Περί Ουκρανίας

Costas

Costas

¥
Interpol rejects Ukrainian murder charges against ex-officials
(Maxim Tucker / Kyiv Post)

Interpol issued a statement today saying that it had rejected a Ukrainian request to place ex-regime officials, including former President Viktor Yanukovych and former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, on its wanted list for murder.

The international police agency instead issued "Red Notices, or international wanted persons alerts, for four individuals including former President Viktor Yanukovych and former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov," for financial crimes only.

The alerts are based on a new request by the Ukrainian authorities, as a March 2014 request on charges including abuse of power and murder was "assessed by Interpol as not compliant with the Organization's rules and regulations and was refused," the Interpol statement read.

"Red Notices are only issued to Interpol member countries if the requesting National Central Bureau has provided all the information required by the General Secretariat."

Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office accuses Yanukovych and Azarov, along with other regime officials, of plotting the murder of Euromaidan protesters on Independence Square by ordering security forces to open fire on a three-month old demonstration against their leadership.

The massacre of more than a hundred people undermined support for the former President among his own party and he was forced to flee in his helicopter, leaving behind overwhelming evidence of massive corruption in the form of his billion-dollar Mezhigirya mansion - complete with galleon, zoo and classic car collection.

Ukraine's new government had already faced fierce criticism for failing to gather enough evidence of human rights violations or corruption to obtain an Interpol red notice or support EU sanctions against former regime officials. Serious flaws in their investigation into the Euromaidan killings were exposed in a Reuters special report last October.

So when Ukraine’s Minister for Internal Affairs, Arseniy Avakov, announced that after “argument and explanation” and “months after the submission of a request from the Interior Ministry, Prosecutor General of Ukraine and the Security Service,” Interpol had appointed a special commission to deal with the request, it seemed to represent a major breakthrough.

But the "argument" is far from over. The Minister claimed six people had been added to the list, whereas Interpol list only four.

“On the international wanted list of Interpol (red notice – wanted for extradition to Ukraine): Viktor F. Yanukovych, [his son] Olexander Yanukovych, [former Prime Minister] Mykola Azarov, [former Health Minister] Bagatyreva Raisa , Kolobov Yurii (former Minister of Finance), Dzekon GB (former head of Ukrtelecom),” he posted on Facebook.

For the majority of the day even ex-Prime Minister Azarov did not appear on Interpol's list, and the organisation responded “either there is no red notice for that person, or the country has requested that the red notice not be made public," when questioned about his absence by the Kyiv Post.

By late afternoon he had been included, but Yanukovych’s son Olexander and former Health Minister Raisa Bagatyreva still do not appear on the police agency's list. The organisation has also not issued notices for a number of key regime leaders, including former Internal Affairs Minister Zakharchenko, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine Oleksandr Yakymenko and former head of the Presidential Administration Andriy Klyuyev.

The government will suffer a serious blow to its credibility if its law enforcement arm cannot present a convincing case against Yanukovych and other key figures for the deaths of demonstrators, who have become legend in Ukraine as 'the heavenly hundred'.
 
Costas

Costas

¥
Warsaw moves to airlift ethnic Poles from eastern Ukraine
(Kyiv Post)

Poland’s operation to evacuate some 200 people claiming Polish ancestry from strife-torn eastern Ukraine is underway, officials said this weekend.
Some 162 people went to the Polish Consulate in Kharkiv to be airlifted to Poland, Radio Poland, with more due to arrive.
Polish authorities have declined to announce when the group would be flown out of Ukraine, citing security reasons. Weather problems were also a factor in removing the individuals and families.
“We haven’t come across any serious problems, although we have had to alter our travel plans due to the weather conditions,” Deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Pawlik, who was in Kharkiv to oversee the evacuation, told Radio Poland.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Marcin Wojciechowski said the evacuees included children, families, and the elderly. They were to be flown to the northern Polish city of Malbork.
One man from Luhansk who was waiting at the consulate told Radio Poland, “It is impossible to describe it in one word. The war has been ongoing for half a year, and even earlier I lost my job in Luhansk. I was even arrested and sentenced to death by firing squad.”
Poland will be the first European nation to attempt an evacuation from the contested region, the Financial Times reports.
“Ukrainians are seen by the Poles as important neighbors, people very similar in terms of language, culture,” Jaroslaw Cwiek-Karpowicz, head of research at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, told the FT. “Ukraine is perceived as a place that deserves our support. … It is in our interests to support them.”
 
