Important points here. Nobody knows most of this older history or the sad recent history of the USA intervention in the Ukrainian situation over the last decade plus. The tactical tide (regardless of western invention in this proxy war) is fully turning against the Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas battle space. There are least five (5) separate cauldrons slowing closing around the Ukraine forces, they will be trapped. They will either have to surrender or as Kiev as instructed “die in place” or words to that effect. The humiliation of the Russian Federation sought by the west is not likely to happen in Ukraine and for that matter any time soon. Finland which had wisely remained neutral for decades, (don’t poke the Bear) may not have liked their great neighbors but they knew enough not to pick a fight. Now, with the cardboard cut out of a president Alex Stubb (well he looks the part) Finland has joined NATO, just in time to receive no benefit and be part of then unwinding. It is going to all reveal itself as the war in Ukraine ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Excellent. Thank you for the succinct summary of the Maidan and its course. It is already becoming clear that the US strategy to weaken Russia and by doing so strengthen US hegemony has backfired. Together with the Iran war and the 'wager' on the Gulf tyrants against their Arab people, the war on Ukraine will be remembered as a milestone in the descent of the anglo empire to impotence and irrelevance.
Editorial comment: the "versus" in the title suggests an opposition between Russophobia and deception; a simple "and" might better indicate interweaving of both strands.
As a scholar it can be hard to fathom what looks, if taken as genuine, like sanctimonious ignorance among foreign ministries, which apparently lack intellectual curiosity and brush aside basic expectations of due diligence. Revanchism explains elements of that behavior, and thank you for the new-to-me background on Scandinavian Russophobia (and now rejected rapprochement). Knowing deception of the public through propaganda likewise helps explain apparent lack of contextual understanding. But to those we might add self-deception arising from groupthink and rational, if ultimately corrosive, calculation of personal and bureaucratic advantage. You can't get people to understand what their salaries depend on their not understanding, as Damon Runyon put it. We needn't imagine top-down conspiracies, though those do exist (see Nuland and Pyatt above), not only to explain but to model herd-like behavior. It may merely take local incentives and mimesis. Path dependencies then emerge, with phobias to energize and rationalize them, for others and the putatively responsible parties themselves. This is less a case of "versus" than of erratic amplification.
Thank you for this insightful piece. It is very interesting to shift the attention from Russophobia as such as a main driver of policy, to Russophobia as a main discursive tool of propaganda, and therefore a device of deception. It is very useful to distinguish Russophobia in the various strata of a society, as it seems to be the case of Sweden and may be the case of other countries, like Italy, where Russophobia is not endemic, but certain strata of society have inherited it from anti-communism, because of the arbitrary association between Russia and Communism. Both deception and Russophobia as proper of certain fractions of society are useful tools to better understand how consent for support to Ukraine has been built throughout Europe, also in countries that never had problems with Russia or the Soviet Union. I believe that Russophobia is a powerful ideological and discursive constraint to policy, and therefore deserves a deeper understanding and to be given nuances. On the one hand it would be a great to study mechanism through which Russophobia migrated through media discourse from traditionally Russophobic context, i.e. the Anglosphere, to countries like Norway, or Italy or, say, Spain. On the other hand, it would be also important to understand how Russophobia is transmitted via ideological processes of hegemony, and through which means, from upper to lower strata of society, like it seems to be the case of Sweden.
Thank you. In support of your portrayal of Swedish-Russian cooperation in the 19th C can I point you to the monumental achievement of a 23 year project for both countries to jointly measure a geodetic arc from Crimea to Hammerfest (now Norway). Like the Great Arc by Surveyor Everest in India, this created the geomatic certainties which underpin our ability to have satellites and GPS. See the UNESCO listing for Struve Monument.
Happy Ola about your publishing of this insight being not told or blocked in the West. My lack of capacity makes me struggle a bit with the logic in the Sixthly. Please explain.
