ЗМІ про Україну

[Олесь Вахній]

цікаво, на укр.правді, якій я довіряю все менше, зявилась стаття, що Кремль щомісяця передає бойовикам ДНР $37 млн - Bloomberg, з посиланням на Bloomberg.
Я переглянув всі свіжі новини на Bloomberg, нічого такого не знайшов. Питання, навіщо дезінформувати людей? Я більш ніж впевнений, що саме так і є, але потрібно, щоб це було доведено спецслужбами України, і щоб докази були передані у відповідні міжнародні інстанції. А замість того, щоб працювати, команда опрошенка імітує таку роботу, поширюючи плітки, зроблені швидше за все в мінстеці.

Люди котрі це пишуть, є вчорашніми діячами савєцького агітпропу. Вони ніколи не обтяжувались пошукамиправди

[smisha]

Fitch considers Ukraine in partial debt default

Fitch ratings agency said Tuesday it now considers Ukraine to be in partial default after it failed to make payment on bonds the country has been trying to restructure with its creditors.

"The 10-day grace period on Ukraine's USD500m eurobond maturing on 23 September 2015 has elapsed without payment being made. Fitch therefore judges Ukraine to be in default on its sovereign eurobond obligations," the agency said in a statement.

Економіка України не може виплачувати борги. Про це говорять на 5-му каналі?

[Олесь Вахній]

Про це і без каналу вже давно кажуть

[smisha]

The Guardian: Stalin portraits emerge in heart of Ukraine's rebel-held territory

Three portraits of the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin are on display in the centre of Donetsk, the rebel capital of eastern Ukraine, as the separatist authorities fuel a mood of Soviet nostalgia.

The Stalin portraits have been placed in the main square and feature a quote from the wartime leader: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be routed. We will claim victory.”

The previously taboo display comes as the rebels revive Soviet customs to cement their Moscow-backed rule – while glossing over Stalin’s atrocities.

The portraits went down well with one young woman walking past. “I think the portraits of Stalin are a good thing. It’s our history and a lot of people have forgotten he even existed,” said Yekaterina, a 22-year-old student.

The horrors of Stalin’s repressions and the deaths of up to five million Ukrainians in the 1930s due to famine caused by forced collectivisation go unmentioned.

The Donetsk rebel leader, Alexander Zakharchenko, said how he regretted the break-up of the Soviet Union.

“The Soviet Union was a great country and it was a huge mistake that it was destroyed by the CIA and other secret services,” said the 39-year-old former field commander who prefers to dress in camouflage gear. “Europe and other countries were scared stiff of us.”

Stalin portraits have become de rigueur in the offices of rebel officials in eastern Ukraine, where the separatist conflict has killed more than 8,000 people.

The Donetsk rebels’ deputy defence minister, Eduard Basurin, wears a badge with Stalin’s profile on his uniform.

This new cult of Stalin revives the memories in Donetsk, a coal-mining city that was formerly known as Stalino.

It was renamed in the early 1960s after Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as Soviet leader in the power struggle that followed Stalin’s death, condemned his predecessor’s cult of personality.

Such reverence for Stalin contrasts with the attitude of Kiev’s pro-western government, which in May passed laws making it illegal to display Soviet symbols, as it does Nazi swastikas. The law calls for the pulling down of monuments as well as renaming of streets, towns and enterprises that carry Soviet names.

Across Ukraine, the authorities have already pulled down numerous statues of Lenin, much to the rebel leaders’ disgust.

The Donetsk rebels’ culture minister, Alexander Paretsky, condemned “vandalism and barbarism” while the leader of the Luhansk rebel region, Igor Plotnitsky, warned of a “moral genocide”.

In the town of Novoazovsk on the Azov sea, the rebels ceremonially restored a Lenin statue to its pedestal after taking control from Ukrainian forces.

In forging a new identity for the separatist region, the rebels have largely turned to the Soviet past.

Their territories are called “people’s republics”, echoing the Soviet-era names of Communist satellites such as Bulgaria, Mongolia and Romania.

Luhansk People’s Republic has a new emblem featuring sheafs of corn and a red star, like those of the USSR’s republics.

