The crucial factor behind the rolling collapse of Ukrainian statehood was “EuroMaidan”, which weaponized long-running ultra-nationalist sentiment in society.
I remember as if it were yesterday the first "Orange Revolution" in the early 2000s. I remember my astonishment at the emergence of a snarling Russophobia and malicious glee within the French bourgeois bloc (Socialist Party, Greens, centrist parties, liberal right). The French bourgeoisie hates Russia (the humiliation of Napoleonic France, the cancellation of the Russian state's debt in 1917, Bolshevism, victory over Nazism where bourgeois France was defeated in six weeks, aid to decolonization). So the Orange Revolution awakened all the hopes of harming Russia in the minds of the French bourgeoisie and, I suppose, the Western bourgeoisie.
I distinctly remember it too but for a different reason since I was already reading Russian news in English at RIA and was therefore aware that this was a Color Revolution, which made me wonder when and how such political technologies will one day be used inside the US. BLM and associated movements later answered that question for me.
On a tangential note, the nearly decade between the "Orange Revolution" and "EuroMaidan" could have seen Russia more effectively counter these hostile forces that the West was cultivating in Ukraine, yet it totally dropped the ball for a variety of reasons. It's thus another example of Russia's broken feedback loops and show how far back the problem goes.
You are absolutely right. I remember already being horrified by the quiet self-satisfaction of the Russians in the face of the obvious disaster unfolding. Their attitude, rather condescending, seemed to say: "Ha, ha, ha, come on, these Khokhols are too interested in our preferential energy to turn their backs on us. And we've locked the Europeans in with our cheap energy. Everything is fine. No worries."
I was stunned by this mixture of smugness, naivety, and ignorance of the Western mentality.
I had arrived in Moscow shortly before "EuroMaidan" began and actually went to Kiev with a former Polish colleague from a different program right when it started in order to check it out. He was sympathetic and asked me to come along while I was unsupportive but wanted to see the start of a Color Revolution up close and personal. My experiences later inspired me to write my MA dissertation on Hybrid Warfare, which I later released as a book that was reviewed by the Russian Diplomatic Academy and can be purchased digitally at Amazon or read for free at the links below:
Anyhow, when I returned to MGIMO a few days later, I remember my professors being uneasy with what was happening but all of them more or less signaling -- sincerely or not -- that they thought everything would be okay and that it wasn't all that big of a deal. After the coup, they were shocked, as was the media here, but then tried to play it off as no big deal yet again after Crimea's return. Once Donbass exploded, there was more palpable concern, but they all still downplayed the notion that this was a grand strategic power play by the West.
"Hope dies last", as they say, and I distinctly remember my critical analyses of US foreign policy towards the conflict being rebuffed by my professors and even some of my Voice of Russia peers (( began interning there in 2014 before it merged with RIA to become Sputnik). They all seemed to approve of me criticizing the US, but in retrospect with years of wisdom since that were honed by many personal and professional experiences, I think they didn't take it seriously and just casually dismissed it as pro-Russian/anti-US propaganda.
Therein lies another problem that I haven't talked about here before and it's that it used to be the case that members of Russia's "global media ecosystem" weren't taken seriously by experts, who seemingly assumed that we're all just propagandists who are either saying what he say due to deeply held ideological convictions (thus making us impartial activists whose assessments are unreliable) or because we're getting paid. This was the case apart from some rare exceptions and further contextualizes why Russia is usually caught off guard.
Everything is now the polar opposite but similarly counterproductive from Russia whereby instead of dismissing members of its "global media ecosystem", some elite ones are actually listened to by diplomats, experts, and journalists and their word is treated as the gospel. What's required is a healthy balance, but Russia has an historical tendency to oscillate between extremes while technocratic periods usually lead to it just floating along and getting by with no sense of urgency to improve anything, only an interest in maintaining the status quo.
