Napetost v Ukrajini - Krimu

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The Ukrainian neo-fascist militia, Right Sector, has announced it is preparing for “widescale actions” and the holding of an “emergency Congress” in Kiev, after a violent standoff with a rival gang and government authorities in western Ukraine last week. The primary fighting force behind the US-backed coup in February 2014 that led to the installation of the current regime in Kiev, Right Sector is now challenging the government of President Petro Poroshenko and demanding his resignation.

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The Kiev government is absolutely impotent and does not decide anything. Moreover, Ukrainian top officials do not even control their own lives, the expert concluded

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In December 2013, a number of Islamist Tatars suddenly returned from the Middle East, where they had been fighting the Syrian Arab Republic, to lend support to the coloured revolution on Maïdan Square

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The Guardian has found more evidence of Russian military hardware operating inside Ukraine, spotting an armoured vehicle marked with the symbol of the Russian army's "peacekeeping forces".

The armoured personnel carrier was well inside Ukraine, in Lutuhyne, a town near Luhansk, where a Ukrainian military convoy was destroyed by artillery and Grad missiles last week.

Amid the remains of the destroyed Ukrainian column, three soldiers stood by an intact armoured personnel carrier on Tuesday afternoon.

The men, who refused to be photographed, said they were from Russia and were not regular soldiers, saying they were paid mercenaries. They did not say who was paying them.

Their vehicle was marked in three places with a blue circle and the yellow Cyrillic letters MC – the Russian abbreviation for "peacekeeping forces".

Many of these have been seen moving on the other side of the border in recent weeks, and the vehicle's presence was yet more evidence of what Moscow has continually denied – that its soldiers are active in east Ukraine.

In many cases, separatists have claimed that columns are not Russian military vehicles but trophies stolen from the Ukrainian army.

However, the distinctive MC peacekeeping signs are only featured on Russian vehicles, used on peacekeeping missions in the Caucasus and Transnistria.

"Ukraine's only peacekeeping missions are with the UN, and those vehicles are painted white. If it has the blue and yellow symbol, it has to be Russian," said Oleksiy Melnyk, a Ukrainian military analyst at Kiev's Razumkov Centre.

Half an hour after the APC was first spotted, one of the soldiers could be seen painting over the MC signs with black paint.

When the Guardian returned to the scene on Wednesday, the vehicle was gone.

Driving on the road from Donetsk to Luhansk, several small convoys of trucks and armoured vehicles were visible that looked very different to the irregular rebel forces, and appeared to be manned by regular Russian troops.

The men by the armoured vehicle in Lutuhyne did not look as well equipped as other Russians seen in Ukraine in recent weeks; one of them was even wearing trainers, but it appeared clear that at least the vehicle came from official Russian military stock.

Last month, the Guardian witnessed a Russian armoured column cross the border near the Izvaryne border post. Russia denied it had happened, claiming the convoy was a border patrol that stayed on the border.

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In a new analysis, European Council on Foreign Relations senior policy fellow Kadri Liik explores European sanctions against Russia and how European leaders should use them.

She observes that Europe doesn't seem to know what it wants the "structural sanctions" to achieve and thus don’t have any time frame as to exactly when to end said sanctions.

“Do we expect a regime change in Moscow? Or do we want Russia to start behaving ‘as a normal European country’ i.e. one that tries to base its influence on attraction rather than coercion?” Liik asks.
These questions need to be answered as the issue of renewing sanctions arises.

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Moscow, for its part, knows exactly what it wants: Russia thinks in terms of "spheres of influence" and is set on making clear what it considers as its own sphere.

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Europe has more of a "postmodern, win-win oriented, OSCE-based view of international relations," Liik writes.

Given that "the two sides see through totally different paradigms," Liik argues, a standoff between Russia and Europe was bound to happen.

If not in Ukraine, it would have happened elsewhere. Part of the reason is that now, 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the countries that used to be part of the USSR are demanding better governance and more power to steer their future as they see fit.

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Basically, the shaping of post-Soviet Europe has an inherent tension.

“This manifests in a bumpy, but inevitable evolutionary process that the EU did not launch and does not control, but cannot do anything other than support," Liik writes.

"Moscow, on the other hand, is fixated on the elites it can control — and therefore bound to resist [the post-Soviet process]. The clash is systemic, and likely to manifest repeatedly as long as the fundamentals remain unchanged."

What Russia wants, she argues, is not a large-scale conflict but a deal with the EU about those countries that the Kremlin sees as part of Russia’s rightful "sphere of influence."

The EU, on the other hand, could never accept this deal because it would mean conceding to Russian aggression in former Soviet states that are now part of Europe.

What EU leaders need to understand when discussing further sanctions, Liik argues, is that Russia and Europe are in the midst of a long-term conflict that cannot be resolved quickly.

If Europe is waiting for a regime-change in Moscow, it is waiting for the wrong thing, according to Liik. The dominance-fixated mindset of Russian leaders has been alive and well for decades and is not likely to disappear — even if Putin is not at the head of Russia anymore.

The ideal situation from the European perspective, according to Liik, is that Russia would rethink of "the means and ends of its international behavior.”
Ultimately, Liik concludes, the changes will only be profound if the government is discredited and brought down by Russians themselves.

And that is where sanctions come in.

By making Russia’s aggressive stunts costly and ineffective, Europe will “deny Russia the ends it wants.”

Liik argues that this needs to be done by keeping sanctions implemented until the conditions set by the EU (implementation of the Minsk agreements and the return of Crimea) are met. At the same time, Europe needs to keep vulnerable EU countries and NATO members secure.

What is most important for Europe is to show Russia that it will not simply stand by and accept one annexation or conflict after another without reacting — an impression the EU gave during and after the 2008 war in Georgia, where Russia is still slowly eating away at its territory.

The fact that Europe is willing to keep those sanctions, even as they bring on certain economic hardships, is also part of that same strategy to show Russia the EU’s credibility — even if it means more strikes in Europe and no more French cheese for Russians.

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The Slavic Union (Russian: Славянский Сою&#1079 (SS) is a Russian national socialist movement, which aims at the creation of a Slavic national state. The Slavic Union is the most active ultranationalist political association in Russia, and is alleged to have around 70,000 members throughout Russia, according to various police sources.

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The leader of the organization is Dmitry Demushkin (Дмитрий Николаевич Дёмушки&#1085.

The group's website, in Russian, links to extensive material on Holocaust denial and to works by Adolf Hitler. Its organizational logo is a stylized swastika and the group's initials, "SS" in Russian, are the same as those used by the German Schutzstaffel and its secret intelligence service, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret Policeforce), during World War II.

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The incident was reported in the facebook post of a pro-Putin activist Maks Ovsiannikov, who has found out that the huge poster on display on the wall of a local children’s after-school education facility called Pioneers Palace was agreed upon with the local administration. The texts read “They need great perturbations. We need a strong Russia!”, which is a quote of Pyotr Stolypin, a monarchist politician whose tenure was marked by efforts to counter revolutionary groups, and “We are the power!”

Maks Ovsiannikov has already filed a complaint.

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