The rebels are even attempting to revive the Soviet-era Young Pioneer youth group, a kind of socialist Scouts.

In a more sinister move, the rebels named their security organ the Ministry of State Security or MGB, the same as Stalin’s secret police from 1946 to 1953.

Their justice system is also modelled on the Soviet system, where the defendant had little chance of acquittal. “It’s the Soviet model of the prosecutor’s office that we adopted in Donetsk,” said Andrei Spivak, the official charged with overhauling the system.

Also in Donetsk, an exhibition of paintings pays tribute to Soviet hero “shock worker” Alexei Stakhanov, who achieved record coal production levels at a mine in the Luhansk region in the 1930s.

Historians now see Stakhanov’s feats as carefully choreographed by the authorities as a propaganda tactic to push up norms.

Admiring the paintings of miners and factory workers, Galina, a 73-year-old, recalled a rose-tinted past. “Things were better back then. It was a totally different life,” she said.

But such idealisation of the Soviet era by the authorities comes with a denial of anything that spoils the rosy image. In August, the Donetsk rebel authorities decided to pull down a monument to victims of the 1930s famine in Ukraine.

And Donetsk State University removed a monument to Ukrainian dissident Vasyl Stus, a poet and campaigner for national culture, who spent decades in jail and died in a prison camp in 1985 at the age of 47.

“That was a criminal act,” said Maria, a pensioner – but her view seemed to be shared by few.

[smisha]

Buzzfeed: Washington’s Man In Ukraine Can’t Stop His Country’s Corrupt Cronies

Захід розчаровується в українській псевдоборотьбі з корупцією і псевдореформами. Прогнозую, що підтримка Заходу буде різко падати. Прийде момент, коли вони перестануть бачити різницю між путіним і порошенком, і тоді працювати будуть з сильнішим, хто має вагу в цій ситуації.
Буде дуже шкода, якщо на недільних виборах до місцевих рад люди віддадуть свої голоси чинній злодійській владі.

When Ukraine’s revolution swept him to power last spring, Arseniy Yatsenyuk vowed to become a “kamikaze politician” pushing unpopular reforms and “waging a war” on graft.
A year and a half later, Ukraine’s prime minister is fighting for his political future after making slow progress on those reforms — and watching his allies become embroiled in corruption allegations themselves. Swiss prosecutors are investigating one of his top parliamentary leaders for paying bribes in a scheme to set up a nuclear power plant. The official in charge of repatriating ill-gotten foreign assets is facing criminal charges over luxury homes she somehow obtained in Britain and France. Investigative journalists revealed how a Yatsenyuk-linked billionaire used his political connections to win a government tender for duty-free space in Kiev’s airport.

Frustration over Ukraine’s sluggish reform process and anti-corruption efforts is fracturing its pro-Western governing coalition, creating rifts with the United States and European Union. Popular Front, Yatsenyuk’s political party, is polling so badly that it decided not to run in local elections on Oct. 25, only a year after it won a surprise majority of the parliamentary vote. An IRI poll published in August found that only 3% of Ukrainians were satisfied with the pace of change in the country; an astonishing 51% said that the government of Viktor Yanukovych — which protesters overthrew last year in large part due to anger at his appropriation of untold billions in state funds — did a better job fighting corruption.

“Definitely, much more must be done,” said Danylo Lubkivsky, an adviser to Yatsenyuk. Despite that, “if the government was corrupt, we would never receive any money from the international community,” he added. “There is only one person who gets benefits — Putin.”

Yatsenyuk’s tenure has exposed the difficulties and contradictions Ukraine faces in escaping the crony clan politics plaguing it since independence more than 20 years ago. His cabinet is stacked with fresh-faced, English-speaking ministers pledging a move towards transparent, Western-style governance. Yet in Yatsenyuk and President Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine is led by politicians with deep roots in the very corrupt back-door clan politics they say they seek to destroy. The equal division of power between their offices has slowed the legal process and given rise to countless backroom spats. Several officials in the governing coalition speak of a powerful “shadow government” of informal allies with longstanding connections to the president and prime minister who wield vast influence over political decisions and state-owned companies that loom over Ukraine’s economy.

