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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/18/red-square-rally-vladimir-putin-crimea


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Red Square rally hails Vladimir Putin after Crimea accession
Russian president addresses large crowd of supporters and thanks Crimeans for their 'courage and perseverance'
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Alec Luhn in Moscow
The Guardian, Tuesday 18 March 2014 19.47 GMT

Vladimir Putin supporters wave flags in Red Square. Photograph: Dmitry Serebryakov/AFP/Getty Images
It was hard to avoid Vladimir Putin at the rally in Red Square on Tuesday celebrating the joining of Crimea to Russia. As the president's defiant speech from earlier in the day was replayed on speakers, supporters waved giant white flags with Putin's face and the words "We're together!", and signs reading "Putin is right" and "We believe Putin".

Finally, the man himself appeared on a huge stage in front of the Kremlin. Speaking against a backdrop reading "Crimea is in my heart!" while officials from the Ukrainian breakaway region looked on, Putin was briefly interrupted by chants of "Putin!" and "Russia!" as he thanked Crimeans for their "courage and perseverance".

"Today is a very bright, happy holiday. After a long, difficult, exhausting voyage, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their native harbour, to their native shores, to their port of permanent registration – to Russia!" Putin began.

"Russia! Crimea! Putin!" chanted people with the red-and-yellow ribbons of St George, typically worn to commemorate military victories.

US and European leaders have decried the accession treaty Putin signed on Tuesday with Crimean politicians, but at home the move was met with an outpouring of patriotic fervour at rallies organised with the help of pro-Kremlin civic groups and political parties.

Police reports, which are often accused of exaggerating the size of pro-government rallies, said 120,000 people were assembled on Red Square. The state television channel Rossiya 24 reported that similar demonstrations took place in all of Russia's 81 regions.

Attendees in Red Square said they felt pride in their resurgent country and in Putin for his decisive actions on the world stage. Frequent references to the US and signs reading "Obama! Look after Alaska!" gave the gathering a cold war feel, and it was clear who was seen to be winning this time.

Irina Makarova, a gallery owner, said she had stood and clapped along with the politicians in the Kremlin when she watched Putin's address to the Federal Assembly earlier in the day at home.

"I am proud to be Russian and proud of Putin, proud that he didn't back down and kept Crimea," she said. "For a long time, we didn't know what kind of country we were living in and where it was going. Now a new confidence in our country has appeared."

Putin's power play in Ukraine has been enormously popular at home, with 79% of Russians in favour of Crimea joining Russia, according to a survey this month by the independent Levada Centre. Putin's approval rating has reached a three-year high of 71.6%, the state-run pollster VTsIOM reported last week.

Igor Sukhopyatkin, who was waving a Russian navy flag with his friend Vladimir Sukhrun as they waited for the rally to start, said Russia was now strong enough "to protect fellow Russian speakers".

"A kind of truth has prevailed," Sukhrun said. "Europe doesn't listen to us, the US doesn't listen to us, but there are fascists" running Ukraine, he added.

As they spoke, a drunken rallygoer stumbled up to the two men. "Have you spoken to anyone from Odessa? When will they rise up?" he asked, referring to the largely Russian-speaking port city in mainland Ukraine.

Mingling in the gilded halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace before and after Putin's address, politicians including the boxer-turned-parliamentarian Nikolai Valuev painted Crimea's accession as a sign of Russia's resurgence. "We're living in a great era," the former heavyweight champion said. "What's going on now is the appearance of a different world order."

Valuev said western sanctions "can't touch" those who "feel together with Russia," although he did note that his homes in Germany and Spain were up for sale.

Meanwhile, Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of the arms and space industries, who has laughed off the US sanctions levelled against him, announced that ministers would meet on Thursday to discuss how to help the unrecognised republic of Transnistria deal with an "economic blockade" that he said had been started recently by its neighbours Moldova and Ukraine.

