Situationen i Ukraina just nu, del 3

The picture above is a screenshot from the Moscow Police Department’s website showing a “wanted” post for a Russian citizen, resident of Moscow oblast, Mr. Sergei Nikolaevich Velikorodnyi, indicted on large-scale fraud charges and being a fugitive from the law. What the police had not known until recently is that Mr. Velikorodnyi has been keeping a very public profile as a “Deputy Defense Minister” in Russia’s puppet “government” for the occupied territory of Donetsk in Ukraine. When the Russian public informed them about that fact, instead of catching the criminal, Moscow police took down the post

“Nazism is again coming to us from Europe,” says Mikhail Myagkov, one of Russia’s leading historians of the Second World War and a professor of history at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where most of Russia’s top diplomats are educated. “The bacilli of Nazism have not been destroyed. Unfortunately, they have infected, among other countries, our brotherly nation of Ukraine,” he told a press briefing on the eve of the conference at the museum on Poklonnaya Gora.

The following day, in one of its auditoriums, Russian historians took the stage one after the other to draw an explicit link between the Hitler’s Reich and today’s Ukraine. None of them mentioned Russia’s military support for the rebels in eastern Ukraine or the encouragement they got from Russia in rising up against the government in Kiev this spring. Nor did the speakers dwell on the fact that the far right is hardly the driving force of Ukrainian politics. The country’s new President Petro Poroshenko is a liberal Westernizer with no links to Ukrainian nationalist parties, and the supposed popularity of those parties in Ukraine was exposed this week as a Russian fabrication; in the parliamentary elections held on Oct. 26, they failed to win a single seat in the legislature. But from the speeches presented at the conference in Moscow, one would assume that Poroshenko and his allies are all just resurrected Nazis in disguise.

As these speeches were translated for the foreign delegates, including guests from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, their faces turned gradually from confusion to disgust.

As the conference drew to a close, the two of them decided to voice their objections. Morre, springing from his seat, took hold of the microphone and told the hall that he did not agree with the final declaration of the conference, which had been written by its Russian organizers.

After some noisy debate, the delegates agreed to put the matter to a vote. Practically all of the foreign participants raised their hands in favor of deleting the reference to a “revival” of European fascism. All of the Russian participants, including a large group of high school students who had been herded into the auditorium about 15 minutes earlier, had the clear majority in voting to leave the text of the declaration unchanged. So the hosts of the conference won out—a small but telling victory for the cause of Russian revisionism.

Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation headquarters says Russian-backed militants in eastern Ukraine have massed a force of 700 militant Russian tanks and 43,000 soldiers, of whom 9,000 are Russian servicemen, Ukraine’s TSN news broadcaster reported on Tuesday. (...).

Intelligence suggests that the militants have restocked their weapon and ammunition supplies, and they are targeting the positions of the Ukrainian armed forces in order to improve their skills for the active phase of hostilities.