Someone's left this comment today/yesterday - thank you, dear Anonymous:

Ok. Sorry I am being out of every topic but somoone had to say it on this blog. It's been 2 days since we know: ... UKRAINE and POLAND will host EURO 2012!!! the 3rd largest sport event in the world. (..) I'm very, very happy.

I should've mentioned how happy and excited we are - but then there are so many things I fail to mention here...

And so much stuff going on in Kyiv that I'm missing, too...

But yes, Euro 2012 is such a great news - but there were no celebrations in Kyiv, nothing like what I saw on TV from Warsaw, right? We're too preoccupied with politics right now...

Yulia Tymoshenko's piece in Foreign Affairs: I've read it but don't really know what to make of it.

It's ghost-written, right?

Because, somehow, it reads like that huge text about Russia in LRB, and like a thousand other pieces of that kind.

And it is about Russia, not Ukraine. Which I, of course, find a bit annoying. Yulia Tymoshenko advising the West on what to do about Russia - instead of speaking out as an "expert" on Ukraine - an expert that she, hopefully, is.

***

An absolute trifle: "[...] the collapse of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991 [...]" - could it really be Tymoshenko who wrote this?

They celebrate Christmas about two weeks later here - Orthodox Christmas - and, moreover, very few people celebrated it back in 1991.

Sounds too foreign to me.

***

But overall, it's a very smoothly-written piece, and as tactful towards Russia as the context allows.

"Russia is not a police state," according to Tymoshenko. And it "is usually judged on the basis of speculation about its intentions rather than on the basis of its actions." And its "leaders deserve understanding for their anguished struggle to overcome generations of Soviet misrule."

***

Oh, and this reminded me of the conspiracy theory thingy that I quoted from a week or so ago:

Indeed, Russia may actually be putting itself out of the gas business, because high engineering costs for new projects in Russia are signaling to the market that Russia and Gazprom lack the capacity to develop these fields. Western companies could come in and do the job, but given the Kremlin's recent usurpation of Shell's investments on Sakhalin Island, these companies would be remiss in their fiduciary duties if they undertook such investments.

How strange that I read this on the day Shell had finalized its deal with Gazprom - and was forced to sound happy about it:

Shell’s Executive Director, Exploration and Production, Malcolm Brinded said: “Gazprom’s entry into the Sakhalin Project is warmly welcomed. Combined with the government acceptance of the Environmental Action Plan, this is another important step for Sakhalin II. The AMI should create additional growth opportunities for the partners in the future.”

***

Tymoshenko also mentions Microsoft at one point: they should bring Gazprom "into line" - the way they did with Microsoft.

And in the adapted version of this piece, published in the International Herald Tribune, she's so hip, she even writes about iPod:

One must ask how it is that Apple's iPod and iTunes are challenged by EU regulators yet Gazprom is not?

***

One last thing - a terrible sentence, whoever wrote it:

And dangerous new forms of tuberculosis - as well as of Islamist extremism among the 17 percent of the Russian population that is Muslim - are being incubated through neglect.

Another little GV translation, this time on the March in St. Pete, among other things.

I'm getting really sick of this subject...

Kasparov's aide and PravdaBeslana.ru founder Marina Litvinovich has posted recordings of the walkie-talkie conversations between OMON fighters - on April 14 in Moscow and on April 15 in St. Pete.

On Radio Echo of Moscow, they've been playing one of these clips all day long today, the edited copy, with beeps instead of the curses.

There's also this thread on RadioScanner.ru forum, where the folks were listening in on the police during the rally in Moscow:

Ivanov, April 14, 2007, 13:02:27 -

A quote: "There's no one on Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard! Not a single person, only OMON. Who are we supposed to detain, damn it?!"

Ivanov, April 14, 2007, 13:03:21 -

And in reply - "Detain everyone - with or without the attributes - detain them all!"

They'll have to detain the OMON guys :)))

(All links are in Russian, of course.)

Another Global Voices translation on April 14:

Russia: Dissenters' March in Moscow (2)

On the one hand, president Vladimir Putin's spokesman admitted Tuesday that there had been instances of "overreaction" by riot police during the opposition's weekend rallies.

But on the other hand, also on Tuesday, opposition leader and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov was summoned for questioning to the Federal Security Service (FSB), on suspicion that he had been propagating extremism.

There is a lot of media coverage of these two and other post-rally developments (here's what comes up when you google "kasparov kasyanov limonov" - this AP piece, for example) - but below is a bit more of what Russian bloggers have written about the Dissenters' March in Moscow itself, as well as links to their photos.