We know that the mass killing on 20 February 2014 forced President Viktor Yanukovich to flee the country. He was accused all over the mass media for having ordered the killing, and he was running for his life. However, we now also know that the shooting was done not by the police forces but by snipers shooting against both the demonstrators and the police (it was the same bullets) from Hotel Ukraine and a from a couple of other buildings all controlled by the extreme rightwing organisations Svoboda and the Right Sector. Svoboda kept a strict control in Hotel Ukraine, and it was the same people that had organised the violent demonstrations and that controlled the buildings from where the demonstrators were shot. Several people, claiming to have been some of the snipers, were Georgians, someone was supposedly from Lithuania, and someone was from Ukraine, but according to one or two of the Georgians, an American sniper was heading the operation.
We do not yet have the final evidence, but we know that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a tape-recorded telephone conversation two weeks before the mass shooting, instructed her Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, to accept that one of the three top leaders of the Maidan demonstrations, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, should become a new Prime Minister. He had been heading the largest of the opposition factions in the Parliament and he had economic experience. The two other top leaders, the Svoboda Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok and the popular speaker and former boxer Vitali Klitschko could not go into the Government, she said. Klitschko, who was the “top dog” during the demonstrations, had family problems and had not enough experience, and it would not look good with Tyahnybok as Prime Minister (she did not say it, but that was obvious). And Klitschko and Tyahnybok would be too much of competitors to Yatsenyuk to have them in the same Government, but Yatsenyuk had to speak to them four times a week, Nuland said. However, Yatsenyuk was also walking close to Tyahnybok in a Svoboda demonstration, and they were all celebrating the World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera as their hero. The same people, who let snipers shoot demonstrators from their buildings on 20 February, were also the people who were chosen for the new regime by Nuland two weeks before the coup. Tyahnybok’s former colleague and commander of the Maidan demonstrations, Andriy Parubiy, claimed in an interview that he believed that the task of the mass shooting was “to orchestrate a blood bath”.
There is enough evidence to say that the Americans were directly involved in the coup or rather were orchestrating the coup. There was a massive support for the coup in Western Ukraine. In Lviv, Svoboda had had 25 % of the votes in 2012, but in the densely populated Southern and Eastern Ukraine people protested, but were forced to retreat to Donetsk and Lugansk (and to Crimea). The Western minority forces took over most of Ukraine. In that sense, it was an invasion, and the new U.S. orchestrated Kiev regime cannot be considered legitimate, while the forces in the East supporting the democratically elected President Yanukovich had to retreat to Donetsk and Lugansk, where Yanukovich had originated from and where he had his strongest support. The "independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk" became the “leftover” of the Yanukovich democratically elected regime that the illegal Kiev regime had not succeeded to crush. Donbas became the "Free Catalonia" of Ukraine that the illegal regim in Kiev, similar to the Franco regime, had not succeeded to crush. In other words, Donetsk and Lugansk was the “successor state” of the legitimate state of Ukraine that had elected Yanukovich as a president.
If I may, I will try to explain more plainly the sixth point made by Professor Tunander.
The 2022 invasion has been described almost monolithically by Western media, commentators, and officials as illegal. The basis for considering it illegal is the violation of the sovereignty of a country governed by a legitimate government. This holds—albeit only partially, since the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine could still be invoked—if we accept that the Maidanist governments led by Zelensky and his predecessors were legitimate.
Moreover, as Tunander points out, there are grounds for questioning the legitimacy of the constitutional reforms that abandoned Ukraine's neutrality, particularly given that Ukraine obtained independence on the basis of its neutral and non-nuclear status. Also, the intentional breach of Minsk agreements with the purpose to deceive Russia, should be considered, when speaking of the legitimacy of the Maidanist Ukrainian government.
However, Tunander draws attention to the fact that the overthrow of Yanukovych itself was illegal, and that the governments that subsequently came to power were therefore illegal as well. At the same time, Tunander hypothesizes that those parts of Ukraine that rebelled against the Maidanist governments could be understood as continuing, or attempting to preserve, the legitimate Yanukovych government.
If one accepts the premise that Yanukovych was illegally overthrown, and that the rebel regions in the southeast that rejected the outcome of the Maidan sought to preserve or continue the legitimate Yanukovych government, then the Russian intervention in 2022 assumes a fundamentally different character under international law. Rather than constituting an illegal invasion, it could, within this line of reasoning, be characterized as a military intervention intended to restore constitutional legality.
