From “The Exiled” 10 years ago:
Much has been made of eastern Ukraine’s support for Yanukovych, the pro-Russian prime minister who tried to steal the election. The Western and the Russian press both play up the issue, albeit for different reasons. Others, like my good friend Olya, who is an editor at a respected Ukrainian magazine, claimed everyone in Donetsk was just brainwashed.
What’s happening in Donetsk is the real key to figuring out what’s going to happen in Ukraine. The general situation in Ukraine has gotten plenty of coverage, but a brief outline of the facts is in order. Basically, Ukraine has always been divided into east and west, with the east Russian-speaking, heavily industrialized, and Russia-friendly; and the west Ukrainian-speaking, agrarian, and nationalist. Yanukovych is the east’s candidate, Yushchenko the west’s.
Almost all of Ukraine’s oligarchs are from the east or Kiev, and they almost exclusively lined up in support of Yanukovych, a Donetsk native. There are a few exceptions, notably Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and candy factories and a ship-building yard. He also owns Channel 5, which was an invaluable tool in helping Yushchenko compete. In recent weeks, Channel 5 is the only Ukrainian channel to show news and propaganda 24 hours a day. A large part of the programming consists of watching Yanukovych’s team make asses of themselves. They often repeat a speech Yanukovych gave where he was gesturing with his fingers in the air, “paltsami,” a classic bandit gesture. Another favorite clip of theirs is of Yanukovych ally and Kharkov governor Kushnyarov gesticulating wildly and declaring, “I’m not for Lviv power, not for Donetsk power, I’m for Kharkov power!” Still, the biggest and most powerful clans are still behind Yanukovych, who is their man.
Yanukovych is a truly loathsome character. Most Ukrainians agree that if a more palatable candidate had been given the nearly unlimited access to “administrative resources” that Yanukovych had, he would have won handily. But Yanukovych twice served jail time in the Soviet Union, he has no charisma, and is obviously a tool of powerful Russian and Ukrainian interests. Yushchenko, on the other hand, is considered by most western Ukrainians to be something between Gandhi and Christ, while many people in the east worry he has it in for everyone who speaks Russian. Many people who voted for Yanukovych did so out of suspicion of Yushchenko, not because they like Yanukovych (except perhaps in his home turf, Donetsk).
While the country is relatively evenly divided, it’s a fact that Yushchenko would have won the election if it had been violation-free. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a fool or getting paid by the Russians. Even Putin, who called Yanukovych to congratulate him before all the votes were counted, recently said he’d be willing to work with any elected leader and seemed to acknowledge that there’d be a re-vote. Thanks to ballot-stuffing, Donetsk and the neighboring Lugansk oblast had by far the highest voter turnout in Ukraine (Donetsk had 97 percent turnout, of whom 97 percent voted for Yanukovych, and Yushchenko actually lost votes in between the first and second rounds of voting) and it’s on the basis of thousands of violations that the Supreme Court recently ordered a new round of voting. Channel 5 has plenty of footage of election observers getting the shit beaten out of them, and Yushchenko observers weren’t allowed anywhere near the polls in the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts.
The blatant falsifications, combined with an extremely well-funded and coordinated protest movement, have brought us where we are today, gearing for another round. The protests have come under fire as an American-funded coup, particularly in the Russian media. And there’s some truth to it — the US has been bringing in Serbs and Georgians experienced in non-violent revolution to train Ukrainians for at least a year. One exit poll — the one finding most heavily in favor of Yushchenko — was funded by the US. The smoothness and professionalism of the protest, from the instant availability of giant blocks of Styrofoam to pitch the tents on to the network of food distribution and medical points, is probably a result of American logistical planning. It’s certainly hard to imagine Ukrainians having their act together that well. The whole orange theme and all those ready-made flags also smack of American marketing concepts, particularly Burson-Marstellar.
But the crowds in Kiev, which can swell up to a million on a good day and are always in the hundreds of thousands, are there out of their own homegrown sense of outrage, not because some State Department bureaucrats willed them there. The meetings that happen every day in virtually every city in Ukraine (and in literally every western Ukraine village) are not the result of American propaganda. Rather, they are the result of the democratic awakening of a trampled-on people who refuse to be screwed by corrupt politicians again.
While you wouldn’t know it by watching Russian TV, maybe the only two cities in Ukraine where there are not Yushchenko rallies that outnumber the Yanukovych rallies are Lugansk and Donetsk. According to my friends in the heavily Russian Kharkov, for example, active Yushchenko supporters outnumber active Yanukovych supporters four to one. One reason why Lugansk and Donetsk are an exception is because every time Yushchenko’s people try to organize a rally there, they get beaten. Another is because the vast majority of those two regions really do support Yanukovych. So what gives?
* * * *
The Tuesday rally, which I witnessed in full, was like watching a farce of a Nazi rally. This time they introduced Ludmila Yanukovych but made sure not to give her the mike, lest she say something as ridiculous as her spiked-orange theory. However, the other speakers weren’t much more sane. One speaker after another spewed venomous anti-Kiev, anti-western Ukrainian, and anti-American rhetoric at the crowd of several thousand. One of the more famous, Natalya Vitrenko, is sort of a Zhirinovsky without the slapstick element. Vitrenko argued that the US planned to colonize and enslave eastern Ukraine and would use NATO as its muscle. Another speaker warned that east Ukraine would beat back the Americans like they had the Germans, and reminded the audience that western Ukraine welcomed the Nazis with bread and salt, keeping in the theme that Yushchenko’s the fascist here. Some of the other arguments were just silly; one doctor said that Yushchenko was destroying the nation’s health by forcing students to spend long hours in the cold, thereby causing a public health crisis (a line echoed on Russian state television). Another said under Yushchenko people would be jailed for speaking Russian and that the “orange plague” was a terrorist organization. Another popular theory was that western Ukraine was planning on raping the riches of the east and only regional autonomy could save them. Every speaker was fear-mongering and totally detached from reality.