Why I'm sharing all this is because I always wonder how different everything would have been had Russia's feedback loops not been so broken for so long. If people who matter, not even policymakers but even just experts (including professors) who might occasionally provide input and guidance upon request, took seriously what I and some other members of Russia's "global media ecosystem" were saying back then, everything would have been altogether different.
At the end of the day, as I've learned the hard way from some Russians, "not my country, not my problem", and "I can't love Russia more than the Russians themselves". It is what it is, my conscience is clean, I always did my best to accurately reflect reality and recalibrating my assessments as required by new developments and insight, including self-corrections when required. I don't agree in principle with the notion that some problems might be "eternal", but Russia's broken feedback loops might unfortunately be the exception.
The Anglo-Saxon, and above all the Yankee, is a formidable adversary. No one, no nation, can imagine their level of treachery, scoundrelry, and their incredible creativity in perversion.
The Indians were completely incapable of understanding that behind the smiles of the first settlers and traders lay a deeply greedy system that aimed only at their extermination. They could not imagine that the white man would exterminate all the free and abundant bison to install private cattle. The French were incapable of understanding that all the US pop and rock soft power broadcast from the 1960s onward was a terrifying acculturation offensive, just like the funding of all left-wing libertarian groups and entities.
I believe the Russians still refuse to understand that they are not considered any better than Indians, just good to be stripped or to die. The Nazi Germans arrived with Panzers and Einsatzgruppen; the Yankees arrive with cool music, Coke, and adorable stars.
The end goal is the same.
The Russians are far too proud to admit that they are seen as "snow niggers." And that will ruin them.
"The Indians were completely incapable of understanding that behind the smiles of the first settlers and traders lay a deeply greedy system that aimed only at their extermination."
Absolutely, Darras. There is a limit to the amount of evil a fairly normal human-being is capable of detecting or even imagining. The Indians were completely incapable of understanding that behind an elegant and soft-spoken US government official, be it civilian or military, lay an emissary of a system hellbent on wiping them off the surface of the Earth, which eventually they did. In my rather distant youth (b.1950) I was very much interested in their plight and I seem to remember that almost all of the roughly 370 formal treaties the United States made with Native American nations, were subsequently violated, undermined, or unilaterally altered by the U.S. government.
However, as if by the wave of a magic wand it is Spain which in everyone´s mind is the epitome of a cruel, ruthless and, on top of everything, bearded conquistador. And yet, wherever you go in South America you will find Native South Americans, or their descendants, here, there and everywhere, even in governments. Try to find a Comanche somewhere in the US.
"I was stunned by this....ignorance of the Western mentality."
The last phrase is the most incisive. The Western mentality is perfectly happy to slit their own throats, if that is what it takes to harm their enemies.
Broken feedback loops? Putin has stated some years ago, that the one capacity of The West they fear or worry about most, is its ability to social engineer, manipulate minds, in other words: To create colour revolutions. They are simply not as well equipped in that field as the Americans! The Russian folk soul is not naturally inclined that way and they haven’t build up the science accordingly.
"Ukraine’s alignment with NATO radically accelerated after 2014’s “EuroMaidan” Color Revolution"
Yes, like Darras below, I too think it's important to remember the dirty tricks "revolution" of 2004. In the end, the coalition of pro-western and neonazi (pretty much the same thing, for an obvious reason) forces has never been able to win elections fair-and-square.
They took over twice: by dirty tricks in 2004 and then by an armed coup in 2014. Not a single time have they managed to win honestly, on the whole territory formerly known as state of Ukraine. I find it's quite optimistic.
QUESTION: What do you think about the conjecture/hypothesis that the Ukrainian ultra-Nationalist movement has been hidden below the surface since late 1944 and only broke out onto the ground surface after 1991?
I think it has, like other movements, but it was nowhere near as popular in 1991 as it was in 2014 and then again in 2022, to say nothing of today. It required a lot of funding and organization to popularize something so radical and which clearly, to all average folks whose main interests are to keep their job, save money, have a family, and go on occasional vacations, was counterproductive to their country's socio-economic and security interests vis-a-vis Russia.