Important points here. Nobody knows most of this older history or the sad recent history of the USA intervention in the Ukrainian situation over the last decade plus. The tactical tide (regardless of western invention in this proxy war) is fully turning against the Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas battle space. There are least five (5) separate cauldrons slowing closing around the Ukraine forces, they will be trapped. They will either have to surrender or as Kiev as instructed “die in place” or words to that effect. The humiliation of the Russian Federation sought by the west is not likely to happen in Ukraine and for that matter any time soon. Finland which had wisely remained neutral for decades, (don’t poke the Bear) may not have liked their great neighbors but they knew enough not to pick a fight. Now, with the cardboard cut out of a president Alex Stubb (well he looks the part) Finland has joined NATO, just in time to receive no benefit and be part of then unwinding. It is going to all reveal itself as the war in Ukraine ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Excellent. Thank you for the succinct summary of the Maidan and its course. It is already becoming clear that the US strategy to weaken Russia and by doing so strengthen US hegemony has backfired. Together with the Iran war and the 'wager' on the Gulf tyrants against their Arab people, the war on Ukraine will be remembered as a milestone in the descent of the anglo empire to impotence and irrelevance.
Editorial comment: the "versus" in the title suggests an opposition between Russophobia and deception; a simple "and" might better indicate interweaving of both strands.
As a scholar it can be hard to fathom what looks, if taken as genuine, like sanctimonious ignorance among foreign ministries, which apparently lack intellectual curiosity and brush aside basic expectations of due diligence. Revanchism explains elements of that behavior, and thank you for the new-to-me background on Scandinavian Russophobia (and now rejected rapprochement). Knowing deception of the public through propaganda likewise helps explain apparent lack of contextual understanding. But to those we might add self-deception arising from groupthink and rational, if ultimately corrosive, calculation of personal and bureaucratic advantage. You can't get people to understand what their salaries depend on their not understanding, as Damon Runyon put it. We needn't imagine top-down conspiracies, though those do exist (see Nuland and Pyatt above), not only to explain but to model herd-like behavior. It may merely take local incentives and mimesis. Path dependencies then emerge, with phobias to energize and rationalize them, for others and the putatively responsible parties themselves. This is less a case of "versus" than of erratic amplification.
Thank you for this insightful piece. It is very interesting to shift the attention from Russophobia as such as a main driver of policy, to Russophobia as a main discursive tool of propaganda, and therefore a device of deception. It is very useful to distinguish Russophobia in the various strata of a society, as it seems to be the case of Sweden and may be the case of other countries, like Italy, where Russophobia is not endemic, but certain strata of society have inherited it from anti-communism, because of the arbitrary association between Russia and Communism. Both deception and Russophobia as proper of certain fractions of society are useful tools to better understand how consent for support to Ukraine has been built throughout Europe, also in countries that never had problems with Russia or the Soviet Union. I believe that Russophobia is a powerful ideological and discursive constraint to policy, and therefore deserves a deeper understanding and to be given nuances. On the one hand it would be a great to study mechanism through which Russophobia migrated through media discourse from traditionally Russophobic context, i.e. the Anglosphere, to countries like Norway, or Italy or, say, Spain. On the other hand, it would be also important to understand how Russophobia is transmitted via ideological processes of hegemony, and through which means, from upper to lower strata of society, like it seems to be the case of Sweden.
Thank you. In support of your portrayal of Swedish-Russian cooperation in the 19th C can I point you to the monumental achievement of a 23 year project for both countries to jointly measure a geodetic arc from Crimea to Hammerfest (now Norway). Like the Great Arc by Surveyor Everest in India, this created the geomatic certainties which underpin our ability to have satellites and GPS. See the UNESCO listing for Struve Monument.
The Swedes eat so much shitty, rotted fish that their brains have to be fucked up.
Happy Ola about your publishing of this insight being not told or blocked in the West. My lack of capacity makes me struggle a bit with the logic in the Sixthly. Please explain.
