Putin’s Invasion of Eastern Ukraine: Is It Next Week or Never?

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/putin-s-invasion-of-eastern-ukraine-is-it-next-week-or-never


A Ukrainian soldier stands at a checkpoint near the town of Slaviansk in eastern Ukraine May 2, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Ukraine’s escalated violence over the past four days is just the event that seems likely to trigger the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian ground forces massed near its eastern border. Indeed, following the Ukrainian army’s counter-attack against Russian-backed separatists around the eastern Ukrainian city of Slaviansk, and the weekend fighting in the seaport city of Odessa, Russian President Vladimir Putin is under heightened pressure of his own making to launch the invasion, note the prominent US scholar of Eurasia, Paul Goble, and Russian dissident blogger Oleg Kozyrev.
After months in which his government has blared warnings across all Russian media about the dangers of “fascists” it says have seized power and attacked Russians in Ukraine, Putin has marched into a political tupik, a “blind alley” in which he may have no good policy choices, according to Kozyrev. “If Putin does not introduce forces after all this hysteria in the media, he will have betrayed those who placed their hopes in him,” Kozyrev wrote over the weekend on the independent Russian news website Kasparov.ru.  “The disappointment of the Putinists will be strong both in the eastern portion of Ukraine and in Russia itself.”

Already before the weekend’s violence, Russia faced military pressures to invade quickly or not at all, including its schedule for mustering out its most experienced conscript soldiers. “The window of opportunity for an invasion will open during the first weeks of April and close somewhere around the middle of May,” the prominent Russian military analyst Pavel Felgengauer noted in late March. Other analysts have noted the advantage to Russia of invading before May 25 if that step seems the best way to disrupt Ukraine’s presidential election, with its potential to strengthen and legitimize the government in Kyiv.

The pro-Russian separatists of eastern Ukraine, who have declared their “Donetsk People’s Republic,” have vowed to hold a referendum Sunday (May 11) on whether to secede from Ukraine. In its armed seizure of Crimea in February, Moscow seemed to attach some value to following the legalistic niceties of a referendum and a Crimean parliamentary appeal for Russian annexation.. If it values them as much in eastern Ukraine, it will hesitate to invade before the show of the Sunday plebiscite. The window estimated earlier by Felgengauer will be soon to close, and Moscow will then have only two weeks left in which to disrupt the Ukrainian vote.

“Regardless of which choice he makes – and at least up to now it is his choice – Putin will face problems at home,” Goble wrote yesterday on his blog. “If he does not introduce troops, he will face a population whose anger he has whipped up and will have to find a new outlet for that either at home or, more likely, abroad lest that anger be turned on himself.”

If Putin does launch the invasion, “he will face another set of problems although they may not seem as immediate to the Kremlin leader,” Goble wrote. “There will be initial enthusiasm for the use of force, but as the costs both in the form of Russian casualties and from Western sanctions become clear, that will dissipate and ever more Russians will question his strategy.”

Michael McFaul, until February the US ambassador in Moscow, and former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted last week that a Russian invasion likely would lead to years of urban guerrilla warfare by Ukrainians – something “very costly for Russia,” McFaul told Time.  And, Brzezinski said, a war that the Ukrainians, if supplied weapons by the West, would eventually win.

McFaul credited Putin with some realistic notion of the stakes, saying that such an invasion is “not something one does lightly. But it got a lot more likely” with the weekend violence.

James Rupert is managing editor at the Atlantic Council.

ruSSian nazis ortodox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UCW-tmB8F0&feature=youtu.be

Ukraine Activists Flee Death Threats And Kidnappings

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/ukraine-activists-flee-amid-death-threats-and-kidnappings

 “The danger isn’t going to knock on my door and tell me it’s coming in 15 minutes.” posted on May 6, 2014 at 10:53am EDT
Mike Giglio BuzzFeed Staff


Pro-Russia protesters burn a Ukranian flag outside the district council building in Donetsk. Marko Djurica / Reuters



DONETSK, Ukraine — Olena Tkachenko told her 9-year-old daughter they were going on vacation; as she zipped up their overstuffed bags on Monday evening, jamming a chocolate bar into the girl’s backpack, she tried hard to believe it.

Until this week, Tkachenko ran a hotline for pro-Ukraine activists in Donetsk, the city of 1 million that has become a frontline of an increasingly violent separatist push in eastern Ukraine. She decided she couldn’t do it anymore when relentless threats from the separatists began to shake her. “We will kill you all,” read one of the texts on her phone.