Everywhere, absolutely everywhere in the world, wherever someone is willing to pay dearly to revive a dormant old hatred—religious, national, ethnic, social—absolutely everywhere in the world, there are then frustrated morons, opportunistic scoundrels, cretinous bigots, and masses of imbeciles ready to wake it up.
When I lived in Ukraine, nationalists were universally seen as freaks and losers.
When it became clear that adopting the nationalist ideology was part of the price of admission to The Club, suddenly everyone started to pretend to be a Galician.
In the USSR, interwar and Nazi-era Ukrainian nationalism was forcefully fought, as in the Red Army going out and killing guerrilla-terrorist cells in the rural areas for some years after World War II.
Even if some people might have still sympathized with the cause afterwards, they wouldn't dare make that known for fear of arrested, if not killed. There was also fear of informants so few took the chance to share their support with what they might have thought could have been one of their like-minded compatriots but which might have really been an asset of the secret police.
I think the shock of the Nazis' defeat and the Red Army's pacification campaign in Western Ukraine afterwards former "fellow travelers" in Ukraine realize that it's time to move on and get with the times.
The situation was altogether different with the diaspora, many of whom moved to Western Europe, Canada, and the US after the war precisely because they supported this ideology and knew what awaited them if they stayed.
These groups kept those ideas alive and ensured that their variant of nationalism became the so-called "standard" outside of Ukraine. They then exported it "back home" (even if they were the next generation and weren't born and raised there).
The long suppression period usually causes the old, deeply rooted ideology to fade. But the "imported back" action is a different matter. In Taiwan's case, the initial suppression was strong but not brutal (except for 2 years after the 228 incident). The revival of the independence movement can be traced more or less to 1968, when a large amount of administrative duty and power was transferred to Chiang Ching-kuo. Chiang was much more friendly to Western democracy, and was also less likely to resist the US meddling in Taiwan's domestic politics. The initial wave of the revived Taiwan independence movement was usually characterized as a US-supported Independence movement. The second wave, starting from President Lee, however, allowed the Japanese-linked Taiwan independence movement to appear on the surface. Since the second wave is linked ethnically and culturally, it has been fading because Japan itself has drifted away from its old Imperial ideology. Currently, I think the Americans have the upper hand right now.
When I lived in Ukraine, the "Canadian nationalist", the descendant of some SSman who fled to Canada and learned everything he knew about Ukraine from Grandad and Ukrainian School, only to return to Ukraine and be shocked that Ukrainians weren't as Ukrainian as he was led to believe, was a stock figure in jokes.
I was having a conversation with someone, when a (literal) Canadian nationalist asked us if we were speaking Ukrainian. The girl responded "We speak Russian. Like normal people."
You establish close relations with the CIA while living next to superpower that is under US pressure. You develop biolabs for gain of function research with US help. You line up behind a jew piano player who advertises itself as ‘the servant of the people’.
“they hate Russia more than they love Ukraine”. That academic from Ottawa painstaikingly gathered evidence and demonstrated that the killings during EuroMaidan were executed by the ultranationalists. Killing their own to reach a political objective. And now, the hundreds of clips showing the brutal busification of Ukrainian men is also a clear example that these madmen don't care about Ukraine and Ukrainians...
I remember as if it were yesterday the first "Orange Revolution" in the early 2000s. I remember my astonishment at the emergence of a snarling Russophobia and malicious glee within the French bourgeois bloc (Socialist Party, Greens, centrist parties, liberal right). The French bourgeoisie hates Russia (the humiliation of Napoleonic France, the cancellation of the Russian state's debt in 1917, Bolshevism, victory over Nazism where bourgeois France was defeated in six weeks, aid to decolonization). So the Orange Revolution awakened all the hopes of harming Russia in the minds of the French bourgeoisie and, I suppose, the Western bourgeoisie.