(Warning: as in the previous installment, some links here lead to blogs with bandwidth-intensive content.)

- LJ user drugoi (photos and video);

- LJ user jetturtle (photos);

- LJ user zhenshen (photos);

- LJ user sholademi (photos featuring riot police in the context of the city and its various ads and signs):

On April 14, OMON fighters in Moscow took part in the casting for commercials of world-famous brands.

- LJ user khit (text):

April 12, 2007 -

I'm a dissenter, too [I disagree, too], but I'm not going to the March. Because what I disagree with isn't what the Communists, nationalists, and Limonov people [limonovtsy, members of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party] disagree with. And don't try to explain to me that Communists and limonovtsy are absolutely not what they used to be, and that the nationalists who are going to be there are all good - derivative from the word "nationa" and not "ethnicity." This [mixed up mass] smells of unscrupulousness. Not political unscrupulousness (you can't surprise anyone with that now), but human unscrupulousness. Disgusting.

April 15, 2007 -

Yes! Yes! Yes! I went there, even though only a day before, I was explaining in detail why I wouldn't go. But I wasn't lying. [...] I don't regret having gone there. It was something to be seen with my own eyes. In order to once again realize that this regime is mean. And also to understand that, alas, we are not ready for resistance. Alas!

- LJ user orthannaer (photo, text - here, here, here, and here):

[...] An OMON sergeant. A normal guy. Some female journalist was trying to get him talk on the subject of whether he "enjoyed defending the regime" - so I also spent some time talking to him. I'll skip the conversation's beginning, here's from the middle:

He asks me: "Have you come here to cause something bad to happen?"

- No, I wouldn't want anything bad to happen. But if the fighting occured here, it would be my duty to tell how it all went, who started it first.
- Ah, come on, as always, you'll write that it was OMON that beat the crap out of everyone.
- If you start it, I'll write this. But if the NBP people set upon you, I'll write that they are the idiots.
- Oh yeah?

Then [an officer of superior rank] approached and we pretended that we were just standing next to each other. Then the guy said that they couldn't be photographed, and couldn't talk to journalists, and couldn't do anything at all - because they wouldn't get their bonus money if they did. I [ignored] this ban on photographs and took a picture, shooting upward, from the hip, and the guy didn't see it.

Anyway, what am I trying to say? If you approach them with hatred, you'll get hatred in return. Folks come out of the subway and look at the cops as they would look at animals, or mud beneath their feet (and I've seen many people like this today), and then they are for some reason surprised that they're being grabbed by their hands and taken to jail [obezyannik, "monkey cage"]. Cops are people, too. And they differ from one another. Just like anywhere else, some are bastards, and some are normal guys. [...]

- LJ user bee-n-noa (photos, text):

[...] When we started photographing the police, an OMON fighter came up to us and asked if we had any posters with us. When we asked him what he'd do to us if we did have posters, he said mysteriously: "Well, it depends on what the posters say." And after another question - "And what if it said, 'Putin, give us back the election'?" - he lost patience and said that he wasn't allowed to talk with us. [...]

- LJ user krocodl (text):

[...]

* There are many young people in the audience. I spoke with a friend a while ago, and he complained that he didn't like today's kids too much, because they seemed somewhat zombified to him. But there [at the March], there were many good faces, with thoughts and feelings in their eyes. This, of course, is a plus, but the minus is that OMON is aiming exactly at these very people. I heard it myself - when the Marsians [OMON fighters] were jumping out of the bus, their commander was yelling, "Grab the young ones first." With such an approach, they'll become even more interesting and more adult in a while, of course, but I'm afraid it'll get pretty hard to explain to them about law and non-violent resistance. [...]

* The second-largest group is, of course, people aged 50 and more. Something worth noting is that there are a lot more "middle-class" representatives now [...]. Pensioners and the very elderly people are the second most intense group, too, whose drive can only be compared to that of the National Bolshevik Party guys. An idiotic country, where only the youngest and the oldest can afford being active - because both don't really have anything to lose. [...]

Here's my Global Voices translation about April 14 - I hope to do a few more this week.

Russia: Dissenters' March in Moscow (1)

The volume of blog coverage of the weekend's rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg is truly overwhelming - as overwhelming, perhaps, as the number of riot police (OMON) deployed from all over Russia to disperse the opposition's Dissenters' March. But nowhere near as shocking.

Below is the first installment of links, accompanied with snippets of text translated from Russian. (Please note that many entries - arranged in no particular order - link to bandwidth-intensive content.)