The threats were one more sign of darkening times: Those activists, journalists and politicians who opposed the separatists in and around Donetsk were increasingly faced with beatings, abductions and even attempted assassinations in what felt like a concerted push to drive them out. Some used the word “hunted” to describe their ordeal, and each day brought word that more had fled. On her way to the train station, Tkachenko was still coming to grips with her fate.

Friends had tried to convince her that she wasn’t a “refugee,” she said. Instead, much like the lie she’d told her daughter, they painted her open-ended trip as a well-deserved break. But she was deeply unsettled as the train to Kiev pulled into the station. “I don’t want this trip to be forever,” she said.

For many in the sprawling Donetsk region — where pro-Russia militants occupy government buildings and have turned some outlying towns into conflict zones — life has continued with relative normalcy. For those directly involved on either side of the struggle, however, war is already churning beneath the surface.

One day last week, Igor Firsun, a young parliamentarian from Donetsk who supports a united Ukraine, walked into the lobby of a five-star hotel holding a duffel bag. Well-to-do locals regularly do the same on their way to visit the gym. But as he sat down on one of the lobby’s leather chairs, Firsun unzipped his bag to reveal a modified Kalashnikov. “The danger isn’t going to knock on my door and tell me it’s coming in 15 minutes,” he said, while a woman at the next table chatted breezily on her smartphone. “The point of the weapon is to keep it with me at all times.”


Local politican Igor Firsun’s Kalashnikov, which he has taken to carrying with him at all times. Mike Giglio for BuzzFeed


Ukraine Activists Flee Death Threats And Kidnappings

“The danger isn’t going to knock on my door and tell me it’s coming in 15 minutes.” posted on May 6, 2014 at 10:53am EDT
Mike Giglio BuzzFeed Staff

Pro-Russia protesters burn a Ukranian flag outside the district council building in Donetsk. Marko Djurica / Reuters

DONETSK, Ukraine — Olena Tkachenko told her 9-year-old daughter they were going on vacation; as she zipped up their overstuffed bags on Monday evening, jamming a chocolate bar into the girl’s backpack, she tried hard to believe it.

Until this week, Tkachenko ran a hotline for pro-Ukraine activists in Donetsk, the city of 1 million that has become a frontline of an increasingly violent separatist push in eastern Ukraine. She decided she couldn’t do it anymore when relentless threats from the separatists began to shake her. “We will kill you all,” read one of the texts on her phone.

The threats were one more sign of darkening times: Those activists, journalists and politicians who opposed the separatists in and around Donetsk were increasingly faced with beatings, abductions and even attempted assassinations in what felt like a concerted push to drive them out. Some used the word “hunted” to describe their ordeal, and each day brought word that more had fled. On her way to the train station, Tkachenko was still coming to grips with her fate.

Friends had tried to convince her that she wasn’t a “refugee,” she said. Instead, much like the lie she’d told her daughter, they painted her open-ended trip as a well-deserved break. But she was deeply unsettled as the train to Kiev pulled into the station. “I don’t want this trip to be forever,” she said.

For many in the sprawling Donetsk region — where pro-Russia militants occupy government buildings and have turned some outlying towns into conflict zones — life has continued with relative normalcy. For those directly involved on either side of the struggle, however, war is already churning beneath the surface.

One day last week, Igor Firsun, a young parliamentarian from Donetsk who supports a united Ukraine, walked into the lobby of a five-star hotel holding a duffel bag. Well-to-do locals regularly do the same on their way to visit the gym. But as he sat down on one of the lobby’s leather chairs, Firsun unzipped his bag to reveal a modified Kalashnikov. “The danger isn’t going to knock on my door and tell me it’s coming in 15 minutes,” he said, while a woman at the next table chatted breezily on her smartphone. “The point of the weapon is to keep it with me at all times.”

Local politican Igor Firsun’s Kalashnikov, which he has taken to carrying with him at all times. Mike Giglio for BuzzFeed

Firsun had started carrying the duffel bag just two days earlier, after neighbors alerted him to the appearance of masked men at his apartment one night while he was away. He said he had kept it by his side ever since — and that many of his colleagues were either leaving the city or likewise arming themselves. The separatists, he said, targeted anyone who might resist them: “They do not want to permit any opposition to their regime.”

Interviews with pro-Ukraine residents of the city and region likewise suggested that a growing number considered themselves under threat — and that an exodus from the region might be in the making.