I distinctly remember it too but for a different reason since I was already reading Russian news in English at RIA and was therefore aware that this was a Color Revolution, which made me wonder when and how such political technologies will one day be used inside the US. BLM and associated movements later answered that question for me.
On a tangential note, the nearly decade between the "Orange Revolution" and "EuroMaidan" could have seen Russia more effectively counter these hostile forces that the West was cultivating in Ukraine, yet it totally dropped the ball for a variety of reasons. It's thus another example of Russia's broken feedback loops and show how far back the problem goes.
You are absolutely right. I remember already being horrified by the quiet self-satisfaction of the Russians in the face of the obvious disaster unfolding. Their attitude, rather condescending, seemed to say: "Ha, ha, ha, come on, these Khokhols are too interested in our preferential energy to turn their backs on us. And we've locked the Europeans in with our cheap energy. Everything is fine. No worries."
I was stunned by this mixture of smugness, naivety, and ignorance of the Western mentality.
I had arrived in Moscow shortly before "EuroMaidan" began and actually went to Kiev with a former Polish colleague from a different program right when it started in order to check it out. He was sympathetic and asked me to come along while I was unsupportive but wanted to see the start of a Color Revolution up close and personal. My experiences later inspired me to write my MA dissertation on Hybrid Warfare, which I later released as a book that was reviewed by the Russian Diplomatic Academy and can be purchased digitally at Amazon or read for free at the links below:
https://www.amazon.com/Hybrid-Wars-Indirect-Adaptive-Approach-ebook/dp/B014GA5SX8
https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/books/hybrid-wars-indirect-adaptive-approach-regime-change
I also shared the pics from my trip in these albums on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10103751002343155&type=3
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10103751130695935&type=3
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10103751187397305&type=3
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10103751195615835&type=3
Anyhow, when I returned to MGIMO a few days later, I remember my professors being uneasy with what was happening but all of them more or less signaling -- sincerely or not -- that they thought everything would be okay and that it wasn't all that big of a deal. After the coup, they were shocked, as was the media here, but then tried to play it off as no big deal yet again after Crimea's return. Once Donbass exploded, there was more palpable concern, but they all still downplayed the notion that this was a grand strategic power play by the West.
"Hope dies last", as they say, and I distinctly remember my critical analyses of US foreign policy towards the conflict being rebuffed by my professors and even some of my Voice of Russia peers (( began interning there in 2014 before it merged with RIA to become Sputnik). They all seemed to approve of me criticizing the US, but in retrospect with years of wisdom since that were honed by many personal and professional experiences, I think they didn't take it seriously and just casually dismissed it as pro-Russian/anti-US propaganda.
Therein lies another problem that I haven't talked about here before and it's that it used to be the case that members of Russia's "global media ecosystem" weren't taken seriously by experts, who seemingly assumed that we're all just propagandists who are either saying what he say due to deeply held ideological convictions (thus making us impartial activists whose assessments are unreliable) or because we're getting paid. This was the case apart from some rare exceptions and further contextualizes why Russia is usually caught off guard.
Everything is now the polar opposite but similarly counterproductive from Russia whereby instead of dismissing members of its "global media ecosystem", some elite ones are actually listened to by diplomats, experts, and journalists and their word is treated as the gospel. What's required is a healthy balance, but Russia has an historical tendency to oscillate between extremes while technocratic periods usually lead to it just floating along and getting by with no sense of urgency to improve anything, only an interest in maintaining the status quo.
Why I'm sharing all this is because I always wonder how different everything would have been had Russia's feedback loops not been so broken for so long. If people who matter, not even policymakers but even just experts (including professors) who might occasionally provide input and guidance upon request, took seriously what I and some other members of Russia's "global media ecosystem" were saying back then, everything would have been altogether different.
At the end of the day, as I've learned the hard way from some Russians, "not my country, not my problem", and "I can't love Russia more than the Russians themselves". It is what it is, my conscience is clean, I always did my best to accurately reflect reality and recalibrating my assessments as required by new developments and insight, including self-corrections when required. I don't agree in principle with the notion that some problems might be "eternal", but Russia's broken feedback loops might unfortunately be the exception.
