Protests in Ukraine....Mirrors used..

[myosotis]

I was interested to see these photographs of protestors in Ukraine holding up mirrors to the police. I had not seen this done before...
(The protest background is described in the article)

6 Jan 14
http://[URL=https://imageshack.com/i/j7xhnuj][/URL]

At noon, demonstrators lined the streets of central Kyiv for 30 minutes to hold up mirrors in front of police in commemoration of the Nov. 30 violent dispersal of protesting students from Independence Square. All photos by Kostyantyn Chernichkin






15 December 13
The European Union puts on hold work with Ukraine on a trade and cooperation agreement as large rival protest rallies mobilise in Kiev.


6 Jan 14
Ukraine: mirrors in Kiev but what next for protesters?

Ukrainians have been taking to the streets since November despite the bitter cold, protesting against what they see as their government's overly cosy relationship with Russia.

The pro-EU protesters began demonstrating last year, and after a break during the Ukrainian orthodox Christmas, 50,000 opponents of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich rallied on Independence Square in Kiev on Sunday.

The demonstration came a day after baton-wielding riot police tried to disperse protesters outside a Kiev courthouse, sparking clashes in which at least ten people were injured, including former Ukrainian Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko.

Mr Lutsenko is a minister in the government of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko - a symbol of Ukraine's Orange Revolution.

The ban, decided on 6 January but only issued now, runs from 8 January to 8 March and defines a mass protest as "an event using loudspeakers.... posters, putting up of tents, stages or curtains."

The court did not explain the delay in publishing the ban but opposition activists saw it as the sign of a tougher line to come.
We believe that it is a fact of preparation for... repressions against peaceful activists across the country," said a statement from the opposition party UDAR led by former heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko.

In early December, a violent crackdown by riot police of a student demonstration in Independence Square accelerated protests across the former Soviet republic.

However, since the huge Sunday rally, numbers appear to have dwindled. On Tuesday, some just 200 integration activists picketed the roadway outside of Mr Yanukovich's residence in Mezhyhirya.



Yanukovich's regime will not stop at anything.
Vitaly Klitschko

In another protest, a group of about 200 people marched down a central Kiev street, pushing through police lines and scuffling with officers along the route.

Activists also urged politicians to boycott the Inter TV channel over what they say is biased coverage of protests in Kiev.

EU sanctions


But some emblematic images from the protests, such as the one above, have started to take off on social media - and demonstrators have vowed to fight on.

The viral images show demonstrators holding up mirrors in front of riot police in Kiev. Protesters say they are holding up the mirrors to force police to look themselves in the eye and reflect upon their actions.

The protests began following Mr Yanukovich's decision to abandon a free trade agreement with Europe in favour of closer cooperation with Russia, but opposition leaders have widened their aims since then.


http://www.channel4.com/news/ukraine-protests-smoke-and-mirrors-in-kiev-eu-russia

 

[virginia_woolf]

Mirrors didn't help. It's scary what's happening in Ukraine right now.

 

[souldreamer7]

I saw the people who were killed on the news this morning.... some died on the streets and was drug to hotel lobbies to try & save their lifes but many died... ray:

Sad world we live in... :no:

 

[cinderella]

We need to pray for Ukraine. It's hard to imagine it's the same country (city) which held the Euro 2012 final. :no:,,,,,,,,,The people are being killed only because they want freedom and justice and to join Europe. So sad

 

[cinderella]

http://youtu.be/Hvds2AIiWLA

 

[MIST]

I never thought it would go this far.
They want the president to resign and today I heard on the news that the elections will be brought forward and until then they will form a transitional government.
I hope it helps, that the violence stops

 

[virginia_woolf]

Sadly I don't believe Yanukovych (and Putin) will give up easily.

 

[PoP]

I heard the protesters wanting refuge in the Canadian Embassay.

 

[virginia_woolf]

Things get worse every day. I'm really scared right now.