- LJ user mnog (photos):

Don't feel like writing.

Photos (more than 50 (about 6 MB) )

- LJ user insie (other bloggers' photos, text):

[...] In the backyards near Tverskaya, I was surprised to discover little streams of people, who chose this path as the best, just like I did. In the backyards closer to Pushkinskaya, I saw trucks with OMON, police officers giving threatening orders via walkie-talkies, fire trucks and an ambulance. People walking nearby were on their cell phones, saying something like this: "See you later, unless I get detained." Made me feel uncomfortable. [...]

- LJ user serni (photos, video, text):

Disclaimer: I was present at the Dissenters' March out of curiousity only.

[...] When people moved forward, trying to break through, yelling, "There are more of us," the regime's forces produced sticks right away and started beating everyone who was in their way. It was the first time that I saw the enraged OMON fighters, walking towards me with sticks in front of them, beating everyone left and right. By miracle, I avoided the blows. It felt like a parachute dive. [...]

- LJ user dolboeb (photos, text):

Some OMON fighters, in the Ninja Turtles' outfits, looked appropriately intimidating and photogenic, but the pointlessness of their being there, their walking back and forth, seemed to tire both them and the audience. [...] As background for portrait shooting, the police looked great, I think.

- LJ user plushev (photos, text):

[...] We only got there at the very end of the rally, when they were no longer detaining or beating anyone - all were polite and respectful. The main and, basically, the only impression that I had the time to get was that they send A LOT OF young [police] women to work at rallies. Students of the police school, that is. Many were very beautiful, even in their ugly uniforms. Didn't manage to get a close shot of anyone - [my camera is too slow], and the girls were shy, they were turning away and asking not to photograph them.

- LJ user m_gaidar (text):

When they were taking me away, I called 02 [an equivalent of 911] and told them that I and a group of 20 people have been unlawfully kidnapped by people in uniform. The girl [operator] got very frightened and asked: "Where are you?" In a bus near Pushkinskaya, I replied, and the girl just hung up on me. I called again and asked her to introduce herself and register my call, because people in camouflage were taking us all in an unknown direction. She asked again where we were detained. I said, on Pushkinskaya, and she sign with evident relief and said: "Well... you know... here... We are just having a special operation there! Nothing to be scared of." A special operation against whom - against me?!!!!!! And what do you mean it's nothing to be scared of - for whom nothing scary? For you or for whom?!!! The girl was definitely feeling uncomfortable... said, please call the boss [starshiy]. "What boss?" I asked. "The one in camouflage," she replied. Okay, I see, you are all together in it, I said and hung up on her myself this time.

Anyway, I've now got a phone call from the prosecutor's office and they invited me to come tomorrow at noon to 19 Petrovka, to Boluchevskiy Sergei Anatolyevich and answer questions about my phone call. I said I'd come with journalists and a lawyer. They replied: "Yes, sure! Come with whoever you want..." Anyway, if anyone want to come along - write me. [...]

[A RIA-Novosti photo of m_gaidar's detention is here.]

- LJ user okalman (text):

I'm going to the March tomorrow... For many reasons. I disagree with the Other Russia, too, among other things, but I'm still going. [...] I don't like Kasyanov, nor do I like Kasparov, and even less so do I like Limonov. But if in the 1990s everyone wisely concluded that Yeltsin was a [Communist] party official and why would I go to the White House "for Yeltsin"? - then we'd still be living under Communists. [...]

I've finished posting April 14 photos.



It's depressing to be looking at so many cops (for the second day in a row), while also watching Kill Bill on Channel 1.

***

Below are some of my favorites:



George Michael is coming to Moscow.

***


Kto kuda, a my zhenitsa.

Someone's wedding, interrupted by a traffic jam near Pushkinskaya. Terrible timing.

I also saw a young woman in a maroon Mercedes with the wheel on the right side - she was trying to drive out to Tverskaya from one of the little streets, but the cop told her she had to back up and take a detour, and she replied, in a slightly hysterical but totally serious way, "But I don't know how to drive backwards!!!" - and the cop looked absolutely bewildered, and even asked her, earnestly, "But what can I do about it?"

***


"A million dollars into one pair of hands."

That's a casino sign, on Pushkinskaya.

***


"V mire zhivotnyh" - "In the Animal World"

An ad for a popular TV nature show with Nikolai Drozdov. (I mentioned him a while ago, in this post.)