One local deputy from battle-scarred Kramatorsk said separatists were scouring the area for pro-Ukraine politicians, many of whom had already fled. He himself had left recently when a friend from the pro-Russia side called to warn him: “They are searching for you.”

A newspaper editor said he escaped when he learned of a sizeable bounty for his arrest. Another activist who had fled said: “I’m on a list of enemies.” Yet another went into hiding after a gunman opened fire on his car. Even the fearsome ultras from the local soccer club, often on the frontlines of pro-Ukraine protests, had started to flee. “They are being hunted by armed separatists!” a local sports journalist tweeted on Tuesday.

Anything with shades of a demonstration against the separatists has also come under attack. A Donetsk priest who hosts nightly interfaith prayer gatherings for peace and unity said they were increasingly targeted, with some attendees beaten and threatened with knives. “[The attackers] are zombies of Russian propaganda,” he said.

Sergey Garmash, the head of a large coalition of Donetsk activists, said in a phone interview on Monday that many were in the process of “deciding for themselves whether to leave.” He had elected to stay despite threats on his life, he said, though he was trying hard to be careful. “I’m still here, and I’m not planning to leave yet,” he said.

But that same night, the summer home where he had been hiding out — along with Firsun, the young politician — was sprayed with bullets. The duo returned fire to fend off the attackers, and by Tuesday morning both had fled Donetsk.

Others have been kidnapped, an increasingly common tool for the separatists — a Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday documented multiple cases of abductions and of “severe beatings” of captives. Dozens of people, it added, were believed to be held by the separatists. “Armed men affiliated with anti-Kiev forces have been snatching up activists, journalists and local officials,” one of the report’s authors, Anna Neistat, wrote.

These abductions have reached even the security officials working to combat the separatists, a development that has deeply shaken pro-Ukraine residents of Donetsk. On Thursday, Nikolai Yacubovich, a security adviser to the national authorities, sat in the same hotel lobby vowing that “the government didn’t give up.” He was abducted by separatists the next day.

Soon after, Yacubovich appeared in a harrowing video with masked men who declared that they had yet to decide his fate. He appeared badly beaten, with a bandaged head and swollen face. Then he made what could only have been a coerced appeal to the camera for authorities to stop the very anti-separatist campaign he had been helping to carry out. “My desire is that the Kiev authorities stop the military pressure on citizens of their own country,” he said.


Ukraine Activists Flee Death Threats And Kidnappings

“The danger isn’t going to knock on my door and tell me it’s coming in 15 minutes.” posted on May 6, 2014 at 10:53am EDT
Mike Giglio BuzzFeed Staff

Pro-Russia protesters burn a Ukranian flag outside the district council building in Donetsk. Marko Djurica / Reuters

DONETSK, Ukraine — Olena Tkachenko told her 9-year-old daughter they were going on vacation; as she zipped up their overstuffed bags on Monday evening, jamming a chocolate bar into the girl’s backpack, she tried hard to believe it.

Until this week, Tkachenko ran a hotline for pro-Ukraine activists in Donetsk, the city of 1 million that has become a frontline of an increasingly violent separatist push in eastern Ukraine. She decided she couldn’t do it anymore when relentless threats from the separatists began to shake her. “We will kill you all,” read one of the texts on her phone.

The threats were one more sign of darkening times: Those activists, journalists and politicians who opposed the separatists in and around Donetsk were increasingly faced with beatings, abductions and even attempted assassinations in what felt like a concerted push to drive them out. Some used the word “hunted” to describe their ordeal, and each day brought word that more had fled. On her way to the train station, Tkachenko was still coming to grips with her fate.

Friends had tried to convince her that she wasn’t a “refugee,” she said. Instead, much like the lie she’d told her daughter, they painted her open-ended trip as a well-deserved break. But she was deeply unsettled as the train to Kiev pulled into the station. “I don’t want this trip to be forever,” she said.

For many in the sprawling Donetsk region — where pro-Russia militants occupy government buildings and have turned some outlying towns into conflict zones — life has continued with relative normalcy. For those directly involved on either side of the struggle, however, war is already churning beneath the surface.