“It’s the same house of cards — they’ve just reshuffled the deck,” said Viktoria Voytsitska, a coalition lawmaker and secretary of the parliamentary energy committee. “They’re still defending the same business interests of the same oligarchs.”

Publicly, the U.S. and EU have backed Ukraine’s government to the hilt in its effort to reform while fighting Russian economic pressure and support for a war in its east. Privately, several Western diplomats express serious doubts about whether Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko have the wherewithal, or even the political will, to smash the system that raised them. “They know they have to change the system, but they are too much creatures of the system to do it,” one said. “We are very disappointed” in Ukraine’s progress on reform, the diplomat continued. “It gives ammunition to all the member states who were always skeptical.”

At 41, the skinny, bespectacled Yatsenyuk is part of the first generation of Ukrainians to come of age after the Soviet Union’s collapse offered them experiences of the West. His older sister Alina is married to an American and lives in Santa Barbara, California. Though Yatsenyuk never studied outside his hometown of Chernivtsi in western Ukraine, he speaks the fluent, rhetorical English of the Davos man, to great effect among Western interlocutors. In the pro-Western government brought to power in 2004’s Orange Revolution, he served as economy minister, then the country’s youngest-ever foreign minister.

Yatsenyuk’s combination of English fluency and economic literacy were so rare among senior Ukrainian officials that they quickly made him a favorite in Western capitals. He and Poroshenko are the first Ukrainian leaders to speak English at all. Sergei Arbuzov, who negotiated for an International Monetary Fund bailout that collapsed during the revolt against Yanukovych, would show up to meetings in leather jackets. “Ukraine lost trust with the international community a long time ago — it takes a lot to win that back,” a Western diplomat said. During the protests last year, that skill set saw Victoria Nuland, the U.S. diplomat in charge of Ukraine policy, turn to him as a potential compromise prime minister. “Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience,” she said in an infamous leaked phone call.
Though U.S. officials say they were never under any illusions about the task facing Ukraine — the country even reaching Romania’s progress by 1995 is considered a high benchmark for success — th
e lack of action on corruption has alarmed even many of Ukraine’s biggest supporters in Washington. In July, Vice President Joe Biden directly warned Yatsenyuk at a Ukrainian business forum. “This is it, Mr. Prime Minister. The next couple years, the next couple months will go a long way to telling the tale,” he said. “Now you have to put people in jail.” After the forum, however, President Barack Obama dropped in on Yatsenyuk’s meeting in Biden’s office — a gesture Ukrainians interpreted as support in his turf war with Poroshenko.

“People in Washington ask me, ‘Why do they have to steal so much?’ And I tell them, ‘Why not? You’re letting them get away with it,’” said Balasz Jarabik, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s how U.S. support is understood in Kiev.”

Officials and diplomats say that Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk genuinely want to avoid the infighting that plagued the government that came to power in 2005 after Ukraine’s pro-Western Orange Revolution, in which they both served. “Neither of them have suicidal inclinations,” a senior adviser to Poroshenko said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Relations between president and prime minister are like “this joke about a turtle and the snake who go across a river,” the adviser said. “They agree that the turtle would not [dive] because snakes can not swim, and the snake agrees not to bite, because they would drown.” (In most versions of the story, the snake bites the turtle anyway, though the official did not comment on this.)

Yatsenyuk’s own formative experiences came in the rough-and-tumble world of Ukrainian clan politics. Two college friends from Chernivtsi with whom he started a law firm, Andriy Pyshny and Andriy Ivanchuk, flanked Yatsenyuk as his political fortunes rose. “Pyshny is really a good one; he’s relatively not corrupt. But Ivanchuk is a very bad guy,” a former colleague of all three men said. “I think of them as the angel and the devil on his shoulder.”

