So I just had a long conversation with a colleague who is a scholar of political sciences and specializes in Ukraine. And I’m happy to report that everything I have been offering on this blog in terms of the analysis of the situation in Ukraine was echoed 100% by somebody who studies this as a scholar. She doesn’t know I have a blog but she pretty much repeated verbatim some of the things I have been saying here. (E.g. That if she hears once again about the pro-Russian East and pro-EU West, she will have a conniption. And that the protests are not about the EU. Nobody cares about the EU any longer. What are Ukrainians, stupid, to die for the stupid EU? Many people in the Maidan are very critical of EU and want nothing to do with it.)
Sister: I know you are otherwise occupied right now (and wow, man, congratulations!), but if you are reading this, you will be glad to know that my colleague coincides with you 100% in your analysis of Yulia Timoshenko’s speech. She told me about it using the exact same words you used and quoting the exact same parts of the speech. So yay, we both rock.
V.: My colleague also agrees with you that the attempts to mess with the language laws on the part of the new interim government are wackadoodle. (This is my term, the colleague used more scholarly expressions.) She says that futzing with the language laws is not and has never been one of the demands of the protesters in the Maidan. She also says that the nationalists are widely appalled by this development and see it as pig-headed. For instance, a venerable publishing house in Lviv (located in the Western part of the country) that is famous for never having published a single book in Russian has now announced that it will start publishing Russian-language books to signal its disagreement with these ridiculous legislative attempts to manufacture discord between Ukrainians.
I’m going to the colleague’s talk on Ukraine this Friday, so more is to follow. In the meanwhile, I put the poster for her talk on the door of my office and attached it with blue and yellow tacks.
Clarissa's Blog 
Rather curious about the analysis of Yulia Timoshenko’s speech.
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I’m running to class but I will write in detail when I come back, OK?
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I would be curious to read about what you think about the economic situation of Ukraine. I find this the most confusing aspect of the entire story. So apparently people have lent a lot of money to Ukraine, while it had a corrupt and very bad government, so that Ukraine is now 35 billion Euro in debt. Now the government is gone, but a new government apparently can almost do nothing except trying to obtain foreign aid in order to be able to pay its debts and not go bankrupt. For this it might have to go through brutal austerity measured demanded by the IMF. To me, this sounds like the normal Ukrainian people have to bleed in order that some investor somewhere gets his money back.
So I don’t get this. Why is are the interests of the investors who loaned money so important? Why not let these debts default and start again, as Ukraine 2.0, like a company would? I find this very confusing in general. If a government mismanages a country and borrows a lot of money to do this, why do the successors to this government have to pay back the loans, even if the previous government is now seen as criminal? Shouldn’t the debtors be the ones to carry the risk, if they were the ones to give money to a corrupt and criminal government? It just seems extremely weird to me. Or is there something I am missing? I understood kind of why they did not let Greece go bankrupt, because they were afraid that this would erase trust in other countries of the EU, like Spain and Italy, and let them go bankrupt too. But what is the problem with letting the Ukraine go bankrupt?
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The tragic story of Haiti, where people today live in dire poverty because of something that happened and obligations undertaken literally hundreds of years ago, demonstrates that country can’t choose to play these tricks on capital. Capitalism means that capital rules. Only what serves it will be allowed to happen.
Leaving that aside, Ukraine is not poor because it had a corrupt government. Ukraine is poor because EVERYBODY was corrupt to incredible degrees. People practice corruption and bribery like they breathe. Any suggestion that there might not be any need to give bribes is greeted with extreme aggression. People actually flip out when you suggest that since nobody asked for a bribe, maybe there was no need to give it. This is a tragic legacy of the USSR that infected everybody who was part of it. Economically, the FSU countries will be in deep shit for as long as people are attached to these Soviet patterns of thinking (work is bad, bribery is normal, corruption is something that can only be performed by the government, etc.)
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Thank you for your reply. Yes, that was probably a very naive idea. I was thinking of Iceland, which managed to go bankrupt and survive well, but probably a much poorer and structurally weaker country would suffer much more from going bankrupt…. It becomes very hard to see a good way out of this situation for the Ukraine… even if the EU really wanted to help, I am not sure how it could. It certainly will not be able to justify to its citizens giving 35 billion Euros to the Ukraine. It seems really hard to even think of what the best-case scenario is now…
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And what of Crimea? I’d be very interested in what both you and your colleague think about Crimea.
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How much influence do the “neo-Nazi” ultra-right-nationalists have? Are they simply good at attracting attention of journalists, and not of much interest to actual Ukrainians? Or is this a significant political movement, on the order of the Front National in France?
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There is a small ultra-nationalist movement of the kind that exist everywhere. In comparison with the power and popularity of ultra-nationalists in the US, they are almost non-existent. The stories about the “brown threat” in Ukraine are part of Putin’s propaganda.
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This is a bit more complicated, I am afraid… While “brown threat” per se, narrowly defined, is indeed a figment of Putin propaganda, my pet theory of post-imperial national states tells me that certain nationalist steps are almost inevitable. Said pet theory is not perfectly scientific, and is based on limited empirical evidence, but this evidence includes surprising similarities between practical manifestations of nationalism in countries as different as Quebec and Baltic states. Which makes me believe there are some common development patterns. One can of course argue that this is “normal” then… Well, not all that is “normal” is ethical or healthy…
Anyway, from this viewpoint, immediate meddling with language laws was not some provocation (Putin made them do it?) or just unexplainable “wackadoodle”. It is a very natural and not random expression of actual collective subconscious, that got unrestrained in the euphoria of the revolution. It was an act of national self-affirmation. Asserting the ownership of Ukraine by Ukrainians, not some shady pro-Russian Yanukovich character. But, uncontested, it may eventually devolve into “we are the only rightful owners of this country, and others, if they do not like it, should go to THEIR country”. Do not get me wrong, I am positively impressed by how it was contested (frankly, I did not expect it to be contested at all) but I still would like to observe a bit longer, to see if contesting “wackadoodle” was tactical decision which will be forgotten once they get stronger, or if this was real lasting choice.
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“It is a very natural and not random expression of actual collective subconscious, that got unrestrained in the euphoria of the revolution. It was an act of national self-affirmation. Asserting the ownership of Ukraine by Ukrainians, not some shady pro-Russian Yanukovich character. ”
– I really wish I could believe that. But I just can’t. I think what happened is that the interim government has no idea what to do and is terrified of antagonizing the crowd. So it tried to give the crowd (called “the maidan” these days) what the interim government thought the crowd wanted. But they guessed wrong.
I differ from the Maidan and my colleague, the politologist, in that I believe that this was a good and important law. I don’t see why the official paperwork in the country where Russian is not a state language should be conducted in Russian. But the moment I find anybody who actually agrees with me will be a big deal. 🙂 🙂 I’m an outcast in my own family on this issue. 🙂 🙂
Ukraine is not Quebec. The way the culture and language were destroyed in Ukraine don’t have an equivalent in Quebec. The Quebecois are generally proud of their culture (whatever it consists of). Ukrainians carry a deep sense of shame for theirs.
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Thanks for your analysis of the situation in Ukraine. I find myself coming here to read your take on the situation in Ukraine and I find your analyzis much more in depth than what the Western media has been able to show.
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