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

As Andrey Tselikov notes at Global Voices, Navalny wrote a post on his popular LiveJournal page on Wednesday asking readers who they thought should face sanctions over the Ukraine situation.

The leading vote-getters in the poll were a group of “biznesmeni” with close ties to Putin’s inner circle: Gennady Timchenko of the commodity trading firm Gunvor; construction magnates Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who may have been the biggest beneficiaries of the Winter Olympics; and Yuri Kovalchuk of Bank Rossiya, often referred to as the personal banker of Russia’s rulers.* Navalny also brought up these names in a New York Times op-ed the same day, titled, "How to Punish Putin."

Navalny and his readers got their wish. The very next day, those four individuals, along with Kovalchuk’s company, Bank Rossiya, were the very ones the Treasury Department singled out for sanctions, for “materially assisting, sponsoring, or providing financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation.”
Another name discussed in Navalny’s blog post, Russian Railways Chairman and close Putin associate Vladimir Yakunin, is also facing sanctions as a political official. Fifteen senior Russian officials were also sanctioned.

Given that the op-ed and the sanctions list appeared only a few hours apart, it doesn't seem very likely that that Navalny's suggestions actually influenced the policy. The coincidence mostly underlines the fact that these were the most obvious targets available. A Treasury spokesperson told Slate by email that Navalny’s suggestions hadn’t played a role in the decision and that the department had "fashioned these sanctions to impose costs on individuals who wield influence in the Russian government and those responsible for the deteriorating situation in Ukraine."

It’s also worth noting that a few of the other recommendations for targets in Navalny's Times piece—“the oligarchs Roman A. Abramovich and Alisher B. Usmanov; and Igor I. Sechin and Aleksei B. Miller, the heads of Rosneft and Gazprom, respectively”—were notable by the absence from the final list.

In Donetsk’s Lenin Square, Yuroslav Korotenko keeps a constant vigil inside a tent erected just a few feet away from a massive statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

“We stay here and save this monument and this place, because people in the West come [to] this place with war,” Korotenko told IPS. “People from Donetsk think about peace with Russian Federation and don’t want war in our town.”---

Yoktov said the Euromaidan movement in the capital Kiev used violence and “extremists to get to power.”---
“I fear that Nazis like Svoboda [a Ukrainian political party] and stuff, and such parties will be the main power of the country,” he told IPS. “So they can do whatever they want. It will be almost the same situation … in Germany when fascists come to power.”

Vitalik Coida is also a volunteer guard, protecting the entrance of the Euromaidan protest area in central Kiev. He is a member of the Svoboda party, considered by many pro-Russians as one of the main “extremist” groups.

Cojda watches out for “provocateurs” who bring weapons and bombs. “But we patrol, we stop them, anyone who looks suspicious. All of these are people sent by Putin because you can hear their Russian accent,” he told IPS.

Cojda arrived at Euromaidan on Nov. 26, shortly after the protests began. He said his 19-year-old friend died in his arms after being shot during a battle with the Berkut, the elite riot police of Ukraine. “It was very difficult to look into his mother’s eyes because it was me that invited him to come here…to protect the country from bandits.”

The Svoboda party, he said, is “really fighting for truth and for freedom.” He said he would remain at Euromaidan until Russian troops leave Ukraine.

The mistrust of the Euromaidan activists is the result of an “information war” led by Russia and Ukrainian elites, according to Donetsk Euromaidan activist Aleksandr Beznis.

“The people do not know the truth,” Beznis told IPS. “There are no extremists from my country from Maidan.” He said Ukraine’s biggest problem is now Russia.

Beznis came from Donetsk to Kiev this week to get weapons training.

“We like Russia, too, but we don’t want any war here,” Beznis said. “As we don’t want to be involved, we need to support our safety and democracy in Ukraine. We must protect our democracy and we must train for our power.”

His biggest fear is civil war. “I hope that it will not happen. I really hope. I try not to think about it,” he said.

The three regions most notorious for the closest relationships between gangsters, oligarchs and politicians—Crimea, Donetsk and Odessa—were the most resistant to the Euro-Maidan revolution that led last month to the ouster of Yanukovych. And now all three regions are at the forefront of the pro-Russian fight-back against the new national leaders in Kiev.