In 2009, as Yatsenyuk ran for president, Pyshny fell seriously ill, leaving Ivanchuk control over his campaign. Ivanchuk hired Timofei Sergeitsev and Dmitry Kulikov, vaguely KGB-linked Russian political consultants known as “Tima and Dima,” who told Yatsenyuk to adopt a militaristic platform in an ill-guided attempt to win over Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. They were occasionally joined by a third Russian, Alexei Sitnikov, whose business cards listed his occupation as “color revolutions and coups d’état.” Their smoke-and-mirrors techniques were no match for Yatsenyuk’s rivals, who ran a gritty smear campaign accusing Yatsenyuk of being Jewish. Despite public assurances from Ukraine’s chief rabbi that Yatsenyuk was not Jewish at all, he never shook off the accusations, and finished a distant fourth.

Pyshny and Ivanchuk retain close ties to Yatsenyuk, who is said to run a tight inner circle and has never built a broader political support structure. “He missed the opportunity to build a grassroots party,” said Orysia Lutseyvich, a fellow at Chatham House who set up Yatsenyuk’s Open Ukraine foundation when Yatsenyuk was foreign minister. “He does not carry well among simple people — he’s afraid of the babushka in Bessarabka,” Kiev’s central market. Pyshny now runs Oshchadbank, Ukraine’s state bank; Ivanchuk chairs the economic committee in parliament.

According to some of Poroshenko’s allies, they are joined by Nikolai Martynenko, a lawmaker in Yatsenyuk’s party with influence over the energy sector. Igor Skosar, a former lawmaker in Tymoshenko’s party, claimed last year that he paid Martynenko a $6 million bribe in 2012 so that Yatsenyuk, who then chaired it, would put him on the party list. Swiss prosecutors told BuzzFeed News they are investigating Martynenko over bribery and money laundering allegations which, according to Czech media, are related to contracts for a nuclear power plant with a Czech contractor. Martynenko has said that the allegations are a Russian plot to discredit him, and denies the case’s very existence.

Corruption is so rife in Ukrainian bureaucracy that ministers say they essentially have to start anew. “When I hear the words ‘institutional memory,’ I get scared, because they mismanaged everything for 20 years,” Economy Minister Aivaras Abramovicius told BuzzFeed News. Yatsenyuk’s critics within the governing coalition say that he has not done enough to fight those vested interests. “We essentially have a shadow government, a parallel government,” Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and university friend of Poroshenko’s who now governs Odessa province, recently said. “Ukraine is owned by the oligarchs like a joint stock company.”

The problem is compounded by Ukraine’s political system, which distributes power between Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk equally and where party finance is notoriously murky, requiring both men to cut deals with oligarchs, insiders say. Oligarchs, Poroshenko included, also control Ukraine’s major TV stations, which gives them enormous influence over public opinion and leverage over officials. When Poroshenko fought the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky over Ukrnafta, the country’s largest oil and gas producer, earlier this year, Ivanchuk, who is one of Kolomoisky’s business partners, blocked a bill to return it to the state. Though Yatsenyuk eventually got the bill passed, Kolomoisky still retains untoward influence over Ukrnafta, according to Sergei Leshchenko, a lawmaker who spearheaded the push to take back the company.
“Kolomoisky’s people are still there, and they’ve let him put off his payments [on the company’s $425 million debt to the state] until the end of the year,” Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist, told BuzzFeed News last month. “He isn’t paying the dividends or the revenue. Yatsenyuk isn’t suing or filing criminal charges. I am sure there’s a conspiracy between Kolomoisky and Yatsenyuk.”

Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, also sees Yatsenyuk as a major ally in his attempt to retain his influence and wealth, according to two people who discussed the matter with him. Akhmetov’s fortune, concentrated in industrial holdings in eastern Ukraine, has plummeted from $22 billion to $7 billion since war broke out there last year, according to Bloomberg. His closest political allies, a group of officials who ran their mutual hometown of Donetsk as their personal fiefdom, fled the country along with Yanukovych. “I’ve been knocked down, but not knocked out,” Akhmetov said, according to one of the sources. DTEK, Akhmetov’s sprawling energy monopoly, owns a number of assets it bought from the state at knockdown prices while Yanukovych was president. With he and his team gone, the famously soccer-mad Akhmetov is fond of saying that “Arseny Petrovich is the Lionel Messi of the Ukrainian government,” using Yatsenyuk’s patronymic, according to a Western diplomat who knows him.