***



This is Aleksandr Potkin, aka Aleksandr Belov, leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

I wrote a little about the movement here; and about Potkin-Belov and the Russian March here.

(Also, remember I was trying to locate the link to a Russian blogger's post about that wonderful old lady who went to every rally there was? - I've found it, thanks to Potkin-Belov!)

At the rally, he told the crowd about his car: an old Mercedes with the driver's door broken - so he has to get in through the passenger's door.

He also said he was sure the police would join him and his supporters when they march onto Kremlin - but not this time, later. Judging by his "bodyguards," it must've been a joke - though it's interesting that they arrested Kasparov for much less, yet didn't touch this idiot.

He was also screaming something like "Churki, out!" - churki is one of those offensive terms for the non-Slavic population.

He and Rogozin also believe that 70 percent of Russia's voters would vote for their new party ("Great Russia" or something) in the upcoming election. If they are one of Putin's "projects," the goal must be to get as many people as possible thinking, "If this is what the alternative to Putin looks and sounds like, well, maybe it's better to have Putin stay where he is."

Or maybe not, because why would Garry Kasparov want to invite Limonov and Anpilov to his bloc? And why should everyone anti-Putin worry about the fate of the leader of something called the Vanguard of the Red Youth? (Another ally of Kasparov, he was detained yesterday, too.)

Zyuganov's Communists have been doing pretty well in the regional elections lately - and perhaps freaks are what people here really want, and all the riot police gathered in Moscow for no reason are not making Putin himself look too adequate, so here you go.

Seriously, though, Russian politics is incomprehensible and too crazy, even crazier than what we have in Ukraine.

I've started posting yesterday's pictures - 68 of them, so far.

I'll finish it up later today.

***

The amount of stuff on LiveJournal is overwhelming; I hope to do a little roundup tonight.

Here's a photo from yesterday, taken at Turgenevskaya, by the metro:



The rest will come later, they are nowhere near as nice as this one.

It was hard to take pictures - because the police were everywhere and at times it felt like photographing random people walking down the street, nothing special, a very routine part of the landscape.

I wasn't there when they were beating people - I think I was stuck in traffic half a block away from Novopushkinskiy Square at the time. Then I had to walk around quite a bit, because they weren't letting anyone approach either Novopushkinskiy (where the Young Guard stood) or Pushkinskaya (where the opposition got their asses kicked). So, basically, I didn't see any violence, nor did I see any opposition flags.

Didn't see the opposition marching to Turgenevskaya, either. I took a cab there myself, somewhat later, and you know, I totally didn't get it where Luzhkov had been imagining a rather huge crowd to squeeze itself in there - together with all those cops and army boys, or even without them. I got there at the very end, and the most memorable thing were all the cop girls, the cadets, I guess: many were wearing high heels, looking really absurd - don't they have dress code, or were those girls violating it?

From Turgenevskaya, I walked all the way to Bolotnaya (Swamp) Square, where the Rogozin and Potkin-Belov crowd had gathered. I was impressed with myself for being able to walk such a distance without feeling tired - and I wasn't really surprised to find that Moscow away from Pushkinskaya and Turgenevskaya showed no signs of anything extraordinary happening nearby. Reminded me of Kyiv, where one end of Khreshchatyk may be absolutely calm, and the other may have a mini-revolution going on.

Potkin-Belov is such a clown - but, more about it later: Marta isn't letting me type now.

Oh, and the reason I didn't write anything yesterday is because I fell asleep the same time Marta did, around 10:30 pm. Didn't happen to me in a while.

Mikhail Leontiev got totally hysterical a few minutes ago during an Osoboe Mneniye show with Matvei Ganapolskiy on Radio Echo of Moscow.

He was spitting out bad words - not mat, but still pretty bad for a live radio and TV show.

They were talking about tomorrow's Dissenters' March and what Gleb Pavlovsky said about a possible fight or two that the march might result in (but not bloodshed).

Kasparov, according to Leontiev, is an empty spot. But dangerous.

Leontiev, according to me, is a sick man.

Right now, he keeps saying mne nasrat' over and over - he doesn't give a fuck about someone's politics.

Pizdets kakoy-to.

I'm trying to sort my last week's Kyiv photos (going very slowly), and I've just run into this one - from the Yanukovych rally on March 31 at European Square:

On Radio Ekho Moskvy tonight, Anatoliy Lysenko, the father of modern Russian TV, president of the International Academy of TV and radio, was asked a question about the situation in Ukraine (not just because it's relevant but also because he was born somewhere near Vinnytsya). His voice seemed to grow sadder - he's one of those people who seriously believe in the possibility of Ukraine splitting into two.