Taras Kuzio, a research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, who wrote the Jamestown report, says the internal political turmoil in Ukraine should be viewed through the lens of the hand-in-glove relationships between politicians, mobsters and the so-called “red directors,” managers-turned-businessmen who are steeped in the ways of Soviet-style public sector corruption and deal-making.

The red directors also have their protégés: men such as billionaire Dmytro Firtash, the gas-trading mogul who was arrested by Austrian police on suspicion of mob activity earlier this month following Yanukovych ‘s ouster. Nor are the ties limited to the Ukraine. Their tentacles embrace Moscow: Firtash has joint business ventures with Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenburg and his brother, Boris, close friends and judo sparring partners of President Vladimir Putin.

The Rotenburg brothers, not coincidentally, are prominent on a U.S. sanctions list announced Thursday by President Barack Obama to target Putin cronies.

The symbiosis of politics, organized crime and unscrupulous biznesmeni developed quickly in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in much the same way as it did in Russia. The ambitious, the greedy and the powerful lunged for the huge profits that could be made. The state was disintegrating. The big industries – energy, mining and metals – were being privatized, and may the most ruthless man win. “Individuals such as Yanukovych, Aksyonov and their Donetsk and Crimean allies literally fought their way to the top,” says Kuzio. In Donetsk, Yanukovych as governor “integrated former and existing organized criminal leaders into his Party of Regions,” says Kuzio.

In Crimea, “every level of government was criminalized,” according to Viktor Shemchuk, who served for many years as the chief public prosecutor in the region. “It was far from unusual that a parliamentary session in Crimea would start with a minute of silence honoring one of their murdered ‘brothers,’” Shemchuk recalled in a December interview with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of investigators and journalists tracking developments throughout Eastern Europe.

Donetsk was no different. A March 2006 cable from the US embassy to the National Security Council – one of several on Ukraine released by WikiLeaks—noted that Yukanovych’s Party of Regions was a “haven for Donetsk-based mobsters and oligarchs” and had commenced an “extreme makeover” with the help and advice of U.S. political consultants, including “veteran K Street political tacticians” from Washington D.C. and a onetime Ronald Reagan operative, “hired to do the nipping and tucking.”

According to the cable, Yanukovych was “tapping the deep pockets of Donetsk clan godfather Rinat Akhmetov.” Now supposedly Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Akhmetov has been keeping a low profile in these early post-Yanukovych days, staying out of the limelight and issuing inoffensive statements on how important it is for everybody to get along.

Another US embassy cable from then-Ambassador William Taylor in September 2007 drilled down on how Yanukovych was centralizing Donetsk crime and political and business corruption in his party – something he would go on to do on an even larger national scale when he was subsequently elected as President in 2010. After Yanukovych became president, according to Ukrainian officials, more than $20 billion of gold reserves may have been embezzled and $37 billion in loans disappeared. In the past three years, they claim, more than $70 billion was moved to offshore accounts from Ukraine’s financial system.

Many of the financial crimes are likely to trail back to Moscow. Yanukovych confidant Firtash (the gas mogul picked up in Austria) admitted during a December 2008 meeting with then-US Ambassador Taylor that he had entered the energy business with the assistance of the notorious Russian crime boss Semyon Mogilevich, who, he said, worked with Kremlin leaders.

“Many Westerners do not understand what Ukraine was like after the break up of the Soviet Union,” Firtash told the ambassador. When a government cannot rule effectively, the country is ruled by “the laws of the streets,” he said.

That’s still the rule. The old order has much to fear from reform and change and will do all it can to preserve its wealth and power—and its best bet for that to happen is to look to Russia.

For precisely that reason, rights campaigners and reformers in Ukraine’s interim government are racing against time to uncover as much of the mob story as possible. An anti-corruption panel headed by Tetyana Chornovol, an investigative journalist who was nearly beaten to death in December for her reporting, is starting in earnest to recover billions of dollars of stolen money and piece together the financial crimes of the Yanukovych regime.