Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Analysis: The Riddle of Why Russians Don't Protest Against the War in Ukraine

by Nomad


Although now a British citizen, Oxford-educated political philosopher Vlad Vexler was born in the Soviet Union. For this reason, when it comes to an understanding the Russian mentality, he is something of an insider.
He says:
I know that there are a lot of people who are concerned and overwhelmed about what's happening with politics, not just in their country but all over the world, what I do here is help us operate openly in the light and not blindly in darkness.
In the video below, he takes on one of the most perplexing questions of our time: What can account for the apathy of the Russian people in the wake of the brutal invasion of Ukraine?

You will probably what he has to say interesting and, given the current politics in the USA, a bit foreboding.

Friday, July 8, 2022

Just Because It's Not Happening Here..

by Nomad

Even though this video is eight years old, this PSA, produced for Save the Children Fund, is still impactful.. and timely, especially given the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This video shows how a girl's life is completely transformed in one year.
 
Originally it was entitled "If London were Syria." But I found it online with the new (and probably more universal) title "Just Because It's Not Happening Here, It Doesn't Mean It Isn't Happening."


Tuesday, March 22, 2022

“Prayer for Ukraine”

by Nomad




“Prayer for Ukraine” (“Молитва за Україну”, “Molitva za Ukrainu”) is a patriotic hymn composed and published in 1885, during a time when the Ukrainian language was suppressed by the government of Imperial Russia. The text was penned by poet and interpreter Oleksandr Konynsky and the music was provided by composer Mykola Lysenko.

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Alexander Nevzorov: Where Putin's Disastrous War in Ukraine Will Leave Russia

by Nomad


Russian and Soviet television journalist, a film director and a former member of the Russian parliament, Alexander Nevzorov isn't afraid to criticize Russia's ruling elite. And he is not a man to mince his words.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

The Search For My Grandfather in the KGB's Ukrainian Files

by Bernie Neufeld, Guest Contributor


One of our nomads, Linda, recently asked me if I would be interested in posting an article written by her brother in law, Bernie Neufeld and his quest to learn the facts about his grandfather's fate. I think you will find his story engrossing.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Putin's Grand Offensive Against the West and What We Must Do About It - Part 1

by Nomad


In a piece for Foreign AffairsMichael Anthony McFaul, the US ambassador to Russia between 2012 and 2014, offers us some interesting insights into what went wrong between the former Cold War adversaries. McFaul lays out challenges ahead, what the US and the West must do in a time of "hot peace."

The Russian Offensive Against the West

Even though the era of competing ideologies (communism vs capitalism) may be over, that hasn't stopped Russian president Vladimir Putin from posturing himself as a leader of conservative nationalism fighting against a decadent West.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Hybrid Warfare: NATO Investigates Putin's Troll War against the West 2/3

 by Nomad



In Part One of this series, we took a look at the basic principles of Russia's hybrid warfare campaign on social media based on a 2015 NATO report. In this segment, let's take a look at how these techniques have been used in practice. In addition, we will look at the role that Russian hybrid warfare played in the 2016 campaign.
That's a puzzle that's still missing quite a few pieces.

Early Warnings


I don’t think anybody knows that it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia—I don't, maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?Donald Trump, September 26, 2016
This remark by candidate Trump in last months of the campaign must have struck many informed observers as extremely peculiar. His denial of Russian hacking didn't fit into the established timeline.
Only a few months earlier, on July 27, in the heat of the campaign, Trump had invited Russian hackers to find the 30,000 Hillary Clinton's emails. 
And a month before that, June 15, 2016, a hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 explain he had given the hacked emails to WikiLeaks. The emails reportedly came complete with telltale Russian-language formatting errors. Yet, Trump was still inexplicably denying what was already obvious.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Crimean Chess: The Six Unintended Effects of Putin's Ukrainian Miscalculation

by Nomad

Vladimir Putin
By miscalculation, Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have painted himself into a corner since his decision to back the Ukrainian separatists.
At least that's what one expert on the Russian economy and foreign policy believes. 


The Crimean Move
In the chess game  of international diplomacy, Putin's decisions in Ukraine have been more blunderful than wonderful. His supporters have said it was a bold act of defiance to the West but others say it reflects that the Soviet mentality is still very much alive in Mother Russia.

In a recent article, Chatham House's John Lough observes that Vladimir Putin and his advisers may have been correct about how easy it was to undermine Kiev’s control of the strategically important area, Putin seems to have "gravely underestimated the consequences."

Lough is a associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia program and vice president with BGR Gabara Ltd, a public affairs and strategic consulting company. 
The Crimean move, Lough implies, was not Putin's finest hour.
 He writes:
An easy tactical victory has triggered the prospect of long-term confrontation with the West that spells potential strategic disaster.
It is easy to mistake Putin's decision in Ukraine as an offensive strategy. However, it's probably a misreading of the Russian pyche. One of Russia's historical fears has always been its border security.

Monday, July 21, 2014

A Century Old Historical Mashup: Malaysian Flight MH 17 and the RMS Lusitania

by Nomad

They often say history repeats itself but that's not actually true. Usually some elements of past history are re-formed to create something vaguely familiar.

The downing of Malaysian Flight MH 17 bears some strange and ominous similarities to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania nearly one hundred years earlier.


