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Ukraine? Mykraine!

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Ukraine? Mykraine! - Video

Bloody Harvest - Brutal New Year 2015, Barvy Club, Kiev, Ukraine 27-12-2014
Old School Brutal Death Metal (Ukraine)

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Bloody Harvest - Brutal New Year 2015, Barvy Club, Kiev, Ukraine 27-12-2014 - Video

Ukraine Must Appeal to Donbas and Crimea: President Poroshenko outlines path to reunite Ukraine
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has outlined a way to reunite Crimea and Donbas with the rest of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Presidential Administration, the plan is to show the...

By: UKRAINE TODAY

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Ukraine Must Appeal to Donbas and Crimea: President Poroshenko outlines path to reunite Ukraine - Video

In mid-December, President Obama signed into law the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, which, among options for more sanctions against Russia, calls on the White House to provide Kiev with assistance for internally displaced persons as well as to cooperate with international organizations to distribute aid in Ukraine.

Such aid is sorely needed in eastern Ukraine. Much of the infrastructure of Donetsk and Luhansk the main cities in the Donbas region has been destroyed, coal and food supplies are disrupted, and Kiev froze government pension and other payments to the region in November. With brutal winter conditions approaching, risks of starvation and death are becoming too real. As the United Nations and Amnesty International put it, a humanitarian crisis is looming.

Unfortunately, recent statements by Col. Oleksiy Nozdrachov, Ukraine's chief of military and civilian cooperation in eastern Ukraine, show disturbing signs of Kiev's attitude toward this crisis. Where the U.N. sees a looming humanitarian disaster, Kiev may see an opportunity.

Kiev's strategy, as outlined by Nozdrachov in USA Today, is to continue withholding government services from the rebel-held areas in hopes that increased suffering will turn the local population against the separatists. This shows the population in the occupied territory that the situation under the Ukrainian government is much, much better, Nozdrachov said. In addition, an Amnesty International report posted Dec. 24 said pro-Kiev volunteer battalions are increasingly blocking humanitarian aid into eastern Ukraine in a move which will exacerbate a pending humanitarian crisis.

These actions are reprehensible. Kiev, and most of the world, rightly views the petty warlords in control of Donbas as illegitimate entities. However, if a gunman takes over an office building, no police department in the United States would condone withholding basic necessities from the hostages in the hope that they would rise up and vanquish the perpetrator. Providing aid to civilians trapped in a standoff is not appeasement or negotiation with terrorists; it is a fundamental principle: preventing needless loss of life.

Any decision to use the tragic situation in eastern Ukraine as a weapon is not only morally repugnant, but it also will surely have negative repercussions for Kiev. The strategy may help force the rebels to capitulate and allow Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to establish nominal control over the region. But Ukraine is a land where grudges run deep. Western Ukrainians have never forgotten the genocidal policies of Josef Stalin's Russia (which, incidentally, employed hunger as a weapon); the Russian-speaking residents of Donbass are not likely to forgive Kiev for starving them into submission. Anger at Kiev, and the West, will continue to simmer in Donbass. And that is a problem.

Ukraine cannot afford to have Donetsk and Luhansk solidify into a permanent conflict zone such as Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, regions where long-standing enmities fester, preventing true national unity in those countries. Ukraine has long been teetering on the brink of economic collapse. Turning it around will be an enormous undertaking by the most optimistic of estimates; doing so without the industrial centers and natural resources of Donetsk and Luhansk may be impossible. Ukraine's best chance to beat back economic disaster is to move forward as a united nation, and to do that, it needs to win back the eastern Ukrainians.

That presents a challenge, which cannot be overcome by simply regaining territory and planting a Ukrainian flag. Eastern Ukraine is separated from the rest of country by a cultural, linguistic, and even religious, divide, with one of the two major Orthodox churches aligned with Kiev and the other with Moscow. It is a blurry divide, running through towns, sometimes through neighborhoods and families. Until last year, it was not an insurmountable barrier to national unity if that were the case, Ukraine would have split apart in the early 1990s, as did Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But after 4,700 deaths in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, more than a million displaced persons and continued fighting, the chasms have deepened.

