Colors indicate (from dark blue to light blue) : Dark blue: French Empire Light blue: French satellite states and occupied zones Blue-grey: Countries forced by France into applying the Continental System.
The impact of World War II, or, as most people there call it, The War, on eastern Ukrainian consciousness cannot be understated. My childhood in the northeast city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in the 1980s was surrounded by The War, 40 years after it ended. Every family — Russian, Ukrainian, Roma, Jewish — had ghost relatives who had vanished or perished. One of my earliest memories is of asking my father where the mortar holes pockmarking the outside of our apartment block had come from; one of my father’s earliest memories is of fleeing Kharkov mere hours before the Nazis invaded the city. Eastern Ukrainians today, especially the older generations, respond to swastikas and wolfsangel runes — Nazi symbols now used by Ukrainian ultranationalists — about as well as African-Americans respond to burning crosses. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Mr. Putin and the Russian news media say that western Ukrainians in Mr. Poroshenko’s government are neo-Nazis. The West denies these claims, averring that there are no neo-Nazi elements in the Kiev government. Both are wrong. The Kiev government and the armies fighting in eastern Ukraine contain a small minority of neo-Nazi ultranationalists. To eastern Ukrainians, however, even one is too many.
Washington and the Western media have largely ignored the negative ramifications of Kiev’s actions. The State Department has said nothing about the pension freeze’s effect on the local population of eastern Ukraine; reports of the Azov battalion’s use of Nazi insignia have not been addressed in any meaningful manner. Mr. Putin’s greatest weapon of all may be the West’s refusal to speak directly to the people of eastern Ukraine. When I talk to family friends still living in Kharkiv, they ask me, “Why does the West label us as enemies?”
It seems the West has forgotten the lessons of its own history. At the end of the Cold War in 1989, Communism collapsed, leaving unrest and uncertainty in its wake. In that moment of chaos, the people of Eastern Europe turned their gazes westward. This happened not by accident, but because of decades of public diplomacy — from “Ich bin ein Berliner” to “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” to nightly broadcasts by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which constantly reassured those behind the Iron Curtain that the West had not forgotten them. That year my family was one of many that fled eastern Ukraine for Vienna, and later the United States.
In 2014, the people of eastern Ukraine find themselves in an exponentially more horrible and deadly situation. They will turn to whoever provides them with bread and security and respect for their language and culture. They are looking, and more and more it seems they’re turning, eastward.
Who is the strong horse here? It ain’t rocket science. They just wanna live ... like you an me, ya know ?
Voice of America is pretty much banned in Russia and Eastern Ukraine by Putin while we keep letting him speak here through RT channel.
This author is full of sht.
They’re leaving Ukraine because they’re Russians who were put there by the Soviet Union as a Soviet Fifth Column and they don’t belong in Ukraine in the first place.
These people are not ethnic Ukranians. They are the descendents of ethnic Russians moved there by the Soviet regime to further their control in the border states during the cold war. The same thing happened in Crimea (see tartar genocide).
Consider the stupidity of your comments here, you barely concealed commie. These small parts of East Ukraine are under the control of Soviets who have placed their Commie flags up everywhere and have taken control of all government buildings and media. They have murdered Ukrainian Christians, killed patriots, driven out people who do not want to fight, and have declared the area THEIR country. Consequently, you want the Ukrainians to still be passing out money on territory you've claimed for the Soviet Un--errr, NovoRussiya. Which just goes to show that all the boasts the Russkies made in the first place were all lies, because they have no intention of spending their money on these places. It is to their benefit, in fact, that they turn this new "country" into a giant slum, because they can blame Ukraine for it.
FYI, vatnik, anyone in Ukraine can get their pensions or other money they have coming to them... provided they leave those areas under separatist control.
Thanks for keeping FR up to date with your selected premium Russian propaganda. FU very much!
Yes.
Colors indicate (from dark blue to light blue) : Dark blue: French Empire Light blue: French satellite states and occupied zones Blue-grey: Countries forced by France into applying the Continental System.
An attorney with Sullivan & Cromwell was present at the meeting where leading German capitalists decided to back Hitler for power. Guess who that attorney was.
The “NAZI” movement was the creation of financial elites.
It was designed to be the antagonist in the elite’s second world war.
Upon taking power, Hitler immediately did what the elites who placed him in power wanted, he started working on a military buildup.
Those top companies and banks made a lot of money as the top vendors to the the NAZI government, and political contributions by them and their leaders went directly into the slush funds of the top NAZI leaders, enabling them to consolidate their power.
These top companies and banks, throughout the war, continued to enable NAZI Germany to trade and bank internationally, mainly through the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland, a kind of “central bank for central banks”.
Most interestingly, the President of the BIS in Switzerland was an American banker, Thomas McKittrick, from 1940-1946.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements#Leadership
The elites today still make use of thuggish terror groups, while they simultaneously, through their minions holding top posts, control governments.
A little geography lesson for he folks over in Times Square.