Costas

Costas

¥
Ένα παλιότερο (2012) άρθρο επικαιρότητας ενός ρωσόφωνου Ουκρανού συγγραφέα για το γλωσσικό ζήτημα στην ενιαία (τότε) Ουκρανία, με αναδρομή στην ιστορία του ζητήματος. (Guardian)
 
Costas

Costas

¥
Από ανακοίνωση της Χρυσής Αυγής:
"Πάγια θέση της Χρυσής Αυγής, η οποία έχει διατυπωθεί και δημόσια στη Βουλή είναι ότι η Ελλάς δεν πρέπει να συμμετάσχει στις κυρώσεις Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης και ΗΠΑ κατά της Ρωσίας. Αυτήν την στάση επιβάλλει το Εθνικό συμφέρον και τα γεωπολιτικά δεδομένα." Πηγή: http://www.lifo.gr/now/politics/59407

Μόνο για την τουρκική εισβολή στην Κύπρο οφείλουν να επιβάλλουν κυρώσεις τα ξένα κράτη, αδιαφορώντας για το εθνικό τους συμφέρον και για τα γεωπολιτικά δεδομένα.
 
Palavra

Palavra

Mod Almighty
Staff member
Just hours before his death, Nemtsov had appeared on Ekho Moskvy radio calling on Muscovites to attend an opposition march planned for Sunday. The march against Putin’s government and the war in Ukraine was due to take place in a suburb of Moscow. One of the other organisers of the march, Alexei Navalny, was jailed on 19 February for 15 days. Nemtsov himself had been detained briefly a number of times in recent years for taking part in political rallies, and was seen as one of the old guard of the Russian opposition.
​
Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov shot dead in Moscow
 
Costas

Costas

¥
High Inflation Makes Ukraine’s Troubled Situation Worse
(DANNY HAKIM / ΝΥΤ)

KIEV, Ukraine — Olesia Verchenko looked over a selection of blackened avocados at a supermarket here recently.

Their price has roughly doubled over the last year, notwithstanding the stickers on them advertising a 25 percent discount.

“I don’t think anybody takes avocado anymore, so they are basically rotting on the shelves,” said Ms. Verchenko, an economist.

While the rest of Europe tries desperately to shrug off low inflation, Ukraine has added rapidly rising prices to its long list of problems during its civil war with Russian-backed rebels. Official inflation figures showed that prices rose 61 percent in April compared with a year earlier. But many prices have doubled and tripled.

Ms. Verchenko, a 37-year-old mother of two boys and a professor at the Kiev School of Economics, specializes in arcane subjects like options pricing, but she took some time to explain less esoteric market dynamics. Like the price of candy.

She once bought chocolates from Roshen, the company owned by the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, for about 80 Ukrainian hryvnia a kilogram, or $3.89. Now they are 203.

“You can see inflation in those candies,” she said during a visit to a grocery store near her office.

The price of everything seems to have gone up sharply, including tea, apples and fresh fish.

At a glass display case, she pointed to slices of cake. The prices were quoted for every hundred grams, instead of per kilogram as they once were.

“Before it was always per kilo, but now you have too many numbers,” she said. “It looks better like that. You don’t want to scare your customers away.”

When she recently went shopping for a mattress, she noticed that prices were missing entirely.

For many bigger ticket items, she said, “They don’t really put price tags out anymore.”

“You choose what you want, you ask how much it is, and then you see whether you can afford it or not.”

High inflation is just one of the many problems befalling Ukraine at the moment.

Thousands have died in the war, many more have been displaced, and Ukraine has been cut off from parts of the industrial east. The crisis in Ukraine, where new violence has erupted, is likely to loom large over the Group of 7 meeting in Germany that starts on Sunday.

Potential investors in Ukraine have been scared off. Output is expected to shrink 7.5 percent this year.

A lifeline came this year, when Ukraine negotiated a $25 billion loan package, including $17.5 billion from the International Monetary Fund. As part of that deal, the government is embroiled in contentious negotiations with Ukraine’s creditors in hopes of bringing another $15.3 billion of relief by restructuring the country’s debts.

Austerity measures and tax reforms have also been enacted in tandem with negotiations with the West; there have been cuts in energy subsidies, pension haircuts and tax increases aimed at the wealthy and businesses.

Two factors have worsened inflation. The value of Ukraine’s currency has plummeted since the war began, driving up the cost of imported goods. And energy prices have soared as the government has cut its historically high subsidies.

That has made life more difficult for average Ukrainians and for businesses, which face high borrowing costs.

“I’m not dreaming of credit,” said Yaroslav Rushchyshyn, who founded a garment manufacturer in Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, and is on the board of a coalition of entrepreneurs in the region. “It’s too expensive.”

Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine’s Chicago-born finance minister, said, “I think we’ll be able to bring inflation down over the course of the rest of the year.”

But she was blunt about the stresses inflation poses.

“For a business, it’s a challenge to have to borrow at 30 or 35” percent, she said in an interview. “Our goal is to have real growth again by 2016. That means the banking sector has to be lending to real business, and for it to be lending to real business, inflation has to come down.”

Another problem, she said, is that “when you have this kind of inflation, you have less confidence in your currency,” adding, “People will start pulling their money out of the banks. The deposit withdrawals weaken an already weakened banking system.”

One enterprising entrepreneur, Michael Chobanian, has opened what he calls a Bitcoin embassy and is evangelizing about the controversial virtual currency at a time when faith in traditional currencies is wavering.

“Considering the situation with the currency, it gave Bitcoin a huge boost, so, yes, there is definitely interest,” he said in a recent interview. “Although with Bitcoin, the first time you hear about it, you usually think it’s a scam or a Ponzi scheme.”

The strains of inflation are showing.

“Drugs in Ukraine cost as much as gold,” said Dmytro Sherembey, the founder of Patients of Ukraine, an advocacy group. “For patients, it was a catastrophe last year.”

Government subsidies for medications have not kept pace. They were based on a world where a dollar was worth about eight Ukrainian hryvnia. But the dollar soared to more than 30 hryvnia by February before settling back to about 21 at the end of May.

“Families go to the pharmacy and pay three times more, but the salaries are the same,” said Mr. Sherembey.

Many others are just trying to keep their heads above water.

Vitaly Nakonechnyi, 31, said the weakness of the hryvnia “influences the price of everything I buy” and led him to look for a job with higher pay. He found one as a barista at a coffee shop that looks like an old train car, in a central Kiev park dominated by a Soviet era statue of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.

Victor Halavin, a 60-year-old bus driver, said, “In my flat, electricity, water, everything is up,” adding, “Bread used to be 4 hryvnia. Now it’s 7.”

He stood next to his yellow bus with a cigarette pressed tightly between thumb and index finger and reflected on the last year. “It’s too much revolution in our life,” he said.

Economic hardship is nothing new here. The transition after the fall of the Soviet Union to a market economy has been a rocky one, sapped by corruption and antiquated regulations. The contrast with neighboring Poland, which took a much more aggressive approach to transforming its economy, has been particularly stark. Poland’s per capita output is about three and a half times that of Ukraine.

Ms. Verchenko keeps the inflation problem in perspective.

“I remember how it was in the early ’90s,” she said. “I was still a student in high school when we had 10,000 percent a year. That was hyperinflation! What we have now? It’s not that bad.”

When she was in high school, she had to carry millions of karbovanets, the local currency that temporarily replaced the ruble after the Soviet Union fell, just to buy bread.

“I remember jokes of everyone being millionaires,” she said.

For her, like many others, there are additional concerns while shopping. At the grocery store, she flipped over a package of crackers and pointed to the beginning of the bar code.

“This is not a Ukrainian code,” she said. The first numbers on a product’s international bar code indicate where it was registered, though it does not always coincide with where the product was manufactured. Still, some Ukrainian shoppers aren’t taking chances.

“Russia would be 46,” Ms. Verchenko said. “So 46, no, no. Don’t take 46.”

Everyone was reading bar codes now, she said.

“We don’t know all countries, but we know Russia is 46.” And Ukraine’s code starts with 482.

She turned over a bottle of juice and examined the code on the back label.

“I can’t promise it’s good, but it’s Ukrainian.”

--------------------
Sofiia Kochmar contributed reporting.
 
Costas

Costas

¥
Μετά την απαγόρευση του Κομουνιστικού Κόμματος και μετά την παραδοχή του Πούτιν σε συνέντευξη Τύπου ότι υπάρχουν Ρώσοι στρατιωτικοί στις περιοχές των αυτονομιστών, βρήκα και αυτή την είδηση από το ελληνικό ΥΠΕΞ:

ΡΩΣΙΚΗ ΟΜΟΣΠΟΝΔΙΑ
Ημερομηνία 21/12/2015
Έκδοση Γραφείο Ο.Ε.Υ. Μόσχας (Αρμοδιότητα και για Λευκορωσία, Ουζμπεκιστάν, Τατζικιστάν, Τουρκμενιστάν)