On Monday, Poroshenko announced that he would meet Jan. 15 with representatives from France, Germany and Russia to discuss a peace settlement for Ukraine. Ukraine, he said, cannot win back Donbas militarily. In Moscow, Russia announced that it would continue to supply oil to Ukraine, and over the weekend, prisoners were exchanged between Kiev and rebel forces in separate peace talks in Minsk. These are welcome moves, but for the millions of pensioners and other civilians in Donbas, will the resolution they portend a resolution that has been so far been elusive come fast enough?

Lev Golinkin, who was born in the former Soviet Union in the city of Kharkov, which is now part of eastern Ukraine is the author of the memoir "A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka." He lives in New Jersey.

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Kiev's brutal strategy in eastern Ukraine

By Terrell Jermaine Starr January 2 at 8:39 AM

Terrell Jermaine Starr is a senior editor at AlterNet. He specializes in African diasporas in Europe.

Terrell Jermaine Starr discusses the 18 months he spent in Ukraine as a Fulbright scholar and what he learned about race relations. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

I was already homeless unknowingly a victim of housing discrimination when my plane touched down in Kiev, Ukraine in the summer of 2009. I was traveling on a Fulbright grant to research the lives of biracial Ukrainians, and was eager to explore how the Slavic country could produce native people who looked like me, a young black man from Detroit. A local real estate agent had promised several months earlier to secure an apartment for me before my arrival. I took a taxi from the airport to meet him. Wearing a warm, wide smile, Sergei extended his hand and welcomed me. Then he explained why his apartment search had failed: Your skin color has been causing us a lot of problems.

Sergei explained that he had called numerous landlords saying that an American wanted to lease a flat. He thought emphasizing my American citizenship would expedite the leasing process. But when a landlord asked if I was black, Sergei was forced to reveal my race and the conversation would quickly end. We spent hours that day visiting flats throughout Kiev. Each time, the flatowner refused to rent to me until we finally met one agreeable landlord just as the sun was setting.

My introduction to racism in Eastern Europe had come swiftly and severely. Over my next 18 months in Ukraine, race would remain a constant obstacle to normal life and interactions with Ukrainians.

Certainly, black skin creates hurdles in the United States, as well. Here, racism systemically but usually covertly obstructs African-Americans from fully enjoying all the freedoms afforded to white people. But racism in Ukraine was much more blunt always in my face, unabashed and in plain view. I never had to guess whether a persons remarks carried racist undertones or if an officers stop was fueled by prejudice. Ukrainiansalways let me know where I stood with them, good or bad. And I appreciated it.

My acclimation to Eastern Europes brand of racism didnt come immediately. I spent my first six weeks in Ukraine simply getting used to the most extreme forms of anti-black hatred. Occasionally, Id encounter young men dressed in black shirts and Doc Martins who would throw up the Nazi salute in my direction. Other times, my skin color would attract open curiosity and such overwhelming kindness that I would wonder if I had been mistaken for a celebrity. (And sometimes I was. While visiting Georgia, some residents thought I was Allen Iverson, and I was asked to pose for 80 photos over two days.)

Of course, my arrival in Ukraine wasnt the first time the countryhad welcomeda black person. The highest number of black people arrived therethrough the former Soviet Union during the 1960s, after the decolonization of Africa. Soviet leadership granted thousands of African students generous scholarships to attend university throughout the 15republics. In some ways, the Soviet Union provided a much safer environment for black people than the United States or apartheid South Africa. But in just as many cases, black people were no better off than local, non-black Soviet citizens who were murdered during Stalins pogroms.

Racism was overt and ubiquitous. One of my most blatant encounters came when I was headed to Russian class. I was purchasing a token at the Central Train Stop, when I spotted a young cop glaring at me. As a black American, Im all too familiar with the look police officers give just before stopping you, and immediately recognized the gaze even in this foreign country. The officer walked toward me, gave a Soviet-style military salute and demanded that I present my passport. He looked it over before telling me to follow him into a mini-police unit inside the station. Once there, I asked the cop why I was being held. In Russian, he responded, Youre a nigger and I know youre bringingdrugs into our country, he said. Where are the drugs?

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PostEverything: A cop in Ukraine said he was detaining me because I was black. I appreciated it.