One day last week, Igor Firsun, a young parliamentarian from Donetsk who supports a united Ukraine, walked into the lobby of a five-star hotel holding a duffel bag. Well-to-do locals regularly do the same on their way to visit the gym. But as he sat down on one of the lobby’s leather chairs, Firsun unzipped his bag to reveal a modified Kalashnikov. “The danger isn’t going to knock on my door and tell me it’s coming in 15 minutes,” he said, while a woman at the next table chatted breezily on her smartphone. “The point of the weapon is to keep it with me at all times.”

Local politican Igor Firsun’s Kalashnikov, which he has taken to carrying with him at all times. Mike Giglio for BuzzFeed

Firsun had started carrying the duffel bag just two days earlier, after neighbors alerted him to the appearance of masked men at his apartment one night while he was away. He said he had kept it by his side ever since — and that many of his colleagues were either leaving the city or likewise arming themselves. The separatists, he said, targeted anyone who might resist them: “They do not want to permit any opposition to their regime.”

Interviews with pro-Ukraine residents of the city and region likewise suggested that a growing number considered themselves under threat — and that an exodus from the region might be in the making.

One local deputy from battle-scarred Kramatorsk said separatists were scouring the area for pro-Ukraine politicians, many of whom had already fled. He himself had left recently when a friend from the pro-Russia side called to warn him: “They are searching for you.”

A newspaper editor said he escaped when he learned of a sizeable bounty for his arrest. Another activist who had fled said: “I’m on a list of enemies.” Yet another went into hiding after a gunman opened fire on his car. Even the fearsome ultras from the local soccer club, often on the frontlines of pro-Ukraine protests, had started to flee. “They are being hunted by armed separatists!” a local sports journalist tweeted on Tuesday.

Anything with shades of a demonstration against the separatists has also come under attack. A Donetsk priest who hosts nightly interfaith prayer gatherings for peace and unity said they were increasingly targeted, with some attendees beaten and threatened with knives. “[The attackers] are zombies of Russian propaganda,” he said.

Sergey Garmash, the head of a large coalition of Donetsk activists, said in a phone interview on Monday that many were in the process of “deciding for themselves whether to leave.” He had elected to stay despite threats on his life, he said, though he was trying hard to be careful. “I’m still here, and I’m not planning to leave yet,” he said.

But that same night, the summer home where he had been hiding out — along with Firsun, the young politician — was sprayed with bullets. The duo returned fire to fend off the attackers, and by Tuesday morning both had fled Donetsk.

Others have been kidnapped, an increasingly common tool for the separatists — a Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday documented multiple cases of abductions and of “severe beatings” of captives. Dozens of people, it added, were believed to be held by the separatists. “Armed men affiliated with anti-Kiev forces have been snatching up activists, journalists and local officials,” one of the report’s authors, Anna Neistat, wrote.

These abductions have reached even the security officials working to combat the separatists, a development that has deeply shaken pro-Ukraine residents of Donetsk. On Thursday, Nikolai Yacubovich, a security adviser to the national authorities, sat in the same hotel lobby vowing that “the government didn’t give up.” He was abducted by separatists the next day.

Soon after, Yacubovich appeared in a harrowing video with masked men who declared that they had yet to decide his fate. He appeared badly beaten, with a bandaged head and swollen face. Then he made what could only have been a coerced appeal to the camera for authorities to stop the very anti-separatist campaign he had been helping to carry out. “My desire is that the Kiev authorities stop the military pressure on citizens of their own country,” he said.

Nikolai Yacubovich, a security adviser to the national authorities, was taken by separatists and badly beaten, before being paraded on TV Life News

Yacubovich was finally freed on Monday, according to Roman Svitan, a security adviser to Donetsk’s governor. He declined to give details, but said that several other captives had also been freed, after being held along with Yacubovich on the fifth floor of a local government building that has become a headquarters for the separatists. Such abductions had become commonplace, Svitan said. “They want to get the maximum amount of information out of them, threaten them, and maybe exchange them,” he said.

He added that any Donetsk residents “who are openly showing themselves” as resistant to the separatists risked being targeted as well. Shortly afterward, he put a dazed Yacubovich into the back seat of his car — where a loaded shotgun rested on the floor — and drove him to safety outside the region.

Targeted violence has victimized the pro-Russia side as well, though it appears to be less widespread. One senior pro-Russia activist in Donetsk, Eduard Acupov, recounted being abducted by masked men in mid-April and savagely beaten — and his medical report, along with a jagged scar on his skull, attest to the severe head injuries that kept him hospitalized for two weeks.

