[PostFactum]

andyt andyt:

NATO was all about breaking up Yugoslavia. They should be consistent and support the breakup of Ukraine as well.

*Facepalm*

[andyt]

$1:

Five years ago, I wrote a paper for a Belgrade conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In that paper I stressed that the disintegration of Yugoslavia had been used as an experimental laboratory to perfect various techniques that would subsequently be used in so-called “color revolutions” or other “regime change” operations directed against leaders considered undesirable by the United States government.

At that time, I specifically pointed to the similarities between the Krajina region of former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. Here is what I wrote at the time:

Where did the wars of Yugoslav disintegration break out most violently? In a region called the Krajina. Krajina means borderland. So does Ukraine – it is a variant of the same Slavic root. Both Krajina and Ukraine are borderlands between Catholic Christians in the West and Orthodox Christians in the East. The population is divided between those in the East who want to remain tied to Russia, and those in the West who are drawn toward Catholic lands. But in Ukraine as a whole, polls show that some seventy percent of the population is against joining NATO. Yet the US and its satellites keep speaking of Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO. Nobody’s right not to join NATO is ever mentioned.

The condition for Ukraine to join NATO would be the expulsion of foreign military bases from Ukrainian territory. That would mean expelling Russia from its historic naval base at Sebastopol, essential for Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Sebastopol is on the Crimean peninsula, inhabited by patriotic Russians, which was only made an administrative part of Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian.

Rather the way Tito, a Croat, gave almost the whole Adriatic coastline of Yugoslavia to Croatia, and generally enforced administrative borders detrimental to the Serbs.

As the same causes may have the same effects, US insistence on “liberating” Ukraine from Russian influence may have the same effect as the West’s insistence on “liberating” the Catholic Croats from the Orthodox Serbs. That effect is war. But instead of a small war, against the Serbs, who had neither the means nor even the will to fight the West (since they largely thought they were part of it), a war in Ukraine would mean a war with Russia. A nuclear superpower. And one that will not stand idly by while the United States continues to move its fleet and its air bases to the edges of Russian territory, both in the Black Sea and in the Baltic, on land, sea and air.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/ ... ugoslavia/

[andyt]

$1:

Is Ukraine the Next Yugoslavia?

Twenty-eight dead – and is that the final tally? Barricades divide a city in what is clearly becoming a divided country. Angry messages fly between Moscow and Western capitals. Washington warns the Kiev government of “consequences” if the bloodshed continues, while the EU threatens sanctions. Russia accuses the West of interference. To anyone of my 50-something generation and who remembers the former Yugoslavia, parallels between the trajectory of events in Kiev and the start of the conflict in Yugoslavia are clear and disturbing.

Every well-informed person knows something about the middle and later period of the Yugoslav wars: the fall of Vukovar, the camps in Bosnia and the massacre in Srebrenica. Few remember the relatively small scale of the conflict when it began. Back in spring 1991, after a bunch of rookie policemen was killed in Borovo, in eastern Croatia, I was pounding the streets of Zagreb, querying people on what happens next. I asked a Croatian colleague, Vesna Kesic, to find the names of those who had been killed. Kesic complied but clearly doubted the point of this exercise. “Soon you won’t be able to count the names of the dead,” she said gloomily.

I was horrified. Like most outsiders, I remained convinced that wars in Europe had ended for good in 1945 and that the UN, Brussels, the US, or the Yugoslavs themselves would find a way to de-escalate the situation. No such thing happened, as we know. The violence had a momentum all of its own and by the end of 1991, by which time the death toll had climbed into the thousands, Kesic’s words sounded prophetic.

Of course, history does not repeat itself and hopefully Ukraine won’t fall into the same dreadful abyss as Yugoslavia. Similarities exist - but so do important differences. Yugoslavia was a federation, not a unified state, and the Croats and Albanians in particular had a highly developed sense of their own national identity and history even before Yugoslavia was formed. The bloody civil war or wars that raged in Yugoslavia during the Second World War also cast a long shadow.

None of that applies to Ukraine, which suffered collectively at Stalin’s hands in the 1930s, and where almost everyone, bar ethnic Russians, Tatars and other minorities, feels Ukrainian to some extent. However, even if Ukraine’s ethnic and confessional identities are more fluid and less polarised than those of Yugoslavia, the east-west divide is evident. What is equally worrying is the way that Russia and Europe are tussling over Ukraine as if it is a kind of competition; as if it is a given that the prizewinner will get to enjoy exclusive rights of ownership.