 

[HIStory]

Kiev, Ukraine (CNN) -- Ukraine's new Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned Sunday his crisis-hit country was on the "brink of disaster," accusing neighbor Russia of declaring war.
Ukraine's shaky new government mobilized troops and called up military reservists Sunday, even as the defense minister said Kiev stood no chance against Russian troops in a rapidly escalating crisis that has raised fears of a conflict.
Amid signs of Russian military intervention in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, Russian generals led their troops to three bases in the region Sunday demanding Ukrainian forces surrender and hand over their weapons, Vladislav Seleznyov, spokesman for the Crimean Media Center of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told CNN.
Speaking by phone, he said Russian troops had blocked access to the bases, but added "there is no open confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian military forces in Crimea" and that Ukrainian troops continue to protect and serve Ukraine.

Russia OKs military force in Ukraine

Kiev: Russia's move is direct aggression
"This is a red alert. This is actually a declaration of war in our country," Yatsenyuk said.
Speaking in a televised address from the parliament building in Kiev, Yatsenyuk called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to "pull back the military and stick to international obligations."
"We are on the brink of disaster," he said.
In Brussels, Belgium, NATO ambassadors were scheduled to hold an emergency meeting on Ukraine.
"What Russia is doing now in Ukraine violates the principles of the U.N. charter," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters.
"Russia must stop its military activities and threats," Rasmussen said, adding, "we support Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty. ... We support the rights of the people of Ukraine to determine their own future without outside interference."
Escalating crisis
Ukraine's parliament met behind closed doors Sunday. At the closing of the session, acting Defense Minister Ihor Tenyuh said Ukraine does not have the military force to resist Russia, according to two parliamentary members present at the meeting. Tenyuh called for talks to resolve the crisis with Russia, they said.
The Ukrainian National Security Council has ordered the mobilization of troops, as Putin appeared to dismiss warnings from world leaders to avoid military intervention in Crimea, a senior Ukrainian official, Andriy Parubiy, said.

