Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

Operatörerna Ukrainas säkerhetstjänst fängslade i Odessa subversiv grupp på fyra personer beväpnade med pistoler moderniserade AKS-7, 62 och pistoler.

För informations SBU , planerade gruppen att genomföra en väpnad attack mot en militär enhet stationerad i Odessa-regionen, och beslagta skjutvapen. Angripare planerar också att engagera i olaglig verksamhet för att bli utbildade personer med erfarenhet av militärtjänst eller deltagande i fientligheter.

“We can’t budge from this square, because if we do, in two days Putin’s tanks will be here,” said Alexander Kononko, 39, a wiry and prematurely wizened fighter whose red-and-black insignia identifies him as a member of a militia that become a flashpoint in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The militia is called Right Sector, and the name has become synonymous with the ultranationalist presence in Ukraine’s new government that President Vladimir Putin has cited as justification for Russia annexing Crimea and tipping off a Cold War-style confrontation with Europe and the United States.

But though Right Sector helped put the new, Western-leaning government in power, its members express trust neither for the government nor for Western Europe. “We don’t need Europe, we need to build Ukraine,” Kononko said. As for the new government, “they are mostly the same, corrupt people as the last government.”

Kononko’s stance reflects how simplistic it is to characterize Ukraine as split between the pro-Europe West and the pro-Russian East and how difficult it is to define the militia that is at the center of the complex struggle within Ukraine. Unlike other nationalist groups with deep roots in western Ukraine, it formed only last year around the protests in Kiev.

The red and black they wear were the colors of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which allied itself with Nazi Germany when it invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. For Moscow, that association alone makes anyone who venerates Bandera a fascist; Putin has tarred the entire government a rabble of crooks run by fascists, anti-Semites and Russophobes. “Banderovtsy” is a name that stirs fear in the hearts of many in predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.---

He spoke as he gave a tour of the Maidan: the tire barricade where he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel from a grenade; the spot behind the former monument to Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin where he lit molotov cocktails and handed them to a comrade when he could no longer throw; and the curb where progovernment special forces beat him senseless, and knocked his teeth out, when he couldn’t run away.

Kononko said he has no animosity for the pro-Russian population in the east, though he did call some pro-Russian activists “scum whose heads I’d like to bash in.”

“I have friends in Donestk and Kharkiv,” he said. “Those people have been frightened and zombified by Putin propaganda.”

So if he is not a complete Ukrainian-speaking Russophobe, who is Kononko?

Like a lot of his men, he is a former soldier. He served in UN peacekeeping troops in former Yugoslavia and eventually worked his way up to the Russian equivalent of chief warrant officer. In Right Sector, he oversees “training exercises” of his men. “I am their mama, their papa, and their psychologist,” he says of his role.

He had a construction business that, he said, earned him between $2,000 and $3,000 a month — good money in Ukraine — until President Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010. “I stopped winning contracts, I had to pay bribes to get anything done, and ultimately went bankrupt,” Kononko said.

Kononko does admire Western Europe for one thing. “Corruption would be harder, because there would be rules,” he said. “In Ukraine, they raise taxes to build roads, the roads don’t get built, and the rulers all get richer.”

He has a wife and a daughter, and was still making a decent living as a contractor when he walked away to join Right Sector. “I have a lot of friends who think I’m a fool,” he said.

Right Sector, he said, was the only way to fix Ukraine. “It’s a new force, a force for honesty.”

Kononko did not reveal much about the specific size of this force (“we have thousands) or its weapons (“we don’t patrol with them but we can get them when we need them”).

Kononko did not say how long Right Sector would occupy Kiev if the threat from Russia diminishes . If Dmytro Yarosh, Right Sector’s leader and a ranking security official in the current government, wins his long-shot bid in the May presidential elections, presumably that could be time to stand down. But it’s clear to this de facto policeman of the streets of Kiev that the battle for a new country has only just begun.

“As a builder, I can say that if we were building a three-story house, right now we haven’t even put in the foundation,” Kononko said. “We’ve only just dug the ditch.”

I decided that not only did I have to quit, I had to let viewers know why—to tell them the truth about RT and its misleading coverage. I went to the bathroom, wrote down some heartfelt notes and prepared for my exit a couple hours later. It was then that I contacted Jamie Kirchick, a writer with The Daily Beast, and told him my resignation was imminent. I first reached out to Kirchick a few months ago after he criticized Russia’s anti-gay laws on the RT airwaves. I told him it was a bold move and I was willing to eventually come forward with the truth about RT. I informed him that the time had come and how I planned to do it. He published the exclusive story. Little did I know just how far word of my resignation would go.

U.S. intelligence and military officials said there are now Russian troops on virtually all of the country’s border with Ukraine. Some units have moved within 31 miles of the border, said the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss classified intelligence reports.

Russian troops in some sectors, including near corridors from Russia to major Ukrainian cities, have been reinforced with armor, attack airplanes and helicopters, the officials said. There are also signs that the troops are receiving substantial logistical support, which could signal preparations for sustained operations, they said.

The number of Russian troops along the border is about double what it was when the defense ministry in Moscow announced that its armed forces would hold exercises near eastern Ukraine, according to the officials. Even so, the officials said it’s hard to assess whether the Russians are preparing for an invasion or are trying to intimidate the pro-Western government in Kiev.

If Russian troops enter east Ukraine, it “would trigger far-reaching consequences in a broad range of economic areas,” U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters March 21 after a summit in Brussels. “That must include the key areas like finance, like the military, like energy.”

Still, there is something crucial, life-changing, for us Russians in our approach towards the Ukrainians and Ukraine. Russia is also important for the Ukrainians, but only as a point of repulsion which helps to define their distinctive identity. For the Russians, Ukraine, on the contrary, permanently attracts its attention—.......