DISPATCHES ON THE UKRAINE / RUSSIA FRONTS | BY THE SAKER
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An example of the Russian 5th column at work
Except for one problem: no economist has been able to directly link the US/EU sanctions with what we are observing. In fact, the reality is much simpler.In the case of commodity prices what is happening is quite simple: Russian companies have seized the opportunity presented by these sanctions to sharply raise their prices and make an extra profit. So far, so good. That was predictable. In fact, the Russian government and Putin himself had predicted that and they had warned that the state would be closely monitoring any such price increases and that legal action would be taken against any speculators.This is where things become interesting.The person in charge of this monitoring is Arkadii Dvorkovich, a Deputy Prime Minister in Dmitry Medvedev’s cabinet who has dismissed it all saying that when he goes shopping for bread he does not notice any price increases. So who is this Dvorkovich character anyway?
Arkadii Dvorkovich |
Turns out that he is a pure product of the Atlantic Integrationist clan. Himself a rather modest oligarch (his official personal income in 2011 was only 4 millon Rubles), he is married to a much bigger oligarch, Zumrud Khandadashevna Rustamova, who, according to the Russian Wikipedia, is a member of the board of directors of major companies like the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Kombinat, the gold mining Polius Zoloto, or the main Moscow airport Sheremetevo. Her official yearly income is already a healthier 42 million Rubles. Dvorkovich, who attended Duke University in the USA, is also involved in all sorts of more or less shady companies and deals including the infamous Skolkovo project.
In fact, I would argue that Dvorkovich is so typical of the Atlantic Integrationists that he could be their poster boy. By sabotaging the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent Russian businesses to profit from the sanctions, Dvorkovich not only stands to get some terrific kickbacks, but he also contributes to the 5th columns efforts to convince the general public that western sanctions are crippling Russia.
The good news is that the Eurasian Sovereignists are fighting back and that several Russian TV channels have already reported about these abnormal price increases and about the fact that Dvorkovich seems to be doing exactly nothing about it.
Over and over again we observe the same phenomenon: the President orders the Prime Minister and his government to do something, and the latter just ignore him. This is a typical example of how the 5th column works in Russia and, in the future, I plan to provide more examples of this here.
—The Saker
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UNINTENDED FARCE OCT. 1, 2014
Murderous lawyers, mainstream officials, the decline of the state and fish soup
Apparently he was arrested on charges of violence during the melee, and held for a while, but then released. During the court proceeding deciding his release, pro-Kiev activists demonstrated in support of him in front of the court buildings.His name is Vsevolod Goncharevskii (middle name: Eduardovich). He is a lawyer, and well-known pro-Kiev activist. 47 years old, a resident of Odessa. Here he is speaking to local TV stations (in Russian). Here are three news stories (in Russian) reporting his arrest, trial, and release.
So the authorities new about him and even put him on trial but then let him go. But that is hardly the most interesting fact. The most amazing about this story is that Goncharevskii is STILL not only an activist of the Euromaindan movement, but even a leader!
After the brutal assault on the Parliamentarian Nestor Shufrich yesterday, the leadership of the Euromaidan movement organized a press conference today to explain that it was all Shufrich’s fault because he had no business coming to the city of Odessa in the first place. This is the standard Kiev regime notion about “Euro-democracy” and “free speech”, so that is not what is amazing. But take a look at the video and guess who is sitting second from the right?
[B]y the way, the mayor of Odessa, Palitsa, has also declared that Shufrich is a provocateur and that he assaulted the Right Sector thugs. But then, Odessa now “belongs” to Igor Kolomoiskii, so all that is par for the course.]
So not only are the Kiev regime Nazis blaming a victim for a brutal assault, but they are quite happy to sit together with a well-known murderous thug. And I am not talking about some minor Nazi gang or some Right Sector people here, not at all, I am talking about the very mainstream and “highly respectable” Odessa Coordination Center of the Euromaindan movement. It don’t get more mainstream then that. At least not in Nazi Banderastan.
In fact, Seva Goncharevskii is all over the news in Banderastan. Here, he demonstrates with his Right Sector pals in support of the Ukrainian armed forces. Here he is helping volunteers dig trenches around Odessa. Here he is being interviewed and protests his persecution by the authorities and claims, in perfect Russian, that he is totally innocent.
This example is a perfect illustration of the true face of the Euroukraine which I call “Banderastan”. An ugly, racist, unapologetically Nazi and thuggish face, the face of a “Ukrainian Interahamwe” – a monster created by the West, nurtured by the West for centuries, and a monster which is now armed and free to roam the Ukrainian land.
This is what they did to a couple accused of dealing drugs:
In the meantime, the “popular lustrations” (mob attacks on people deemed “disloyal”) continue, and even though they are completely illegal, the cops do nothing. Over the past 24 hours, many people, including at least one hospital director, have been brutally assaulted, tossed into trash containers and forced to sign letters of resignation.
On a semi-comical note, the Rada is now proposing that only those who have been officials in the previous administration for more than one full year be “lustrated”. Why? Because Poroshenko served as Minister of Trade and Economic Development for Yanukovich for a little less than a year.
In reality none of this is funny in the least. It is, however, significant because all these are clear signs of a society falling apart, of a social order basically destroyed and replaced by a rule by violence on all levels. This is most important because a society which goes down that road cannot do anything but comprehensively collapse because, truly, it ceases to be a “society”.
It is an open question as to whether there is really any kind of “authority” in the rump-Ukraine. While Poroshenko appears to have some control over Kiev while Kolomoiskii “own” Odessa, it is only the Right Sector which has branches in all of the rump-Ukraine and enough activists to scare any official or civil servant from Lvov to Dnepropetrovsky and from Chernigov to Odessa. This all begins to look eerily similar to Afghanistan, Libya or Iraq where one group (more or less) controls the capital while the rest of the country is completely out of control and run by various armed gangs.
The Ukraine was always a historical fiction, a completely artificial entity, originally conceived by the Papacy but which truly acquired a material form only thanks to Lenin and Stalin (the Kiev regimes should not be tossing down their statues, they should honor them as their “founding fathers, really). But from 1991 through 2013 it did exist. It was very imperfect and it suffered from many problems, but at least it did exist. Now that Ukraine is gone forever. If you boil an aquarium, it is easy to make fish soup out of it. But you cannot turn a fish soup back into an aquarium. What we are observing today is this process of “social boiling” from which there is no way back.
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