Με σημερινή Απόφαση του Ρώσου Πρωθυπουργού, τροποποιείται η Απόφαση υπ’ αριθ. 778/07.08.2014 “Περί μέτρων υλοποίησης του Διατάγματος του Προέδρου της Ρωσικής Ομοσπονδίας από 6 Αυγούστου 2014 αρ. 560 «Για την εφαρμογή ξεχωριστών ειδικών οικονομικών μέτρων με σκοπό την εξασφάλιση της ασφάλειας της Ρωσικής Ομοσπονδίας»”, προκειμένου να συμπεριλάβει και την Ουκρανία στον κατάλογο των χωρών, για τις οποίες ισχύει η απαγόρευση εισαγωγών αγροτικών προϊόντων, με έναρξη ισχύος την 01.01.2016. Η Απόφαση αυτή έρχεται λίγες ημέρες μετά την έκδοση Διατάγματος του Προέδρου Putin για την αναστολή ισχύος της Ζώνης Ελευθέρων Συναλλαγών με την Ουκρανία.

Σημειώνουμε ότι ήδη από τις 13 Αυγούστου τ.έ., ο Ρώσος Πρωθυπουργός είχε προαναγγείλει την συμπερίληψη της Ουκρανίας στον κατάλογο των χωρών υπό τα ρωσικά αντίμετρα, σε περίπτωση που η Ουκρανία εφάρμοζε την Προωθημένη και Περιεκτική Συμφωνία Ελευθέρου Εμπορίου με την ΕΕ (DCFTA) ή το αργότερο την 01.01.2016 εάν έως εκείνη τη στιγμή δεν είχε καταλήξει σε συμφωνία με τη Ρωσία στους τομείς οικονομικής συνεργασίας Ουκρανίας-ΕΕ για τους οποίους η Ρωσίας είχε προβάλει ενστάσεις.

Σύμφωνα με τις δηλώσεις του Ρώσου Πρωθυπουργού κ. Μεντβέντεφ κατά την παρουσίαση της ως άνω Απόφασης στο Κυβερνητικό Συμβούλιο, η συμπερίληψη της Ουκρανίας έρχεται σαν αποτέλεσμα της ανακοίνωσής της ότι από την αρχή του επόμενου έτους θα εφαρμόσει το οικονομικό τμήμα της Συμφωνίας Σύνδεσης με την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση. Υπό αυτές τις συνθήκες, η Ρωσική Κυβέρνηση θα πρέπει να προστατεύσει τη ρωσική αγορά και τους παραγωγούς, εμποδίζοντας την εισαγωγή προϊόντων από άλλες χώρες ως ουκρανικών. Επιμένοντας στη ρωσική θέση ότι η εφαρμογή της εμπορικής και οικονομικής συμφωνίας της Ουκρανίας με την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση θίγει τα ρωσικά συμφέροντα και δημιουργεί κινδύνους για την οικονομική ασφάλεια της χώρας, ο κ. Μεντβέντεφ αναφέρθηκε στους άκαρπους γύρους τριμερών διαπραγματεύσεων μεταξύ Ρωσίας, ΕΕ και Ουκρανίας, καθώς τόσο η Ουκρανία όσο και η ΕΕ δεν ήταν έτοιμες να υπογράψουν μία νομικά δεσμευτική συμφωνία που θα λαμβάνει υπόψη τα συμφέροντα της Ρωσικής Ομοσπονδίας. Ως εκ τούτου, ο Ρώσος Πρωθυπουργός τόνισε ότι από 1ης Ιανουαρίου 2016, τα ρωσικά αντίμετρα θα εφαρμοστούν και έναντι της Ουκρανίας, λόγω της ένταξής της στο μέτωπο των χωρών που έχουν υιοθετήσει αντι-ρωσικές κυρώσεις (ΕΕ και ΗΠΑ).
 
Costas

Costas

¥
The Victory of Ukraine
Anne Applebaum (The NY Review of Books)

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
by Serhii Plokhy
Basic Books, 395 pp., $29.99

“Tell Them We Are Starving”: The 1933 Soviet Diaries of Gareth Jones
edited by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, with an introduction by Ray Gamache
Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 275 pp., $45.00

Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor
by Ray Gamache
Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 241 pp., $49.99 (paper) (distributed in the US by International Specialized Book Services)

Ukraine’s right to exist as a nation at all is routinely questioned in Western capitals.
(...)
The idea that Ukrainian “isn’t really a language,” that it’s a peasant patois or a dialect, is very common among educated Russians, and no wonder. That’s how Russian speakers have treated Ukrainian speakers for two centuries.

But then the notion that Ukraine—once known as “Malorossiya,” or “Little Russia”—is illegitimate, that it isn’t really a state and doesn’t really count as a nation, is nothing new either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top