Yanukovych, he said, was addressing the crowd in Russian, and Yushchenko - in Ukrainian.

This seemed to be the main basis for Lysenko's fear (he also worried we might have a re-run of 1993 in Moscow).

The way they are completely missing the point about the "language issue" is amazing: it's as if one half of the country speaks Hebrew and the other Chinese.

***

Surprisingly, Victor Chernomyrdin, the Russian ambassador in Ukraine, sounds a lot more reasonable (Gazeta.ru, RUS): he doesn't think it's gonna get as violent here as it did in Yugoslavia - and he insists that Russia doesn't favor Yanukovych any more than anyone else.

On Saturday, there'll be at least four rallies here in Moscow: The Other Russia's Dissenters' March either at Pushkinskaya or Turgenevskaya, or both (or neither); an SPS rally at Slavyanskaya Square; Rogozin's nationalist rally at Bolotnaya Square; the United Russia/the Young Guard's rally at Pushkinskaya AND Vorobyovy Gory.

And here's a relevant item from Gazeta.ru (RUS):

"All journalists planning to cover street rallies this coming weekend can visit us at the Center for Extreme Journalism and receive special jackets. It'll say MEDIA on them and there'll also be listed those articles of the legislation, which protect journalists' professional rights and for violation of which those guilty are to bear responsibility," said on Thursday Igor Yakovenko, secretary general of the Russian Journalists' Union.

He noted that "these jackets are in fact meant for journalists working in "hot zones," but, taking into account the tensions surrounding the upcoming events, the Russian Journalists' Union is ready to lend them to reporters."

Yakovenko has appealed to law enforcement officials, calling them "to follow the law and let journalists do their job during the upcoming rallies." "You should understand that journalists are not participants - they are just there doing their job, just as the police do their job. And you should approach it from the legal, not political perspective."

This is so fucked up. And after Kyiv and our "on the verge of civil war" state, this seems especially crazy.

What about, say, a group of Japanese tourists who might happen at the site of one of those rallies and, of course, start taking pictures? Do they need flak jackets, too?

Or, what about someone with the soul of a Japanese tourist - someone like myself?

:)

P.S. to the previous post: by "serious" I now mean stories in English and longer than your average Reuters/AP story. Conspiracy theories do qualify because they usually take up much space.

***

And here's one of Yushchenko's bullshit promises: the building on Hrushevskogo that he kept promising to tear down but never did - it looks almost ready for people to move in now.



I remember being pissed when Yushchenko said the building would go not because those who decided to build it at that spot violated certain laws - but because Kyivites found it annoying.

My head is still not ready for all the "serious" articles on Ukraine (I've very little time, too). So far, I've only been able to read this piece by LaRouche Movement's Executive Intelligence Review (found via Kiev Ukraine New Blog).

I've heard they are known for their love of conspiracy theories - so here goes:

Evidence is mounting that Vice President Dick Cheney may be personally handling a "Ukraine portfolio," involving the destabilization of Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych's government, or even splitting the country in two [...].

They sure don't like "Cheney-friend Tymoshenko":

Back in Kiev, Tymoshenko crowed that "Cheney and Rice" support new elections.

And in the end, it's all about oil and gas, of course:

U.S. connections to the destabilization were the subject of sensational claims, such as the assertion by Socialist Party Rada member Vasili Volga, that Tymoshenko had received $1 billion from the Shell Oil Company during her U.S. trip, "to organize a coup in Ukraine."

I've looked it up, and, according to Kommersant, Shell has been in Ukraine since early June 2006 - after eight years of "negotiations":

The agreement with Shell will enable Ukraine to reduce dependency on the gas and oil of Russia and to break Gazprom’s monopoly on gas transit via its pipelines, spokesmen of press service of Ukrainian government said.

Shell is in Ukraine to conduct "exploration of the fields of Dnepr and Donetsk basin," Kommersant says - and so I wonder: if this is their (and Yulia's) intention to "even [split] the country in two," how are they gonna go about it, geographically? They are in the "hostile East" already, no problem - and why would they want to kick the chair from under their own butts?

***

All in all, it's always amazing to watch how something comparatively tiny and obscure as Ukraine suddenly turns into a bat that folks across the ocean use to smash the heads of their political opponents with - how suddenly it's no longer about us, but about Cheney and other irrelevant entities God knows where, how "local" - email-less coal miners, napping babushkas and the dancing youth - suddenly becomes "foreign"...