Given Ukraine’s hybrid personality - Ukrainian-speaking in the west, Russian-speaking in the east, Catholic, Uniate and Ukrainian Orthodox in the west, Russian Orthodox in the east – the Europeans surely were unwise even to have attempted to treat Ukraine as country that was in a position to make a settled decision in favour of either a “Western” or “Eastern” future. One might as well ask someone with schizophrenia which of their various personalities they wish to stick with permanently.

It seems remiss that the EU did not consult more closely with Russia on the proposed treaty that has generated such bitterness and recrimination. It was obvious from the start that Russia saw the proposed deal as infinitely more than a simple economic agreement; that the Kremlin viewed it as a tool to yank Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and pull it into the Western camp.

Perhaps what Russia thinks or fears might not matter so much if this were another Poland or Latvia - another country that just happened, by dint of historical happenstance, to be in Russia’s embrace and can’t wait to escape. But Ukraine is home to several million Russians and to millions of other Ukrainians who view the world through much the same spectacles as do the Russians.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article ... yugoslavia

[andyt]

F

$1:

or yesterday’s Bosnian Serbs, substitute today’s pro-Russians in Ukraine



It is a good 2,400km from the eastern Ukrainian town of Slavyansk to the Dutch city of The Hague. Measured in terms of international law, however, the distance is considerably shorter.
In Slavyansk, pro-Russian separatists hold hostage a team of military observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

In The Hague, the seizure of UN personnel as hostages is one crime for which Ratko Mladic, the general who commanded Bosnian Serb military forces in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, is standing trial.
Hostage-snatching is one of several threads that connect Ukraine in 2014 with Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. Just as it is uncertain if Moscow is embarrassed by the abductions of observers in eastern Ukraine, so it was unclear if Belgrade approved or disapproved of the Bosnian Serb hostage-taking.
Still, the essential similarity of the conflicts lies in the collapse in 1991 of two multinational, federal, communist states – Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Serbs and Russians, the largest nationalities of these federations, found themselves divided into a mother country and a diaspora spread among newly independent states, notably Bosnia and Ukraine.
Whereas Yugoslavia’s civil wars coincided with its disintegration, the Soviet Union’s demise did not spark much bloodshed between Russians and non-Russians. Only now, in terms of the potential reintegration of ethnic Russians into one state, are the full implications of that seismic event starting to unfold.
“The Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders,” Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said in March when he announced Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s deceased strongman, lamented the Serb nation’s fate in similar language in 1991.
In depth

Crisis in Ukraine
In depth: pro-EU Ukrain rallies
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin moved swiftly to annex Crimea, in the first land grab in Europe since the second world war, and the EU and US are worried over Moscow’s intentions elsewhere in Ukraine
Now the masked militants of Slavyansk, Donetsk and other eastern Ukrainian cities proclaim the goal of secession, and possible absorption into Russia, with a determination no less implacable than that with which the Bosnian Serbs sought independence and, if circumstances permitted, unification with Serbia.
For yesterday’s Republika Srpska, substitute today’s People’s Republic of Donetsk. The self-styled Bosnian Serb state was led by Radovan Karadzic, a psychiatrist and poet who is on trial with Mr Mladic in The Hague. The Donetsk entity is headed by Denis Pushilin, a former casino croupier who was linked in the 1990s to MMM, a Russian Ponzi scheme.
Just as the rebel Donetsk leaders have scheduled a referendum for May 11, so the Bosnian Serbs staged a plebiscite in November 1991. But there is one difference. Unlike the Bosnian Serb referendum, which asked voters if they wanted to remain part of the rump, Serbian-led Yugoslav state, the Donetsk secessionists are not explicitly asking voters if they want their region to be part of Russia. Perhaps a second annexation of Ukrainian territory is not, at least for now, the Kremlin’s purpose.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4b4e6d94-d1ee ... z30wymniBK

[PostFactum]

Comparing cock with stick.

[andyt]

$1:

Now, the events in Ukraine seem to us Bosnians like a terrifying deja vu. The parallels between Ukraine now and Bosnia in 1992 are obvious. The Russian army acted aggressively towards Ukraine, as Milošević's army did in Bosnia. Putin had strong support in parts of Ukraine, as Milošević had in large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Now Kiev has the support of the EU and the US, as Sarajevo did. We even had Bono and Pavarotti singing about Miss Sarajevo. Yet all the musical telegrams of support from the free world didn't stop the ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia, close to the Serbian border.

