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

‘We only have a few years to rescue the soul of holy Russia,’ Alexei Weitz said. ‘Just a few years.’ Weitz is a leading member of the Night Wolves. There are five thousand of them in Russia, five thousand Beowulf-like bearded men in leathers riding Harleys. It’s Weitz who has done most to turn them from outlaws into religious patriots. For the past few years, Vladimir Putin has posed for photo-ops with them, dressed in leathers and riding a tri-bike (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler). They defended the ‘honour of the church’ after the Pussy Riot affair, roaring in a cavalcade through Moscow bearing golden icons of Mary the Mother of Christ on the front of their Harleys. The Kremlin gives them several hundred million rubles a year and they work to inspire loyalty across the country with concerts and bike shows that fuse flying Yamahas, Cirque du Soleil-style trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle re-enactments, religious icons, holy ecstasies, speeches from Stalin and dancing girls (there are booths for go-go girls next to the great crosses). At the last concert in Volgograd, 250,000 locals turned up, a world record for a ‘bike show’.

‘Why Stalin?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t he murder hundreds of thousands of priests?’

‘We don’t know why he was sent by God. Maybe he had to slaughter them so the faith could be tested. We don’t know. It’s not for us to judge. When you cut out a disease you have to cut out healthy flesh too.’ As we spoke, Weitz – who is of folkloric size, bearded with glasses – was changing from his office clothes into leathers. He took me to a little wooden house on the territory to have something to eat. There were icons everywhere. We drank tea brewed with spicy medicinal herbs picked by shamans in the Russian far east. Weitz dropped six lumps of sugar into his goblet and told me his story. ‘I trained as an actor. I received the classic Stanislavsky method acting training. My teacher used to say I can be both tragic and comic at the same time. It’s a rare gift.’---

For a while I’d been seeing visions, religious visions. I could see devils and angels on people’s shoulders. I could see serpents wrapping themselves around people as they spoke, their true souls. I could see the things others can’t. People’s auras, the colours round them … You’re looking at me like I’m crazy. I just have gifts. I had been interested in religion for a while. Yoga and shamanism. But I was finding my way to the true faith. I couldn’t be both an actor and a man of God.’

When he came back from London, Weitz gave up acting. He became more devout. But he still needed a job so a friend found him a position at a new political consultancy. Using the Stanislavsky method he started training politicians ‘to manipulate public consciousness’ with ‘verbal and non-verbal forms of influence’. ‘I applied the principles of method acting. First they had to decide where they were headed. What they wanted … Where are you headed, Peter?’ he suddenly asked.

I didn’t know.

‘You’re headed to death. We’re all headed to death. That’s the first thing I would make them realise … That’s the thing about us bikers. We live with death every day. We’re a death cult. We know where we’re going.’ Biking had been Weitz’s passion since his Soviet teens. The biking movement in the USSR had sprung up in the late 1980s, utterly anti-Soviet, pro-freedom, pro-Steppenwolf, and by association pro-American. In the 1990s and 2000s it remained a fringe subculture, though connected to biker gangs in Europe and beyond. The patriotic shift came late. The legend goes that Aleksandr Zaldostanov, the Surgeon, the Night Wolves’ leader, met a priest on the road who told him he needed to change his life, help save Holy Rus. Weitz helped give that impulse form. The Night Wolves are a top-down organisation: if the Surgeon and Weitz say they are now Orthodox, everyone follows suit.---

The Kremlin needs the bikers, and movements like them. The things Russia’s dictatorship once depended on to give it an air of legitimacy – its cheerleaders and its fake opposition, the pro-Putin youth groups and tame political parties – no longer hold sway the way they did. Only 5 per cent of Russians think the government ‘very effective’. Putin’s popularity is at an all-time low: an approval rating of 60 per cent is high for a democracy but in a system built around one man it raises eyebrows. Apathy rules: only 30 per cent bothered to vote in the Moscow mayoral elections. The system needs new stars and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s wanted. Where until recently political players talked about ‘modernisation’ and ‘innovation’ the buzzwords are now ‘religion’, ‘traditionalism’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘God’.

Moscow plans to end Crimea's reliance on Ukraine for electricity by helping to build gas-fired power stations and possibly linking the region to Russia's grid, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday.

Medvedev told a government meeting that Moscow may have to take part in "international negotiations" to secure near-term supplies, suggesting Russia may be forced to talk to Ukraine's new leaders over Crimea, which it annexed from Kiev last week.