Until recently, Acupov considered some of his rivals on the pro-Ukraine side to be close friends, and he said he was saddened by the violence that has gripped the region, and by the threats and violence from his own side that were forcing people to flee. But he didn’t see another way. “I don’t know what to say. War is a very dirty business,” he said. “We’ve passed the point of no return.”

The Cossacks Are Coming

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-06/russian-cossacks-are-coming

Following the Ukraine government's most recent retaliatory escalation, which saw the death of some 50 people in Odessa on Friday, everyone has been waiting to see how the Kremlin would respond. For now while Putin appears to be merely biding his time until the various referendum votes take place in east Ukraine, quite confident they will have the same outcome as the Crimean vote to join Russia, thus giving him a legitimate basis to annex further Ukraine regions, some "independent" military units, according to local press, appear to be making their way into Ukraine: Cossacks, that roving group of militants (and sometimes mercenaries) who have been so instrumental in shaping the history of both Ukraine and Russia.



Several clips distributed earlier on social networks purport to show Russian Cossacks who have entered eastern Ukraine, specifically the town of Anthracite.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xi20JwfkB1c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A2Ux-I_EDlw

While one can't determine the validity of these reports (at least not yet), it is certain that both the Ukraine government and NATO will latch on to reports that Russian mercenaries are operating and supporting the eastern militias. However, what this will achieve aside from even more futile diplomatic bluster, is unclear.

And for those who are not familiar with the Cossack culture, here is a reminder from SkyNews:

Russian Cossack leaders have plans to cross into Ukraine to "rescue" Russian-speaking communities in the east of the country, after providing militias which helped Vladimir Putin's Crimean land grab.

Atamans, or headmen, of two Cossack communities, said they had traditional claims on the lands on both sides of the border, adding: "One day we will take them back."

But they warned they would expect rewards for acting as the Russian president's muscle.

Romanticised by the Tsars but crushed by the communists, Russia's Cossack communities are rapidly rebuilding themselves and have become a powerful symbol of nationalist fervour.

To many Russians, they have betrayed their martial roots to become henchmen for the worst aspects of Mr Putin's rule.

Most recently, they have been seen on the streets of Crimea, often heavily armed and sometimes drunk, blockading Ukrainian troops in their barracks and running road blocks.

They were also filmed whipping members of the band Pussy Riot when the all-female group attempted a street performance at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
They also admit being close to other hard-line Slav nationalists, Serbs in particular.

Earlier this month, Alexei Sushkov was responsible for hosting a group of black-bearded Chetniks, Serb militia, in Sevastopol.

They serve under a death's head insignia and volunteered to help with Russia's invasion of Crimea.

"You have to have great personal discipline. You need to be religious and of good character to be a Cossack," he confided.

Mr Sushkov is not so much a bear of a man as a man who looks like he ate a bear, and the meal was a little wanting.

He says that when the Cossacks invaded Crimea, they brought their own weapons or picked them up from local authorities when they arrived. They also turned up with an armoured personnel carrier - or a "mini-tank", as they called it.

He spoke with passion about how he wished he had been able to help the Serbs fight in the former Yugoslavia and of how they were bilked of the province of Kosovo, which won its independence after a civil war with Serbia and Nato bombardment of Serb forces.

"Russia was weak back then," he growled.

On the outskirts of Taganrog, a few miles from the border with Ukraine, Cossacks demonstrated how they were reviving the tradition of horsemanship which was central to the Cossacks' culture.

Their warlike tendencies and citizen cavalry meant their regiments became a celebrated part of Tsarist imperial life.

The Don Cossacks ruled a vast Host on both sides of the River Don for centuries and were given a degree of autonomy from central government.

When many sided with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks in the early part of the last century, though, they were crushed by the Soviet rulers who snuffed out any potential threats to the Party's hegemony.

They are gentle with their horses, ride with light hands and are freely affectionate towards their mounts - kissing and cuddling them like beloved children.

Such tenderness is in sharp contrast to what they have planned, the details of which they won't share, in the neighbouring Ukrainian region of Donetsk.

"We are ready to go in whenever the time comes to protect our people," said Andrei Lovlenski, the ataman of the Taganrog Cossacks. "We are ready."

In Rostov-on-Don, a city of one million people and home to a vast helicopter factory, the Cossack revival is being driven by Timor Okkert, the local ataman.

He is a combat veteran of Russian conflicts in Georgia, Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Close to the Patriots' Sports Club where his Cossack disciples work out and learn martial arts, his offices house an impressive collection of swords and automatic weapons.