Ukraine’s Western partners say they are seriously concerned the country’s leadership will not make good on its reform commitments. The country has passed the sweeping macroeconomic reforms under the terms of its $40 billion IMF bailout, but has made little progress elsewhere. Another diplomat recalled a meeting over bailout terms in 2014 where Yatsenyuk screamed at senior European officials, demanding they hand over the money immediately. “They can only be helped so much as they are willing to help themselves,” the diplomat said. “This is the most money the EU has ever given to a third country, and we’re not seeing the result.”
Some former members of the government say that institutional resistance is so strong as to make reforms all but impossible. “I was never invited to do reforms,” said Pavlo Sheremeta, who resigned as Yatsenyuk’s economy minister last year. “The money came in and it got much tougher. There’s no sense of urgency unless there’s no money in the coffers.”

Speaking at a conference in Kiev last month, Yatsenyuk said the struggle against corruption was ultimately not his concern. “I am not responsible for the prosecutor’s office … nor for judiciary. I am doing my jobs: to fix the economy, to be back on track in terms of reforms, to provide energy efficiency reform, to provide financial resources for the Ukrainian military, to improve corporate governance for state-owned enterprises, ” he said. “Everyone is to make his own job.”

[ozi lucky]

так борються, як сліпий дихає. чи то пак як мертвий дивиться. до сих пір плуютася в цій грі слів.

загалом Порошенко просрав все що тільки можна було просрати. єдине що можна було б в хоч якийсь плюс поставити - це зовнішню політику. хоча тут мабуть все таки більша заслуга західних і арабських мужів, яких вже кацапи своїм "особливим баченням міжгалактичного стану речей" реально дістали.

[Олесь Вахній]

А стаждають від того Україна й українці

[smisha]

Порошенко нічого не просрав - иого задача була залишити стару систему відносин незмінною, і він її виконує навідмінно. Ще й захід за ніс водить.

[Олесь Вахній]

Савєцька система породила цілий пласт безпринципних, продажних, морально розкладених й духовно здеградованих себелюбців. Воно можуть паразитувати на різних ідеях, але суть від того не зміниться. Ці істоти є чужими Украіні й украінцям. Порошенко породження цієі системи. Тому зайве й дивуватись його діям. Чужий він Украіні

[smisha]

Daily Mail.co.uk: The police force is strong with this one: Ukrainian officers arrest Chewbacca at political rally where he was campaigning for mayoral candidate Darth Vader

The Force was certainly strong with Star Wars character Chewbacca when he was found campaigning for Darth Vader in Ukraine.
The police force, that is.
For the Wookiee warrior was arrested by no fewer than four officers for campaigning on Election Day, which is banned under Ukrainian laws.
He also had his lightsaber and laser gun confiscated.

He was also accused of failing to present his passport and was fined the equivalent of £5.
However, he declined to pay it, saying his 'funds are in an intergalactic bank that has no branches on this planet'.
Hilarious video shows four police officers struggling to handcuff Chewie as the music from Star Wars is played.


The bizarre incident happened in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, where candidates from The Internet Party have put themselves forward for election under the leadership of Darth Vader.
Chewie, who appeared to be trying to resist arrest, was eventually bundled into a police car and taken to a police station and later released.


The Internet Party have complained that the name of their candidate Darth Vader did not appear on the ballot papers and have accused the Ukrainian government of fraud.
Last week, a bronze Lenin statue was remodelled into Darth Vader.
The sculpture of the revolutionary leader in the city of Odessa was going to be removed by the government under de-communisation laws.
The tall statue is now Darth Vader, having been given the Star Wars villain's iconic black helmet and mask.
Warehouse manager Semyon Horbunov, on whose land the statue sits, said: 'Everything flows and nothing abides.
'New heroes replace old ones, and this is how the world goes round.'

[Олесь Вахній]

Було б воно смішно, але насправді - гірко і образливо. Клоунада а не вибори в Україні

[smisha]

Le Monde.fr: Le tournant russe de François Hollande

Союз росії і заходу у війні з ісламістами. Нічого хорошого для України.