Parts of Crimea, which receives around 80 percent of its electricity supplies from Ukraine, faced blackouts late on Sunday in what the local power company said were technical problems but which underlined the region's vulnerability.

"On electricity, there are the possibilities to unite Crimea with Russia's unified energy system through the Kerch strait," Medvedev said, referring to the small stretch of water separating the region from Russia's southern rim.

Running a cable through the strait could cost between $200 million and $300 million, based on a Reuters calculation of how much it cost Russia to lay cable to an island in its far east.

China's take on the Ukrainian issue carries three core points. First, Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected. Second, the underlying causes of the crisis, complicated and deep-seated, have to be dealt with in a calm and restrained manner. Third, peaceful negotiation and not armed confrontation should be the way to find a solution.

It goes without saying that this position serves China's strategic interests. On the one hand, China, itself facing separatist issues in Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet, can't afford to openly support Russia and endorse the referendum in Crimea. On the other hand, the Chinese sympathizes with the Russians as the people in Ukraine and Russia do enjoy deep cultural and historical ties and current geopolitical connections.

A hairstyling business closes four salons rather than deal with crooked tax officials. An independent salesman hustling paint from the trunk of his car faces a $5 million tax penalty. A humble crafts stall gives up after taxes increase ten-fold overnight.

That's the world of small business in Ukraine — a tangled thicket of bribe-hungry government inspectors and complicated, unpredictable regulations.

Reducing graft and red tape are set to be part of the conditions Ukraine will face in exchange for an international financial rescue package. Officials in Kiev are expected to wrap up talks with the International Monetary Fund as soon as Tuesday.

Yet it will take some doing. Ukraine's culture of corruption and bureaucracy is deeply entrenched.

"De stilla i landet", benämning på de rättfärdiga och fromma bland israeliterna som i stillhet strävade efter att leva i enlighet med Guds vilja.

And there is Maxim Martsinkevich, a neo-Nazi, now a star with his ‘Occupy Paedophilia’ project. Max and his friends go online and pretend to be underage gays looking for older men. They arrange dates. When the men arrive Max is there with a camera to make them admit they are paedophiles, force them to drink urine and suck on dildos. He then posts his candid camera stings online. The videos are ably shot and cut together; ‘Welcome, my little lovers of extremism,’ he says at the top of his segments. His YouTube channel is a massive hit and the advertising revenue impressive. Martsinkevich denies he is also sponsored by the Kremlin but he is obviously encouraged: he appears as a guest on Jerry Springer-like chat shows that you don’t get invited to without an official nod. People like Martsinkevich and the Night Wolves keep the TV spinning: oohs and aaahs about gays and God, Satan and paedophilia. They don’t reflect any actual popular movement: only 3 per cent of Russians regularly go to church; there is no Russian Tea Party, no Khomeini figure in the wings. Rather, the Kremlin has learned to fuse pop culture and authoritarianism to keep the 140 million-strong population entertained, distracted and constantly exposed to nightmarish threats which, if repeated often enough, become infectious.

In the Duma the familiar Kremlin-run pseudo-parties are threatened with being shut down. Their ratings are plummeting: in the Moscow elections the Liberal Democrats and A Just Russia could barely clear 3 per cent, despite the backing of the main TV channels. It’s every Duma deputy for himself. The challenge is to propose a law so flamboyant in its patriotic burlesque that it will get you noticed. Vitaly Milonov is now a celebrity thanks to his ‘anti-gay propaganda law’; Elena Mizulina performed beautifully with her proposal to ban ‘untraditional’ sex – for the next week the news was dominated by talk of oral sex and whether it would be made illegal. The point isn’t whether these laws ever get enacted: the point is to fill up the conversation. Evgeny Fedorov, a member of the ruling party, United Russia, explains that the Duma and the government are in the pay of the CIA and that Russia pays ‘Dane-geld’ to the US. Putin, Fedorov says, knows this but he can’t force a way out.

When you look through the careers of Milonov, Mizulina and Fedorov you find that, in some cases very recently, they were all once committed democrats and liberals, pro-Western, preaching modernisation and the importance of Russia’s European course. Their latest incarnations could be just a new get-up in the Moscow political masquerade. But something about their delivery makes them different from the usual Russian demagogue like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who performs his rants with a knowing wink to show that it’s all a cabaret act.