Perhaps I can add something:
We know that the mass killing on 20 February 2014 forced President Viktor Yanukovich to flee the country. He was accused all over the mass media for having ordered the killing, and he was running for his life. However, we now also know that the shooting was done not by the police forces but by snipers shooting against both the demonstrators and the police (it was the same bullets) from Hotel Ukraine and a from a couple of other buildings all controlled by the extreme rightwing organisations Svoboda and the Right Sector. Svoboda kept a strict control in Hotel Ukraine, and it was the same people that had organised the violent demonstrations and that controlled the buildings from where the demonstrators were shot. Several people, claiming to have been some of the snipers, were Georgians, someone was supposedly from Lithuania, and someone was from Ukraine, but according to one or two of the Georgians, an American sniper was heading the operation.
We do not yet have the final evidence, but we know that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a tape-recorded telephone conversation two weeks before the mass shooting, instructed her Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, to accept that one of the three top leaders of the Maidan demonstrations, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, should become a new Prime Minister. He had been heading the largest of the opposition factions in the Parliament and he had economic experience. The two other top leaders, the Svoboda Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok and the popular speaker and former boxer Vitali Klitschko could not go into the Government, she said. Klitschko, who was the “top dog” during the demonstrations, had family problems and had not enough experience, and it would not look good with Tyahnybok as Prime Minister (she did not say it, but that was obvious). And Klitschko and Tyahnybok would be too much of competitors to Yatsenyuk to have them in the same Government, but Yatsenyuk had to speak to them four times a week, Nuland said. However, Yatsenyuk was also walking close to Tyahnybok in a Svoboda demonstration, and they were all celebrating the World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera as their hero. The same people, who let snipers shoot demonstrators from their buildings on 20 February, were also the people who were chosen for the new regime by Nuland two weeks before the coup. Tyahnybok’s former colleague and commander of the Maidan demonstrations, Andriy Parubiy, claimed in an interview that he believed that the task of the mass shooting was “to orchestrate a blood bath”.
There is enough evidence to say that the Americans were directly involved in the coup or rather were orchestrating the coup. There was a massive support for the coup in Western Ukraine. In Lviv, Svoboda had had 25 % of the votes in 2012, but in the densely populated Southern and Eastern Ukraine people protested, but were forced to retreat to Donetsk and Lugansk (and to Crimea). The Western minority forces took over most of Ukraine. In that sense, it was an invasion, and the new U.S. orchestrated Kiev regime cannot be considered legitimate, while the forces in the East supporting the democratically elected President Yanukovich had to retreat to Donetsk and Lugansk, where Yanukovich had originated from and where he had his strongest support. The "independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk" became the “leftover” of the Yanukovich democratically elected regime that the illegal Kiev regime had not succeeded to crush. Donbas became the "Free Catalonia" of Ukraine that the illegal regim in Kiev, similar to the Franco regime, had not succeeded to crush. In other words, Donetsk and Lugansk was the “successor state” of the legitimate state of Ukraine that had elected Yanukovich as a president.
If I may, I will try to explain more plainly the sixth point made by Professor Tunander.
The 2022 invasion has been described almost monolithically by Western media, commentators, and officials as illegal. The basis for considering it illegal is the violation of the sovereignty of a country governed by a legitimate government. This holds—albeit only partially, since the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine could still be invoked—if we accept that the Maidanist governments led by Zelensky and his predecessors were legitimate.
Moreover, as Tunander points out, there are grounds for questioning the legitimacy of the constitutional reforms that abandoned Ukraine's neutrality, particularly given that Ukraine obtained independence on the basis of its neutral and non-nuclear status. Also, the intentional breach of Minsk agreements with the purpose to deceive Russia, should be considered, when speaking of the legitimacy of the Maidanist Ukrainian government.
However, Tunander draws attention to the fact that the overthrow of Yanukovych itself was illegal, and that the governments that subsequently came to power were therefore illegal as well. At the same time, Tunander hypothesizes that those parts of Ukraine that rebelled against the Maidanist governments could be understood as continuing, or attempting to preserve, the legitimate Yanukovych government.
If one accepts the premise that Yanukovych was illegally overthrown, and that the rebel regions in the southeast that rejected the outcome of the Maidan sought to preserve or continue the legitimate Yanukovych government, then the Russian intervention in 2022 assumes a fundamentally different character under international law. Rather than constituting an illegal invasion, it could, within this line of reasoning, be characterized as a military intervention intended to restore constitutional legality.
I hope this makes the point clearer.