Masked gunmen occupy Crimea

Ukranian airspace shut down amid crisis
He also said the Defense Ministry was calling for reservists to register at the local and regional headquarters to be on standby if needed.
A sense of escalating crisis in Crimea -- an autonomous region of eastern Ukraine with strong loyalty to neighboring Russia -- swirled Saturday night, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemning what he called "the Russian Federation's invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory."
Russia has not confirmed it deployed thousands of troops to the region following reports that armed, Russian-speaking forces wearing military uniforms -- without insignia -- patrolled key infrastructure sites.
It was the latest in a series of fast-moving developments that saw Russia's parliament sign off on Putin's request to send military forces into Ukraine, raising the stakes in the escalating brinksmanship. Putin cited in his request a threat posed to the lives of Russian citizens and military personnel based in southern Crimea. Ukrainian officials have vehemently denied Putin's claim.
According to a tweet from the official Russian government account Sunday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev discussed the crisis in Ukraine in a telephone call with Yatsenyuk.
According to a second tweet, Medvedev said Russia is interested in maintaining stable and friendly relations with Ukraine but reserves the right to protect the legitimate interests of its citizens and military personnel stationed in Crimea.
Path to war?
In Kiev, thousands of people rallied in the central Independence Square, cradle of Ukraine's three-month anti-government protests that led to President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster last week.
A crowd held up signs reading "Crimea, we are with you" and "Putin, hands off Ukraine."
In Moscow, about 50 protesters were detained outside a Defense Ministry building, a Moscow police spokesman said.
Putin's move prompted world diplomats to call for a de-escalation of tensions that have put the two neighbors on a possible path to war and roiled relations between Russia and the United States.
In what appeared to be an illustration of the growing schism between the two world powers, U.S. President Barack Obama and Putin spoke for 90 minutes, with each expressing his concern over the mounting crisis, according to separate statements released by their governments.
According to the Kremlin, Putin told Obama that Russia reserves the right to defend its interests in the Crimea region and the Russian-speaking people who live there.
The Russian government said in a statement that, in reply to U.S. concerns over the possibility of the use of Russian armed forces in Ukraine, Putin "drew his attention to the provocative and criminal actions on the part of ultranationalists who are in fact being supported by the current authorities in Kiev."
According to a statement released Saturday by the White House, Obama "made clear that Russia's continued violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity would negatively impact Russia's standing in the international community."
Lean to the West, or to Russia?
Ukraine, a nation of 45 million people sandwiched between Europe and Russia's southwestern border, has been plunged into chaos since the ouster a week ago of Yanukovych following bloody street protests that left dozens dead and hundreds wounded.
Ukraine has faced a deepening split, with those in the west generally supporting the interim government and its European Union tilt, while many in the east prefer a Ukraine where Russia casts a long shadow.
Nowhere is that feeling more intense than in Crimea, the last big bastion of opposition to the new political leadership. Ukraine suspects Russia of fomenting tension in the autonomous region that might escalate into a bid for separation by its Russian majority.
Ukraine's acting President Oleksandr Turchynov took to the airwaves late Saturday to warn that any Russian military intervention would lead to war.
'The troops are already there'
The crisis set off alarm bells with the world's diplomats, with Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.N. Yuriy Sergeyev calling on member nations of the Security Council to take a stand against what he called Russia's "clear act of aggression.''
"The troops are already there, and their number is increasing every hour," Sergeyev said during an emergency meeting of the Security Council.
Russia now has 15,000 troops Crimea, Yegor Pyvovarov, the spokesman for the Ukrainian mission at the United Nations, told CNN ahead of Saturday's session of the Security Council. He did not say how Ukraine arrived at that number, or whether that included troops already stationed at a Russian base in the region.
Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, rejected Ukraine's calls to stop Russian intervention. "We can't agree with this at all," he said.
He blamed members of the European Union for causing the bloody street demonstrations in Ukraine.
"It's a difficult situation in the past few hours," Churkin said, claiming that there were Ukrainian forces from Kiev en route to to overthrow the local pro-Russian governments in eastern Ukraine and Crimea and establish new ones that would enforce the power of the new Ukrainian government.
Churkin has said reports of Russian troops taking charge of positions on the ground were rumors and noted that rumors "are always not true."
Crimea's pro-Russian leader askedfor help
The Russian parliament vote Saturday came on the day that the newly installed pro-Russian leader of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, asked Putin for help in maintaining peace on the Black Sea peninsula, where Russia's fleet is based at Sevastopol.
Security forces "are unable to efficiently control the situation in the republic," he said in comments broadcast on Russian state channel Russia 24. Aksyonov was installed as the region's premier after armed men took over the Crimean parliament building on Thursday.
Aksyonov said that a referendum on greater Crimean autonomy, originally set for May 25, would be moved to March 30.
Yatsenyuk called the Russian presence in Crimea a provocation.
"Ukraine will not be provoked, we will not use force. We demand that the government of the Russian Federation immediately withdraw its troops and return to their home bases," he said during a televised Cabinet meeting.
Airspace in the region reopened Saturday, a day after Ukraine accused Russian Black Sea forces of trying to seize two airports in Crimea but said Ukrainian security forces had prevented them from taking control.
Groups of armed men, dressed in uniforms without identifying insignia, patrolled the airports in Simferopol and the nearby port city of Sevastopol. The men remained at the airports Saturday, but Yevgey Plaksin, director of the airport in Simferopol, said airport services were working.
Obama: Warning to Russia
Senior White House officials say they are looking at a wide range of possible economic and diplomatic measures to present to Obama that would show Putin there is a cost to his actions in Ukraine.
The White House has already announced the United States will suspend participation in preparatory meetings for the G-8 summit that will bring world leaders together in June in Sochi, Russia.
"Going forward, Russia's continued violation of international law will lead to greater political and economic isolation," according to a statement released by the administration.
Pressure has been mounting on Russia as leaders from the EU and the UK joined an international outcry, with EU High Representative Catherine Ashton deploring Russia's "unwarranted escalation of tensions." British Foreign Secretary William Hague was scheduled to travel to Kiev on Sunday.
During a telephone call with Putin, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said he told the Russian leader that it was crucial to "restore calm and proceed to an immediate de-escalation of the situation."
"Cool heads must prevail and dialogue must be the only tool in ending this crisis," he said.

http://www.cnn.co.hu/2014/03/02/world/europe/ukraine-politics/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

 

[virginia_woolf]

Sorry but Putin is a terrorist.

 

[virginia_woolf]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/03/russia-ukraine-and-west

Russia, Ukraine and the West
How will the West read Putin’s playbook?
Mar 2nd 2014, 12:12 by M.J.S.

