Putin and Protest in Russia and Ukraine

[alice malice]

People who protest in Russia and Ukraine must want something bad
enough to risk their lives for it.

The protests in Ukraine are not and were not merely about Yanukovych
and his  rejection of a free trade agreement with the European Union,
his plan to join the Eurasian Customs Union led by Putin and Russia, a
nation that has dominated Ukraine for centuries.

The macroeconomic trade issues are connected to issues that affect the
people each day, sure, and it is these conditions that motivate
protests.

The people in Ukrainian camped out in Kiev's Maidan in the bitter cold
and resisted police assaults and were murdered. They did this because
they had it with  corruption, state repression, and because they want
more democracy, better living standards and improved social
opportunities.

Will Putin improve the lives of people in Ukraine?

And ugly ideology is in the square, yes, but what unites the
protesters in not an ugly ideology, though the ugly and uglier are
part of it, but a general frustration with the regime and with
political or economic life in Ukraine.

These common grievances spring from years of corruption in a state
machine that has been built by Putin & Co. to serve and protect the
interests of the oligarchs who serve and protect Putin and his plan to
recover Russian influence and enrich his cronies.

In January, Ukraine's parliament, passed a series of measures limiting
freedom of speech and assembly, and imposing steep fines and prison
sentences for minor offense.

Then the ugly: government violence, the kidnapping of activists, and
torture of detainees, murder.

Putin's crony capitalism, his Olympian propaganda has won the hearts
of German's Left, of the Anti-American Americans. So blinded by the
recent wars, the Left is convinced that the US is behind the protests
in Russia and Ukraine.

But the people deserve to be recognized, though some groups are ugly
enough, for what they have managed, and what they are fighting for.
The West should give the support and punish Putin and his oligarchs.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l