The Anglo-Saxon, and above all the Yankee, is a formidable adversary. No one, no nation, can imagine their level of treachery, scoundrelry, and their incredible creativity in perversion.
The Indians were completely incapable of understanding that behind the smiles of the first settlers and traders lay a deeply greedy system that aimed only at their extermination. They could not imagine that the white man would exterminate all the free and abundant bison to install private cattle. The French were incapable of understanding that all the US pop and rock soft power broadcast from the 1960s onward was a terrifying acculturation offensive, just like the funding of all left-wing libertarian groups and entities.
I believe the Russians still refuse to understand that they are not considered any better than Indians, just good to be stripped or to die. The Nazi Germans arrived with Panzers and Einsatzgruppen; the Yankees arrive with cool music, Coke, and adorable stars.
The end goal is the same.
The Russians are far too proud to admit that they are seen as "snow niggers." And that will ruin them.
"The Indians were completely incapable of understanding that behind the smiles of the first settlers and traders lay a deeply greedy system that aimed only at their extermination."
Absolutely, Darras. There is a limit to the amount of evil a fairly normal human-being is capable of detecting or even imagining. The Indians were completely incapable of understanding that behind an elegant and soft-spoken US government official, be it civilian or military, lay an emissary of a system hellbent on wiping them off the surface of the Earth, which eventually they did. In my rather distant youth (b.1950) I was very much interested in their plight and I seem to remember that almost all of the roughly 370 formal treaties the United States made with Native American nations, were subsequently violated, undermined, or unilaterally altered by the U.S. government.
However, as if by the wave of a magic wand it is Spain which in everyone´s mind is the epitome of a cruel, ruthless and, on top of everything, bearded conquistador. And yet, wherever you go in South America you will find Native South Americans, or their descendants, here, there and everywhere, even in governments. Try to find a Comanche somewhere in the US.
Leaders of the world wherever you are, beware!
"I was stunned by this....ignorance of the Western mentality."
The last phrase is the most incisive. The Western mentality is perfectly happy to slit their own throats, if that is what it takes to harm their enemies.
Broken feedback loops? Putin has stated some years ago, that the one capacity of The West they fear or worry about most, is its ability to social engineer, manipulate minds, in other words: To create colour revolutions. They are simply not as well equipped in that field as the Americans! The Russian folk soul is not naturally inclined that way and they haven’t build up the science accordingly.
"Ukraine’s alignment with NATO radically accelerated after 2014’s “EuroMaidan” Color Revolution"
Yes, like Darras below, I too think it's important to remember the dirty tricks "revolution" of 2004. In the end, the coalition of pro-western and neonazi (pretty much the same thing, for an obvious reason) forces has never been able to win elections fair-and-square.
They took over twice: by dirty tricks in 2004 and then by an armed coup in 2014. Not a single time have they managed to win honestly, on the whole territory formerly known as state of Ukraine. I find it's quite optimistic.
QUESTION: What do you think about the conjecture/hypothesis that the Ukrainian ultra-Nationalist movement has been hidden below the surface since late 1944 and only broke out onto the ground surface after 1991?
I think it has, like other movements, but it was nowhere near as popular in 1991 as it was in 2014 and then again in 2022, to say nothing of today. It required a lot of funding and organization to popularize something so radical and which clearly, to all average folks whose main interests are to keep their job, save money, have a family, and go on occasional vacations, was counterproductive to their country's socio-economic and security interests vis-a-vis Russia.
Everywhere, absolutely everywhere in the world, wherever someone is willing to pay dearly to revive a dormant old hatred—religious, national, ethnic, social—absolutely everywhere in the world, there are then frustrated morons, opportunistic scoundrels, cretinous bigots, and masses of imbeciles ready to wake it up.
Everywhere.