He led Cossacks into Crimea and is convinced he will be asked to go into other parts of Ukraine too.

"We've been used like this for many centuries," he said.

But what does he expect from Mr Putin in return?

Mr Okkert allows a brief sneer to cross his face.

"That's a rhetorical question," he said. "We're still waiting for an adequate answer from our government."

That's a warning - it means once unleashed, the Cossacks may be hard to control.

Britain: Russia Wants to Disrupt Ukraine Vote

 British Foreign Secretary William Hague is suggesting that unrest in eastern Ukraine is being fomented by Russia to disrupt the May 25 presidential elections and is urging a gathering of European foreign ministers to rally in support of the vote.

Hague spoke at a foreign ministers' meeting of the 47-nation Council of Europe in Vienna Tuesday. Also present were the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers.

He told reporters that "Russia is clearly intent on preventing or disrupting those elections," while asserting that foreign ministers at the meeting will express "strong support" for holding the vote without outside interference.

He also said nations supporting Ukraine remain ready to find a diplomatic solution to reduce tensions generated by the pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine but "that would require stronger Russian commitment."

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/britain-russia-disrupt-ukraine-vote-23601573

Putin honors journalists as Ukraine propaganda war heats up

(Reuters) - Four weeks after Russia annexed Crimea to great fanfare, President Vladimir Putin quietly signed a decree honoring more than 300 journalists for their "objective coverage" of the region's seizure from Ukraine.

The awards made under decree 279 to television, radio and newspapers loyal to Putin underline the importance of media in stirring patriotic sentiment over Ukraine. However, the decree's initial secrecy suggests Putin wishes to distance himself from the powerful Kremlin policy tool of the media onslaught.

In the official gazette, there was a gap between decrees 278 and 280. Decree 279 remained unexplained until a Russian newspaper reported its contents on Monday, a fortnight after the event, offering a glimpse into how sensitive the use of propaganda has become in the East-West standoff over Ukraine.

A Kremlin source, confirming that Putin signed the decree making the awards on April 22, said only: "It was for internal use, not for public use."

To an outside observer, the propaganda war seems to have reached such a scale that it is all but impossible for Russians or Ukrainians to discover what is really going on from their national media.

Many events are seen through a mist of disinformation or just confusion, a situation that suits Putin in what his critics believe is his attempt to undermine the Ukrainian authorities by portraying them as unable to control the country.

The veracity of events is increasingly hard to check. When Russian media reported heavy fighting in the town of Kramatorsk this weekend, Reuters journalists on the scene shortly afterwards found a sleepy town with no evidence of clashes.

Russian media deny they are part of a propaganda campaign and accuse Western journalists of bias, a charge that has found fertile ground in eastern Ukraine where some reporters have already been taken hostage or beaten.

The Facebook page of Pavel Gubarev, a detained pro-Russian protest leader, has described journalists as "catalysts of intolerance, hatred and violence".

"After lies follows pain," warned the page.

MIS-MATCHED

As on other fronts, the media fight between Moscow and Kiev is mis-matched.

Russia's well-organized and well-financed state media have portrayed events in a style reminiscent of the Soviet era, peppering their reports with the message that Ukrainians, as during World War Two, may be cooperating with fascists.

By contrast, Ukraine's fragmented media lack the single mindedness to answer the charges, remaining poorly financed and usually controlled by business tycoons who have been reluctant to offend business partners in Russia.

Now largely switched off in the separatist-held regions in its east, Ukrainian television has so far failed to make the case for Kiev's new pro-Western leaders that pro-Russian rebels are in the pay of the Kremlin.

That has been left to the Internet, where a war of words is raging as Ukraine prepares for three events: a May 25 presidential election, a May 11 referendum on independence in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and Friday's anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.

All are possible flashpoints in a crisis where Russia could use clashes to justify an invasion of eastern Ukraine - which Putin has reserved the right to stage if he believes compatriots and Russian speakers need his protection.

Several Russian newspapers used the same photo on Monday on their front page. This showed a man with flames licking up his sleeve as he throws a Molotov Cocktail into the burning trade union building in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, where dozens of pro-Russian separatists died after street fighting.

Blaming Friday's trouble on far-right Ukrainian groups, the popular Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a banner headline declaring: "Dirty scumbags!"

Some Russian media likened the blaze to a World War Two Nazi massacre when all the residents of a Belarussian village were burnt alive.