Behind the bloody curtain of Bosnian and other Balkan wars, the transition from the Yugoslav version of socialism to capitalism took place, managed by the EU troika. Behind the ballet of masses on Kiev squares and Russian army manoeuvres, there is a clear economic logic. Brussels asked Kiev to sign a free-trade pact with the EU. That was a good deal for EU, but clearly not for Ukraine. Then, Moscow offered Kiev a helping hand, with all the strings in the world attached: £9bn of aid, a reduction of gas prices by 30% and major business deals for the Ukrainian industry. Then Viktor Yanukovych declined the European offer. And the Euro-Maidan movement rose...

As the economist Michael Roberts notes, "the people of Ukraine are left with Hobson's choice: either go with KGB-led crony capitalism from Russia or go with equally corrupt pro-European 'democrats'".

Roberts predicts that Ukraine's foreign debt is about to double, "as it takes on new debt from the IMF and the cost of existing dollar and euro-debt jumps as the hryvnia is devalued". It hardly comes as a surprise to us in former Yugoslavia. At the beginning of its dissolution, the Yugoslav foreign debt was £9.5bn; today, after all the "help" we got from the troika, it's more than £107bn.

In their struggle to overcome Russian occupation and survive all the Trojan horses from the institutions of global capitalism, it is to be hoped that people in Ukraine learned a thing from the war in Bosnia – that a deus ex machina from the west will never land, solving the situation and leading them into the promised land of the EU.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... an-eu-flag

[saturn_656]

Yugoslavia broke itself up. Without Tito the country fell apart (then started butchering each other) along ethnic lines.

NATO didn't instigate the situation but they did try and bring order to it.

[andyt]

I guess this time it's Russia's turn to bring order. Seems a large part of the population of East Ukraine isn't crazy about joining the EU. To suggest that they are all just mind controlled by Russia is disingenuous. Do a search on Ukraine and Yugoslavia and it's amazing how many people were calling what's happening how months back during the fuss in Kyiv.

[saturn_656]

No maybe they weren't crazy about the EU, but Russia instigated this round of crap when they invaded and annexed Crimea and started backing the insurgents in the East.

Ukraine is no Yugoslavia.

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

He says that soldiers are placing mines in the sewers under the city of Kramatorsk. This is a prudent move to prevent the enemy from using the sewers for covert movement.

PostFactum PostFactum:

There are tunnels which transfer shit, they are under the city. Russians put explosions in this tunnels.

For some reason I took 'mining' as in 'digging for resources' not 'planting explosives'. This was my confusion. "Why the heck would they be digging for shit? . . ."

[Jabberwalker]

andyt andyt:

I guess this time it's Russia's turn to bring order. Seems a large part of the population of East Ukraine isn't crazy about joining the EU. To suggest that they are all just mind controlled by Russia is disingenuous. Do a search on Ukraine and Yugoslavia and it's amazing how many people were calling what's happening how months back during the fuss in Kyiv.

It's hard to imagine that the population of East Ukraine is going to be better off by choosing poor, economically backward Russia over the E.U.. The only reason that they would do so is for jingoistic, nationalist reasons. The Russians of the 21st century are a lot like the Germans of the Weimar Republic. They do not believe that they were defeated but that they were sold out. A lot of these events are eerily similar, in fact.

[andyt]

Without Russian interference the process might have been slower but probably gone down civil war anyway. Russia saw its interests threatened and intervened. The EU trying to pull Ukraine west plays as much a role as Russia pulling east. Basically Ukraine has become a piece of meat while the two big dogs pull away at it.

[PostFactum]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

He says that soldiers are placing mines in the sewers under the city of Kramatorsk. This is a prudent move to prevent the enemy from using the sewers for covert movement.

PostFactum PostFactum:

There are tunnels which transfer shit, they are under the city. Russians put explosions in this tunnels.

For some reason I took 'mining' as in 'digging for resources' not 'planting explosives'. This was my confusion. "Why the heck would they be digging for shit? . . ."

There is their main base, so they'll try to blow up the city if something will be wrong.

[Jabberwalker]

Basically Ukraine has become a piece of meat while the two big dogs pull away at it.



I don't think that Europe and the U.S. are pulling hard at all. A toothless dog that can only bark is a better analogy.

[andyt]

They were trying to pull Ukraine into their orbit economically. That threatened Russian interests, but also threatened a lot of Ukrainians - more so it turns out than we were led to believe. If breaking up Yugoslavia was the right thing to do, maybe it is here too. The insurgents seem to have a lot of local support. These people are not all paid or brainwashed by Russia, they just want to cleave with the side they identify with.