Definitely true.
When I lived in Ukraine, nationalists were universally seen as freaks and losers.
When it became clear that adopting the nationalist ideology was part of the price of admission to The Club, suddenly everyone started to pretend to be a Galician.
Hmm... I wonder if the Taiwan Independence Movement did not have the kind of intensity it has now in 1945, or even 1949.
In the USSR, interwar and Nazi-era Ukrainian nationalism was forcefully fought, as in the Red Army going out and killing guerrilla-terrorist cells in the rural areas for some years after World War II.
Even if some people might have still sympathized with the cause afterwards, they wouldn't dare make that known for fear of arrested, if not killed. There was also fear of informants so few took the chance to share their support with what they might have thought could have been one of their like-minded compatriots but which might have really been an asset of the secret police.
I think the shock of the Nazis' defeat and the Red Army's pacification campaign in Western Ukraine afterwards former "fellow travelers" in Ukraine realize that it's time to move on and get with the times.
The situation was altogether different with the diaspora, many of whom moved to Western Europe, Canada, and the US after the war precisely because they supported this ideology and knew what awaited them if they stayed.
These groups kept those ideas alive and ensured that their variant of nationalism became the so-called "standard" outside of Ukraine. They then exported it "back home" (even if they were the next generation and weren't born and raised there).
Humans naturally side with anyone who is seen as stronger, more aggressive, more ruthless.
The long suppression period usually causes the old, deeply rooted ideology to fade. But the "imported back" action is a different matter. In Taiwan's case, the initial suppression was strong but not brutal (except for 2 years after the 228 incident). The revival of the independence movement can be traced more or less to 1968, when a large amount of administrative duty and power was transferred to Chiang Ching-kuo. Chiang was much more friendly to Western democracy, and was also less likely to resist the US meddling in Taiwan's domestic politics. The initial wave of the revived Taiwan independence movement was usually characterized as a US-supported Independence movement. The second wave, starting from President Lee, however, allowed the Japanese-linked Taiwan independence movement to appear on the surface. Since the second wave is linked ethnically and culturally, it has been fading because Japan itself has drifted away from its old Imperial ideology. Currently, I think the Americans have the upper hand right now.
When I lived in Ukraine, the "Canadian nationalist", the descendant of some SSman who fled to Canada and learned everything he knew about Ukraine from Grandad and Ukrainian School, only to return to Ukraine and be shocked that Ukrainians weren't as Ukrainian as he was led to believe, was a stock figure in jokes.
I was having a conversation with someone, when a (literal) Canadian nationalist asked us if we were speaking Ukrainian. The girl responded "We speak Russian. Like normal people."
As far as the Ukrainian leadership and their western sponsors are concerned, everything is going swimmingly.
Sure, it sucks for the dumb scrotes who make up the populi, but they are just there to be exploited.
I'm going to suggest 1947 and Operation Red Sox as the logical starting point.
At this point, 2014 is a distraction.
Meanwhile, Poland delivered more missiles while Russia continues to dither.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/83092
This also shows that NATO is confident that Russian red lines are idle threats and that they are entirely safe from Russian retaliation.
answer. Ukraine by a jew boy.
excellent
I suspect the ukro-nationalists would have come to little if it wasn't for their financial and political backers.
But their backers are a mix of ex-communist and ex-nazi collaborators (but often Jewish).
Perhaps its just a coalition of aggrieved folks who feel they should rule Russia.
You establish close relations with the CIA while living next to superpower that is under US pressure. You develop biolabs for gain of function research with US help. You line up behind a jew piano player who advertises itself as ‘the servant of the people’.
WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
“they hate Russia more than they love Ukraine”. That academic from Ottawa painstaikingly gathered evidence and demonstrated that the killings during EuroMaidan were executed by the ultranationalists. Killing their own to reach a political objective. And now, the hundreds of clips showing the brutal busification of Ukrainian men is also a clear example that these madmen don't care about Ukraine and Ukrainians...