Ukraine's acting president, Oleksander Turchinov, tried to win back the initiative at the weekend, using his strongest language yet to condemn Russia for "waging war against our country", but lacking support his words failed to catch on.

Other allegations by officials that only drunks and drug addicts follow the pro-Russians have also fallen flat, leaving it to Ukraine's bloggers to vent the widespread frustration with not only the pro-Russians but with their new leaders as well.

"At the time of war, everyone lies," said a post on the "Odessa on fire" website, trying to defuse bitter debate over who was responsible for the more than 40 deaths on Friday. Such comment shows the depth of emotion as a struggle for influence in Ukraine threatens to tip the country into civil war.

But while much of the Ukrainian blogosphere undermines their leaders, Russian media coverage is helping to boost support for Putin, whose ratings last week hit 82 percent - the highest since 2010.

"Putin played a brilliant hand," said one post on a site called "For Putin - For a Great Russia", celebrating his moves to protect the economy from Western sanctions over Ukraine.

"Putin has fooled the European Union and America and wasn't it great? Before the eyes of the whole world, he played them like a violin."

(Additional reporting by Alexei Anishchuk; editing by David Stamp)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/06/us-ukraine-crisis-media-idUSBREA4505H20140506

"Russian march" in Minsk on May 9 banned, say in the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Read full article: http://www.interfax.by/news/belarus/1155543

It is clear that the Belarusians are fascists 

About colorado ribbons - fun, but probably fake, no official source.

  Kazakhstan has banned the use of the orange-black ribbon on May 9. And not for nothing - this will be a key element in Moscow's provocation strategy.
What used to be a symbol of victory over fascism in 1945 has now been turned into a symbol of Kremlin fascism. It will never be the same. It is the new swastika

http://nedelya-ua.com/news/kazahstan-zapretil-nosit-georgievskie-lenty-na-den-pobedy

The Crimean “Occupendum” – Mustafa Jemilev was right: the decision about Crimea’s anschluss is legally fraught.

According to the report of the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights of the Russian Federation, the Crimean referendum is assessed as follows:

SYNOPSIS
• the overwhelming majority of citizens in Sevastopol have voted for joining to Russia on the referendum (50-80% of voters); in Crimea 50-60% of voters voted for joining Russia whereas the general voter turnout was only 30-50%.

• Crimea’s inhabitants have voted not so much for joining Russia, as for the termination of, as they say, “corruption and lawlessness of the thieves of the dominant Donetsk henchmen.” Inhabitants of Sevastopol particularly voted for annexation to Russia. Fears of illegal armed groups in Sevastopol were higher than in other regions of Crimea.

Consequently, the confines of the possible values of the total number of voters in Crimea who voted on the “occupendum” for joining Russia draws from 15% (30×50) to 30% (50×60).

As it’s known, according to Jemilev’s information, Crimean voter presence for the occupendum is 32.4%. In this case the number of voters who voted to join Russia comes to a bit more than 31%.

Thus:

• the majority of the voters living in Crimea (according to various estimates from 69 to 85%) haven’t voted for the Anschluss;

• the officially announced results of the occupendum that were also repeatedly and publically announced by President V. Putin have been roughly fabricated;

The decisions of the State Duma, the Federation Council and the President of the Russian Federation about joining Crimea to RF are based not only on unacceptable violations of the Ukrainian Constitution and International Law, but also on the rough fabrication of the results of the occupendum on the 16th of March against the clearly expressed will of the vast majority of residents of Ukraine and Crimea, and therefore are legally fraught.
Source: ‪#‎crimea_sos‬ 

Effectively this means that Vladimir Putin’s own Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights has confirmed that the turnout for the so-called “referendum” [now called "occupendum"] on Crimea’s status was much lower than reported, and the results also far less overwhelmingly in favour of joining Russia. The same results have been reported from other sources: “while the overwhelming majority of residents of Sevastopol voted for joining Russian (turnout of 50-80%), the turnout for all of Crimea was from 30-50% and only 50-60% of those voted for joining Russia.”

Thus, a maximum 30% (i.e. 60% of 50%) of Crimeans voted to join Russia. This does not take into account any of the bribery, blackmail, bullying and multiple voting that reportedly took place.

Source: echo.msk.ru

http://maidantranslations.com/2014/05/05/the-crimean-occupendum-mustafa-jemilev-was-right-the-decision-about-crimeas-anschluss-is-legally-fraught/