Mutual troop buildups along the Ukrainian-Russian border in recent days have raised fears that Russia will seek to replicate the Crimea scenario in Ukraine's largely Russian-speaking eastern provinces, especially after several prominent politicians voiced support for similar referendums there.

The MP Leonid Slutsky, a target of US and EU sanctions, said Russia was not preparing to deploy troops in eastern Ukraine. "But if, God forbid, the situation gets to bloodshed like in Kiev, since our fellow countrymen are there, we will be obligated to react," he said

 

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http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-ukraine-shooting-pivotal-struggle-heartlands


The focus is on Crimea, but next is the fight for Ukraine
Despite today's shooting, the west must not forget that the pivotal struggle is over control of the eastern heartlands
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Timothy Garton Ash
The Guardian, Tuesday 18 March 2014 19.55 GMT
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A Ukrainian officer supervises recruits during a shooting exercise not far from Kiev on March 17, a day after Crimea voted to secede from Kiev and join Russia. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images
Remember, remember: this is about the whole of Ukraine, not just Crimea. Vladimir Putin knows that. Ukrainians know that. As the reported killing of a Ukrainian soldier shows, there is nothing the government in Kiev can do to restore its control over Crimea. The crucial struggle is now for eastern Ukraine. If the whole of Ukraine, including the east, participates in peaceful, free and fair presidential elections on 25 May, it can survive as one independent country (minus Crimea). It will also be back on an unambiguously democratic, constitutional path. In everything the EU and the west does over the next two months, that should be our first priority.

Only the criminally naive or the hardened fellow-traveller could maintain that the pro-Russian groups now working to produce chaos, disorientation and violence in cities such as Donetsk and Kharkiv are not actively supported by Moscow. In Tuesday's New York Times there was a fine eyewitness account of one such stage-managed demo in Kharkiv. At the base of a giant Lenin statue, a huge banner read: "Our homeland: USSR!" As the reporters pointed out, this was all made for Russian television. Whatever Putin finally decides to do, the media narrative will be prepared: whether for an escalating intervention or, as he would undoubtedly prefer, to blackmail the whole country back into the Russian sphere of influence.

It would be equally naive, however, to pretend that there are not real fears among many in eastern Ukraine. Start by abandoning the labels "ethnic Ukrainians" and "ethnic Russians". They mean almost nothing. What you have here is a fluid, complex mix of national, linguistic, civic and political identities. There are people who think of themselves as Russians. There are those who live their lives mainly in Russian, but also identify as Ukrainians. There are innumerable families of mixed origins, with parents and grandparents who moved around the former Soviet Union. Most of them would rather not have to choose. In a poll conducted in the first half of February, only 15% of those asked in the Kharkiv region and 33% around Donetsk wanted Ukraine to unite with Russia.

In the same poll, the figure for Crimea was 41%. But then take a month of radicalising politics and Russian takeover, with Ukrainian-language channels yanked off TV. Add relentless reporting on the Russian-language media of a "fascist coup" in Kiev, exacerbated by some foolish words and gestures from victorious revolutionaries in Kiev. Subtract Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians living in Crimea, who largely boycott the referendum. Season with a large pinch of electoral fraud. Hey presto, 41% becomes 97%.

It is not just Russian "political technology" that changes numbers and loyalties. What happens in such traumatic moments is that identities switch and crystallise quite suddenly, like an unstable chemical compound to which you add one drop of reactant. Yesterday, you were a Yugoslav; today, a furious Serb or Croat.

So everything that is done in and for Ukraine over the next weeks and months must be calculated to keep that identity-compound from changing state. Shortly before President Putin's amazing imperial rant in the Kremlin on Tuesday, another speech was broadcast on a Ukrainian TV channel. Speaking in Russian, the interim Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatseniuk, said that "for the sake of preserving Ukraine's unity and sovereignty" the Kiev government is prepared to grant "the broadest range of powers" to the mainly Russian-speaking regions in the east. This would include giving cities the right to run their own police forces and make decisions about education and culture.

