope. Now that civil society's common enemy was Yanukovych and the Kremlin political values he represented, speaking Ukrainian in public came to symbolize the fight for democracy, notably including in the east. For his part, Sobolev told me he had overcome his "psychological barrier" to speaking Ukrainian by reading For Whom the Bell Tolls in Ukrainian translation out loud to himself.

The threat and the promise of Ukrainian democracy

Ukrainians today are proud of the democratic episodes in their country's history, and in Kiev you are likely to hear the country described as culturally inclined toward democracy. In late November, President Petro Poroshenko celebrated the formation of a new government following October parliamentary elections with a Tweet that made this point to his 237,700 followers: "The main difference between Ukraine and Russia isn't only linguistic, it lies in our differing political cultures and attitudes to freedom and democracy."

It is an entirely good thing that Ukraine's new leaders are defining their national identity as inherently democratic and freedom-loving. But there have been times when Russia might have laid claim to such an identity, too.

To take just one example: on August 19, 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed on top of a tank in Moscow in front of the White House to defy a hardline coup and assert that "the democratic process in the country is acquiring an increasingly broad sweep and an irreversible character, the peoples of Russia are becoming masters of their destiny."

A quarter century later, no one would make that assertion in Moscow. But it is the sort of thing said every day in Kiev. And that is why Putin is determined to subdue Ukraine. He doesn't need Ukraine for economic gain-indeed, his aggression has come at a great, and mounting, economic cost.

He doesn't need Ukraine for strategic reasons-Putin today is master of Crimea, but Russia is more isolated, less respected and surrounded by more suspicious neighbors than was the proud host of the Sochi Olympics just a year ago. He doesn't even need the immediate popularity bump leaders always get at the beginning of a foreign war, especially one promised to be short and victorious.

What he does need is to show that a democratic, rule-of-law Ukraine can't work.

As Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin's prime minister and once shared a sauna with his boss before joining the political opposition, told me in November: "We are similar people. As soon as Russians understand that Ukrainians can be free, why shouldn't we be, too? That is why Mr. Putin hates what is happening so much, and doesn't want Ukraine to escape his grip."

Leonid Bershidsky, a distinguished Russian journalist who was so appalled by what happened in his country in 2014 that he left, thinks that for Putin, February 22, 2014 was the tipping point. That was the day the police melted away from Mezhyhirya, Yanukovych's grotesquely palatial estate outside Kiev, and the public flooded in.

They discovered a lavish complex including grand, manicured parks, a zoo and a restaurant shaped like a pirate ship. Inside the main residence, a solid gold loaf of rye bread-a tribute to Yanukovych from a petitioner-was found. That absurd sculpture quickly became the symbol of Yanukovych's criminal excess. (You can follow it on Twitter at the Russian-language parody account @zolotoybaton.)

That was the moment, Bershidsky believes, when Putin "submitted to paranoia" and decided it was essential to crush the new Ukraine. After all, he and his cronies have palaces, too.

Bershidsky is right. There were many bloodier and more dramatic episodes over the past year. But the opening of the gates of Mezhyhirya gets to the essence of what is at stake. The uprising in Ukraine and the fight between Ukraine and Russia is about many things-Ukraine's consolidation as a nation, a wounded Russia's rising nationalism, the uncertainty of a world in which the Cold War is over-but we haven't quite figured out what will replace it.

At its heart, however, the conflicts within Ukraine, and the fight Putin has picked with Ukraine, are about post-Soviet kleptocracy, and where and whether there is a popular will to resist it.

Last September, I drove out to Mezhyhirya. It had become a much-visited public park. The grassy shoulders of the surrounding country roads were crowded with parked cars. A few couples were having their wedding pictures taken beside the ornate fountains. Two entrepreneurs were renting bicycles at the entrance to make it easier to tour the vast grounds. Others were doing a brisk business selling toilet paper and doormats with Yanukovych's image on them. Even more popular were the ones depicting Putin.

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