VLADIMIR PUTIN did not take long to show what he thought of Barack Obama’s warning shot that there would be “consequences” for continued Russian military intervention in Ukraine. The prospect of those consequences—Mr Obama mentioned only the suspension of America’s part in the preparations for the June meeting of the G8 in Sochi—did not exactly seem to strike terror into the Russian president’s heart. Within hours he had called on and received backing in Russia’s upper house of parliament for the authorisation of troops for an invasion (or “stabilisation force” in Putinspeak). Not just of the autonomous largely Russian-speaking Crimea, where Russian troops have already seized key facilities and where Russia has a leased naval base, but potentially, and more ominously, of the whole of Ukraine.

Nor does it seem likely that the 90-minute telephone call between the two men that took place in the aftermath of the unanimous Duma vote will have persuaded Mr Putin to pause for consideration. Although a transcript of the conversation has not been revealed, it appears that Mr Obama was trying to nudge Mr Putin towards working through an internationally mediated process that would involve observers on the ground to ensure that the rights of Russian-speakers in the country were not infringed and confidence-building talks with the Ukraine government to recognise the special status of Crimea. That all sounds perfectly sensible, but it is far removed from the trajectory that Mr Putin appears to be on.

The reality is that Mr Putin sees holding Ukraine within Russia’s sphere of influence as a vital national interest that he is willing to run pretty big risks to secure. What is more, it seems highly probable that he does not take threats from Mr Obama particularly seriously. He has seen at close hand the American president’s disastrous vacillation over Syria, culminating in the scuttling away from his own red line declaring punishment for the Assad regime if it used chemical weapons. He no doubt also draws conclusions from big American defence spending cuts in the pipeline and Mr Obama’s extreme sensitivity to the war-weariness of American voters.

If Mr Putin believes (as he almost certainly does) that Mr Obama will do little more than deliver a petulant slap on the wrist, he will have no compunction in putting into operation a familiar playbook. Everything that has happened so far is almost a carbon copy of the tactics used to occupy and effectively annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008: manipulate, provoke, foment a sense of crisis that prompts an appeal for aid and then send in Russian “peacekeepers”.

The difference is that Ukraine is a country of 46m people with by no means insignificant armed forces of its own. It is also bankrupt, and a majority of its people want to be Ukrainians, not subjects of a Russian puppet government. Mr Putin is thus unlikely to want to push things so far that Russian forces get sucked into a hot war in Ukraine against fellow Slavs. With his own economy stagnating, he will surely have second thoughts about taking on the burden of an occupation. Furthermore, whereas after the early 1990s Russia never recognised that South Ossetia and Abkhazia were under Georgia's control, it is a signatory of a 1994 treaty guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

But Ukraine's size and importance also make the current crisis a far more threatening security issue for the West than Russia’s intervention in Georgia. While it is easy to criticise Mr Obama’s infinite capacity for thoughtful inaction, the dilemmas for Western diplomacy are real enough. The problem is that like the fox, the West knows lots of different things but is not sure what it really wants, while Mr Putin is like the hedgehog that knows just one big thing, namely that Ukraine, especially in the south and east, is really part of Russia's world.

A military response to Russian aggression or the threat of fast-track NATO membership for Ukraine are unthinkable. So the West will fall back on lesser, diplomatic measures in an attempt to isolate Russia within the international community. First, all seven of the other G8 members could say they are not going to Sochi unless Mr Putin backs off. Secondly, the US Congress could substantially widen the application of the so-called Magnitsky Law to include Mr Putin and his Kremlin cronies. Thirdly, trade sanctions could be applied including work to begin freezing Russian banks out of the international financial settlement system. Fourth, a UN Security Council resolution could be prepared condemning Russia for aggression against an independent country that might attract the support of China (always first to denounce intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state) even though Russia would, of course, veto it. Last, the West needs to show ordinary Ukrainians that it will back the new government and that it, not Russia, can offer a path to prosperity.

Russia is not the old Soviet Union, which was relatively impervious to diplomatic and economic censure. Mr Putin knows that Russia could pay a high price for what it is doing in Ukraine. For now, he believes that the risk is worth taking because he sees the West as supine and decadent, more worried about keeping Russian oil and gas exports flowing than about standing up for the idea of a Europe whole and free. It is now up to Mr Obama whether he wants to show the leadership that will prove him wrong.

 

[virginia_woolf]

Radosław Sikorski @sikorskiradek · 1h

North Atlantic Council will meet tomorrow on the agression in UKR under Article IV of Washington Treaty for the 4th time in NATO's history.