Despite being incapacitated by spinal disc hernia the ex-PM stressed she’s ready to “grab a machine gun, you know what I’m saying, and go shoot this bastard [Putin] in the forehead.”

The phone conversation with Nestor Shufrych, former deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, was uploaded on YouTube on Monday by user Sergiy Vechirko.

The leaked conversation took placed on March 18, hours after the Crimea & Sevastopol accession treaty was signed in the Kremlin.

While Shufrych was “in shock,” Tymoshenko was enraged by the results of the Crimean referendum .

“It’s going too far! Bugger! We must grab arms and go whack those damn katsaps [a Ukrainian word used to refer to the Russians in a negative tone] together with their leader,” Tymoshenko said.

The ex-pm declared if she was in charge “they [Russia] would’ve never gotten Crimea, god dammit.”

Shufrych nade the valid point that Ukraine “didn’t have any force potential” to keep Crimea.

But Tymoshenko, who plans to run in Ukraine’s presidential election, expressed confidence that she would have found “a way to zap those assholes [Russia].”

“I’ll use all my connections, I’ll raise the whole world – as soon as I’m able to – in order to make sure.. Bugger!.. not even scorched earth won’t remain where Russia stands,” she promised.

Despite being incapacitated by spinal disc hernia the ex-PM stressed she’s ready to “grab a machine gun, you know what I’m saying, and go shoot this bastard [Putin] in the forehead.”

From May 9, calls to action for the return of the Crimea to Ukraine will be punished by a heavy fine or up to five years, which follows from the act signed at the end of 2013 by Vladimir Putin, Law on Amendments to Article 280 of the Criminal Code.

Mr Putin’s decision to grab Crimea was a desperate response to a Ukrainian revolution that the Kremlin could neither stop nor control. Rather than go down in history as a weakling who was watching ice dancing in Sochi as Russia “lost” Ukraine, Mr Putin decided to move on Crimea. It worked. Within days, he was enjoying standing ovations in Moscow and soaring opinion poll ratings.

But by grabbing Crimea, Russia has ensured that it will eventually lose Ukraine. If Ukraine is allowed to proceed with elections in May, an anti-Moscow majority is all but assured since the Russian speakers of Crimea will no longer be voting, and the remaining electorate is likely to be radicalised by the Russian threat. The interim Ukrainian government has just signed an accord with the EU – the very development that Russia was striving to prevent in the first place. Despite the carefully engineered display of pro-Russian euphoria in Crimea, the territory’s disgruntled minorities – particularly the Tatars – may well resist incorporation into Russia.

A military move into eastern Ukraine would greatly increase the dangers of a political, military and economic blowback sufficiently powerful to threaten the leadership in the Kremlin. Western military analysts have no doubt that, in the first instance, the Russian army would swiftly overwhelm Ukrainian forces. But recent history suggests that, when the world’s leading powers resort to military intervention against a hostile local population, they almost always suffer a long-term strategic defeat. The swift conventional military victory feels great at the time – but is followed by long-term agony.

Mr Putin, who has lamented that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest “geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”, should know that “disaster” was greatly accelerated by the draining effects of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Even the mighty US – with the largest economy and the most advanced military machine in the world – was unable to win in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
The cautious, professorial leader in the White House has apparently learnt the lessons of these failed wars far better than his swaggering bare-chested rival in the Kremlin. Of course, the Russian (and American) public get a certain retro thrill from a macho leader who is willing to send in the tanks. But, in time, they end up lamenting his folly.

Why is it that military force has become so much less effective in achieving political goals? Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution, who until recently worked for the policy-planning staff at the US state department, suggests that changes in military and social technology have made it much harder for invading armies to secure a lasting victory.

Unless the population of the area that has been invaded is tiny – or almost entirely welcoming – an insurgency is likely to develop. Modern-day insurgents usually have weaponry, such as roadside bombs or rocket-propelled grenades, that can inflict steady casualties on an occupying army.
They now also have social media and mobile communications technology that make it much easier to get organised. If the insurgency also has powerful external supporters – as in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq – it can be almost impossible to subdue.

The Russians have one “advantage” that they could deploy in trying to suppress an insurgency in Ukraine: the willingness to act with extreme brutality that was displayed during the Chechen wars. But the population of Chechnya is only a little more than 1m and the territory lies within the borders of the Russian state. Deploying “Grozny tactics” after an invasion of a sovereign nation of 45m people, on the borders of the EU, would be an entirely different matter.