Last month marked the 100-year anniversary of the advent of World War I. On 28 June 1914, a seemingly regional event, the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist, set off a chain of unexpected events that led to global war. 
It seems, historians tell us, that no nation was prepared to back down. The inescapable gravity of war pulled nations into a conflict that would eventually lead to the deaths of millions of lives. 

That conflict also marked the first use of poison gas on the battlefield.  In January 1915, the German military fired shells of a lethal gas, xylyl bromide, at Russian troops near the Polish village of Bolimów on the eastern front. More than 1,000 were reportedly killed as a result of this frightening new weapon. Had it not been for the cold weather, the number of fatalities could have been far higher. 

Yet as dreadful as that was, it turned out to be just a preview of things to come.

On April 22, 1915, German forces shocked Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium.

The release of the gas formed a gray-green cloud that drifted across positions held by French Colonial troops from Martinique. The soldiers were terrified and fled, abandoning their trenches and left the front line exposed. In spite of that "success", the German army was unable to seize the advantage. They too were terrified of the effects of the gas.

This was a red line that no other nation had yet dared to cross.
When Allied armies claimed the gas was a clear violation of international law, the Germans simply argued that technically it was not. That ban, they claimed, cover chemical shells. The lethal gas in this battle was released through gas projectors, (or spraying mist projectors similar to those used in neighbors mosquito eradication.)

The Dangerous Illusion of Security 
As horrible as the escalation was, it too, only a month later, the world would be shocked speechless into abject revulsion.
On May 15, 1915, the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat  while  en route from New York to Liverpool, England. Warnings from the German Embassy had been published in newspapers about the risks of traveling into a war zone.

In February of that year, the German navy had adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and ,had decided to up the ante by blockade the British shipping lanes (Later investigations proved that the Germans were correct in their assumptions that munitions were being shipped via the passenger ship. That did not make the sinking of an unarmed passenger liner any less of an atrocity, of course.)

To the travelers, however,  that risk was thought to be exaggerated. The very idea of any civilized nation daring sink a huge commercial liner filled with innocent victims.
It was unthinkable.
And yet, tragically, the unthinkable sometimes happens.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The Hunt For Vladimir Putin's Troll Nest

by Nomad

In Vladimir Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg, journalists uncovered one of the Russian leader's covert operations. Paid by the Kremlin, online trolls are paid to blog and comment, praising Putin and vilifying his opposition and all things American.

Reporters for the St. Petersburg Times recently infiltrated a covert online operation which acts as pro-Putin mouthpiece. Employees, the report alleged, were being paid to write  "pro-Kremlin postings and comments on the Internet, smearing opposition leader Alexei Navalny and U.S. politics and culture."

Professional Comrades
In August of 2013, journalists received a tip from the public. It seemed plausible enough. The insider described her interview with a company called St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency. She described the location as a “posh cottage with glass walls” in Olgino, a village in St. Petersburg’s Kurortny District.
She told the reporters:
The office occupying two rooms reminded her of an “internet club with lots of computers and people.” Employees in one room wrote blog posts for social networks, while those in the other room specialized in comments.
The unsuspecting interviewer was quite upfront about the technical details, about what to write and which political party to support. According the tip:
Each commenter was to write no less than 100 comments a day, while people in the other room were to write four postings a day, which then went to the other employees whose job was to post them on social networks as widely as possible.

Employees at the company, located at 131 Lakhtinsky Prospekt, were paid 1,180 rubles ($36.50) for a full 8-hour day and received a free lunch...
The employment ad- which has since been deleted- invited “goal-oriented people who like to surf the Internet” to join its “successful team.” “Now you’ll be able to surf the Internet and receive money for it,” it said.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Putin's Power Play in Crimea Exposes a Long-Held Russian Hypocrisy

by Nomad

Russia's decision to annex Ukraine's Crimean region has sent a shudder throughout the international community. Vladimir Putin's decision was part and parcel of Russian policy, one that has been shaped by both its tsarist past as well as its Soviet years under Stalin. How does this controversial decision reveal an underlying hypocrisy of Russian policy?

Empire Rebuilding?
Monday saw Russian President Vladimir Putin annexing the Crimean peninsula for the Motherland, in the name of protecting the Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine. While the Russian-speaking minority forms about 17 percent of the Ukrainian population, they do make up the majority in Crimea. A majority of region but a minority of the nation.
This act, which the international community has soundly condemned as treaty-breaking and in breach of international laws of state sovereignty, has many of Russia's neighbors- with similar minorities- extremely worried. Their greatest fear can be summed up with two questions: Is Putin actually attempting to revive the Soviet Empire? If not, where will he draw the line?

As The Washington Post found Putin's speech  was riddled with false statements about the events. One interesting misleading statement:
“Crimeans say that in 1991, they were handed over like a sack of potatoes, and I can’t help but agree with it. And what about the Russian state? What about Russia? It humbly accepted the situation. This country was going through such hard times then that realistically it was incapable of protecting its interests.”
Putin's re-writing of history supplies the Kremlin with all the justification it needed for what some have called "a land grab." In fact, the 1991 decision to join Ukraine was a democratic one, with a vote of 54% in favor. Buried in the quote, Putin makes the suggestion that now Russia is prepared to use force to protect its interests.
Even if that means defying the West.