Quelle rapidité ! A peine le président François Hollande avait-il annoncé, lundi 16 novembre devant le Parlement réuni en Congrès à Versailles, son intention de former une coalition internationale contre l’Etat islamique (EI) – impliquant par là un rapprochement avec Moscou –, que la Russie, à son tour, changeait de pied pour s’inscrire dans cette nouvelle configuration.

Moscou a commencé par reconnaître officiellement ce que tout le monde savait, mais que le président Poutine refusait de dire à ses propres concitoyens : l’avion de ligne russe qui avait explosé en vol au-dessus de l’Egypte le 31 octobre, provoquant la mort des 224 personnes à bord, a bien été la cible d’un attentat. Cet attentat avait été revendiqué par l’EI. Désormais, Moscou, comme Paris, peut arguer de la légitime défense pour agir militairement contre l’EI en Syrie.

Puis, le chef du Kremlin a donné l’instruction aux forces armées russes de se coordonner « en tant qu’alliées » avec les forces françaises sur le théâtre de guerre syrien. Enfin, loin du Moyen-Orient mais sur un sujet crucial pour les relations russo-occidentales, la Russie a offert de restructurer, sous conditions, la dette de 3 milliards de dollars de l’Ukraine, dont elle exigeait jusqu’ici le remboursement le 6 décembre.


Pas d’angélisme

Cet été, déjà, la Russie a pris tout le monde de court et s’est imposée comme un acteur incontournable dans la crise syrienne. Le président Hollande, qui avait refusé de livrer les deux navires de guerre Mistral vendus par Nicolas Sarkozy à la Russie, se méfiait des desseins russes au Moyen-Orient, tout comme les Etats-Unis. Mais les attentats du 13 novembre ont changé la donne. Coopérer avec la Russie contre l’Etat islamique, plutôt que de rivaliser, offre à la France de meilleures chances de combattre efficacement cet ennemi maintenant clairement identifié comme la priorité : M. Hollande s’est rendu à la raison et aux arguments de ceux qui plaidaient pour ce tournant – et pas seulement parmi les idolâtres français de M. Poutine.

Ce réalisme est justifié. Il ne doit pas, cependant, faire la part belle à l’angélisme. Si la Russie a subitement intensifié, mardi, ses frappes contre l’EI, cela ne fait pas oublier que 80 % des bombardements russes ont, depuis septembre, selon le Pentagone, visé les forces rebelles modérées de l’opposition à Bachar Al-Assad. La raison profonde pour laquelle la Russie est intervenue en Syrie est le désir de Vladimir Poutine d’imposer le retour de son pays dans le jeu des grandes puissances, un rôle qu’il a savouré lundi au sommet du G20 d’Antalya. Il voulait aussi empêcher l’effondrement de la Syrie, afin d’y préserver les intérêts russes. Tous ses récents discours le montrent : M. Poutine reste un dirigeant figé dans une logique de confrontation avec un Occident qu’il accuse d’avoir trompé la Russie à la fin de la guerre froide.

Le sort du président syrien, qui a tant divisé Russes et Occidentaux, sera au menu des discussions au sein de cette « grande coalition », si elle prend forme. On découvrira que les Russes ne tiennent pas plus que cela à ce dirigeant qu’ils considèrent comme un vassal, et qui peut être interchangeable. Mais il appartient aux Occidentaux, dans le donnant-donnant qui va s’engager avec Moscou, de ne pas sacrifier en contrepartie du soutien russe contre l’EI les principes qui les unissent et qui ont fondé leur soutien à l’Ukraine.

[Олесь Вахній]

До цього йшло. Захід керується не здоровим глуздом, а прагненням бути ситим і спокійним.

[smisha]

це і є здоровий глузд, дружити з сильним і не звертати увагу на слабких. хіба по іншому буває? нова влада завела Україну в нішу третьосортних країн, з такими ніхто панькатись не хоче.

[Олесь Вахній]

Здається мені, в ніші третьосортних країн україна опинилась задовго до нинішньої влади

[smisha]

Хоч щось хороше:

RT.com: Erdogan: We’ll continue shooting down violating planes