Everyone in Donetsk repeats the same figures and statements obsessively. 15 million voted for Yanukovych, he is the legitimate president, and Yushchenko is an unchecked fascist. People in Kiev are brainwashed and undemocratic; Russian-speaking centers Odessa, Kharkov, Dneipropetrovsk and the Crimea will leap at the chance to form a breakaway republic with them; American money is behind everything. Funny they never mention a word about Russian funds used by Yanukovych, although estimates of Russian contributions reach up to $300 million.
From RT.com, March 16 2014
Thousands picket Donetsk govt building, demand release of local governor
Published time: March 15, 2014 15:30
Thousands have gathered in the city of Donetsk, picketing the Security Council building. The protesters called for the current Kiev authorities to release the local governor and pro-Russian activists detained earlier, threatening to storm the building.
The protesters blocked the Security Council building trying to break the doors and smashing windows on Saturday afternoon. Activists removed the Ukrainian flag from the top of the building, hoisting a Russian tricolor.
The protesters were demanding the release of local governor Pavel Gubarev and 70 pro-Russian activists previously detained by the current Kiev authorities. They also urged local law enforcement to take their side.
The local head of the Security Council has promised the protesters to release the activists and Gubarev, according to Life news. He then reportedly escaped through the back door of the building.
More on Pavel Gubarev
Gubarev is third from the left in the bottom row.
That’s a close-up of Gubarev
And yes, that emblem is meant to look like a Swastika. It was the official symbol of the Russian National Unity group that was formed by Alexander Barakshov in 1990. Who’s Alexander Barakshov? I’m glad you asked. You might want to look at John Dunlop’s article “The Rise of National Socialism in Russia“. Here’s an excerpt:
The ideology and program of the RNYe are, like those of Hitler and the German National Socialist Party, insane and genocidal. As the instance of Hitler demon- strated, however, insane and genocidal programs can in fact be rigorously applied. Since Barkashov’s ideas and prejudices have been taken over virtually wholesale from the German Nazis—and since those ideas and prejudices are well known— a detailed discussion of them should not be necessary. I will therefore limit myself to highlighting a few of the RNYe programmatic positions. In one area—that of religion—Barkashov’s stance, as we shall see, diverges notably from that of his mentor, Hitler, resembling that of Corneliu Codreanu, the charismatic leader of the interwar Romanian fascists, who was strangled by gendarmes loyal to King Carol of Romania in 1938.
At the center of the RNYe program lie twin obsessions with race and conspiracy. It is these obsessions that render the RNYe especially dangerous from a political perspective. The Russian ethnos, in the RNYe view, must harshly assert itself as the ruling people of the Russian Republic to protect Russians from lethal internal and external enemies. In 1917, the RNYe contends, in a fiendish plot orchestrated by Jewish bankers in New York, Jewish Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. Citing A. Diky’s anti-Semitic classic, The Jews in Russia and the USSR (1976), Barkashov maintains that of the 556 persons who took over the top party and state positions in the new Bolshevik state, a total of 448 were Jews, with most of the rest being “Latvians, Armenians and so forth.” “There were practically no Russians” among the early Bolshevik leaders.21
These so-called genocidal Jews who had seized power in Russia, according to the program, then set about uprooting Russians and Slavs in vast numbers, eventually slaughtering some one hundred million of them. While this crime was being perpetrated, a healthy development was, by contrast, occurring in Germany, where a vibrant German National Socialist movement had come to power under Adolf Hitler. Determined at all costs to thwart this development, the Jewish financial oligarchy of the United States and Great Britain organized the Second World War in order to prevent the rebirth of the German nation. Cunningly, the Jews of New York and London succeeded in pitting two brother Aryan peoples, the Ger- mans and Slavs, against one another. The end result of this plot was the utter destruction of German National Socialism and the continued enslavement of the Russian and Slavic peoples of the USSR.
Today, following Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Communists, Russia remains under the direst threat of extinction. The “international financial oligarchy,” directly ruled by Jews from Israel and the United States, seeks rapa- ciously to plunder Russia’s natural wealth and to turn its people into cheap man- ual labor deprived of any rights. That the United States is ruled by Jews is self- evident to Barkashov, who observes that “the pro-Zionist coalition in the U.S. Congress has reached 75-80 percent of the senators and approximately 60 per- cent of the members of the House of Representatives.”22 A certain Jim Warren, a self-declared “American nationalist” and leader of the League for the Defense of Christians USA, confided to Russkii poryadok during a visit to Russia that the United States was indeed harshly ruled “by anti-national forces.” As “proof,” Warren cited the alleged fact that “in Clinton’s government, Jews and Negroes make up 55 percent of the total.” “American nationalists,” Warren noted, were pinning their hopes on like-minded brethren in Russia. “Never lose your faith in God,” he exhorted, “in yourselves, or in your people. . . . God is with us.”23