That was exactly the right thing to do. Now he and his colleagues should go to these places, and say it again and again – in Russian. They should support Russian as an official second language in these areas. They should not dismiss talk of federalisation simply because Moscow also favours it. They should actively want there to be a pro-Russian candidate in the presidential election. And they should do everything they can to ensure that election is free and fair, including diversified media coverage in Russian and Ukrainian – unlike the vote in Crimea.

The west in general, and Europe in particular, can support this in numerous ways. The OSCE, EU and other international organisations should flood the place with election monitors. Western governments must make sure Ukraine's authorities have the money to pay the bills right now. Political parties and NGOs can send advisers. The west can also up the ante. It can make the medium- to long-term economic offer of relations with the EU more attractive. It can threaten Moscow with sanctions far worse than those currently imposed, not just if Putin takes his marked or unmarked forces anywhere else in eastern Ukraine, but if he keeps on trying to destabilise it by proxy.

The time has also come to talk turkey with Ukrainian oligarchs such as Rinat Akhmetov, who is as powerful as any state institution in eastern Ukraine. Quietly but firmly they must be shown carrot and stick: a rosy future for your businesses in the world economy if you help Ukraine survive as an independent, self-governing state; financial strangulation and endless court proceedings if you don't. (One of the eastern oligarchs, Dmitro Firtash, has already been arrested in Austria on an FBI extradition request. It's all about an investment project back in 2006, they say; nothing to do with current politics, you understand.) If Putin's Olympic sport is hardcore wrestling, we cannot confine ourselves to badminton.

None of this is to suggest that what has happened in Crimea does not matter in itself. In his Kremlin speech, Putin scored a few telling hits on US unilateralism and western double standards, but what he has done threatens the foundations of international order. He thanked China for its support, but does Beijing want the Tibetans to secede following a referendum? He recalled Soviet acceptance of German unification and appealed to Germans to back the unification of "the Russian world", which apparently includes all Russian-speakers. With rhetoric more reminiscent of 1914 than 2014, Putin's Russia is now a revanchist power in plain view.

Without the consent of all parts of the existing state (hence completely unlike Scotland), without due constitutional process, and without a free and fair vote, the territorial integrity of Ukraine, guaranteed 20 years ago by Russia, the US and Britain, has been destroyed. In practical terms, on the ground, that cannot be undone. What can still be rescued, however, is the political integrity of the rest of Ukraine.

Twitter: @FromTGA

 

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Russia, US set aside Ukraine crisis for Iran nuclear talks
Russia, the United States and other world powers put their sharp differences over Ukraine to one side today as they held their latest nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna. The gathering is the second in a series of meetings aiming to transform by July a November interim deal into a lasting accord that resolves for good the decade-old standoff and removes the threat of war. So far, despite disagreements over the Syria conflict and other issues, the six powers have shown a united front over Iran, b
Russia, the United States and other world powers put their sharp differences over Ukraine to one side today as they held their latest nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna.

The gathering is the second in a series of meetings aiming to transform by July a November interim deal into a lasting accord that resolves for good the decade-old standoff and removes the threat of war.

So far, despite disagreements over the Syria conflict and other issues, the six powers have shown a united front over Iran, but events in Ukraine in recent weeks have precipitated the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War.

Following Sunday's secession referendum in Crimea -- slammed as a sham by the White House and the European Union -- Brussels and Washington yesterday issued sanctions against a handful of Russian officials.

Today Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty claiming Crimea as Russian territory and said the Black Sea peninsula has always been "in the hearts" of his compatriots.

Despite the tensions, a spokesman for Catherine Ashton, the powers' chief negotiator and EU foreign policy chief, said he had seen "no negative effect" on the Iran talks, with the six "still united".

But Mark Fitzpatrick, a former US State Department official now at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the unfolding crisis made him "even more pessimistic".

"The Russians will... Be less likely to make sacrifices for the sake of unity over the Iran issues," Fitzpatrick told AFP. The Iranians, he said, "now have more reason to wait out the six powers".