Точка зору
У двох останніх числах мого улюбленого щомісячника "Стендпойнт" (тобто "точка зору"), інтелектуального часопису консервативного напрямку, "несподівано" з'явилося чимало статей про Україну й Росію. Нижче - добірка лінків на статті, оприлюднені на сайті часопису
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A reporter shouts into a microphone, finger pressed to his ear. "Here in Sevastopol, Banderovtsy [far-right Ukrainian nationalists] have set fire to a library! They're burning books - Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky, Lermontov! And now they're firing on a Russian school!" Smoke drifts across shot; bangs and sirens sound in the background. Take over, the camera pans back. Beside him an assistant is letting off firecrackers, while another stamps on a disposable barbecue.
As the spoof suggests, Ukraine is locked in two parallel conflicts. One, between Russia and Ukraine's allies in the West, is over the status of Crimea. The other, waged on the airwaves and the internet, is between Russia's version of the Ukrainian revolution - according to which foreign-backed fascists staged a coup, leaving lynch-mobs to rule the streets - and reality, which is that mass protests toppled a grotesquely corrupt president, and that a broad-based interim government is peacefully preparing for new elections.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-borderland-on-the-edge-anna-reid-ukraine
Soviet Russia established itself as a reliable supplier of reasonably priced gas to Western Europe during the Cold War. It is easy to forget how unlikely this seemed at the time. The driver was the development of colossal Siberian gas reserves that far exceeded the requirements of the Soviet Union and its Comecon satellites. Relatively modest relationships were established in the Seventies with companies in West Germany, France and Italy, but larger and more ambitious contracts, and the pipelines to go with them, were forged in the early 1980s in the teeth of opposition from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
These contracts have been expanded and adapted since the Soviet Union's collapse, and post-Soviet Russia remains an integral part of Europe's energy industry, supplying 24 per cent of the EU's gas last year. Revenue from energy exported to Europe is equally important to Russia, representing about a fifth of its GDP.
But when the foundations of this trade were laid, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and there seemed no danger in running all the export pipelines across its soil. That calculation looks very different now to people in the West, but to be fair to the Russians, it has seemed problematic since the breakup of the USSR
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-europe-cannot-do-without-putin-gas-patrick-heren-ukraine
There's nothing new about the Russian conservatism Putin stands for, and it is something worth understanding, even if it makes us weep with frustration at the heavy-handed seizing of Crimea and the evident will of most Ukrainians not to be subject to Russian rule.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-father-russia-conservatism-lesley-chamberlain-putin
Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea has overtly challenged the familiar contours of the post-Cold War world. The inadequacies of the Obama doctrine and lack of strategic thought have brought Europe to the most dangerous point since the end of the Cold War. Critics of American power have found in Barack Obama the leader they have clamoured for since President Carter - and the results are calamitous.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-america-retreats-the-world-goes-to-hell-alexander-woolfson-crimea
The truth is that Russia is at best a middle-ranking nation in economic terms. According to the International Monetary Fund's database, its share of world output was just under 3 per cent last year. But that figure was calculated in terms of so-called "purchasing power parity", a technical method which is best if living standards in different countries are being compared. If the economic size of a nation is instead to be measured by its ability to import from other nations and to participate in international trade, the right technique is to calculate gross domestic product "at current prices and exchange rates".
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/marketplace-april-14-myth-russia-military-spending-tim-congdon
(В російському інтернеті гуляє паганий переклад цієї статті («из британского журнальчика») - почитайте оригінал)
I blinked at Maidan. This was where it happened: the remains of the revolution that overthrew Viktor Yanukoych three weeks earlier. Between the baroque Stalinist edifices were the barricades: rubble, earth and singed tires, planks and smashed glass, netting of copper wire - as high as sand dunes.
Pale sun shone. It was not quite spring. Maidan was peaceful. Maidan was a family day out. Mothers held the hands of little boys. Father stopped for photos with happy daughters. Militia, unshaven, held court in tarpaulin tents with their "exhibits" hammered to wooden planks: bullets, shrapnel, shields and helmets of the riot police who had tried to kill them.
The revolution was over. But the militia were still there. Military tents and makeshift tarpaulins squatted the avenue and covered the square. Maidan, a pretty Facebook activist told me, had changed. Maidan kept changing, beginning with the internet-savvy and ending with the unemployed who still camped waiting for the war.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-april-14-russians-are-coming-ben-judah-kiev-maidan
The current sour state of relations between Russia and the West contrasts strikingly with high hopes on both sides when Communism fell. Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of a "common European home", and Boris Yeltsin pressed for Russian membership of Nato and economic support for the transition to a market economy. Meanwhile President Bush was enthusing about a "new world order" and Western companies were queuing up to enter what looked like a huge new market and investment opportunity.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-march-14-snubbing-vladimir-putin-at-sochi-did-not-help-ukraine-tony-brenton-kiev-protests
"An elite without an ideology is a threat." This is the central point in an article by Aleksei Podberezkin in the first issue of 2014 of the Moscow weekly Zavtra. This is the organ of the Russian far-Right, Podberezkin being a leading figure in these circles. He is a strong believer in Russian nationalism and therefore critical of the present state of affairs in Russia in which politicians are preoccupied with "technical" issues such as macroeconomics, but he also wants to preserve much of Soviet Communism. As a politician he was not very successful: competing in the elections for the presidency of Russia he scored 0.1 per cent of the vote. But he still is a respected figure in these circles as a political thinker. Whether the absence of an ideology is really a threat is not at all clear; Russia has suffered from many disasters in its history but they were more often caused by a surfeit of ideology rather than the absence.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-march-14-the-Russian-enigma-is-the-bear-turning-east-walter-laqueur-vladimir-putin
"Passion, honesty and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, mendacity and false modesty that disguises crime," Tolokonnikova said in court. These are words for a dissident to live by. Yakunin considers Tolokonnikova a person graced with "exceptional gifts". He believes that once they have established their new human rights group, Justice Zone, she and Alyokhina will found a political party - a "genuine Christian democratic party" - that will drive out Putin and transform Russia. That really would be a miracle.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/underrated-march-14-nadezhda-tolokonnikova-rachel-polonsky-pussy-riot
---------------------
A reporter shouts into a microphone, finger pressed to his ear. "Here in Sevastopol, Banderovtsy [far-right Ukrainian nationalists] have set fire to a library! They're burning books - Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky, Lermontov! And now they're firing on a Russian school!" Smoke drifts across shot; bangs and sirens sound in the background. Take over, the camera pans back. Beside him an assistant is letting off firecrackers, while another stamps on a disposable barbecue.
As the spoof suggests, Ukraine is locked in two parallel conflicts. One, between Russia and Ukraine's allies in the West, is over the status of Crimea. The other, waged on the airwaves and the internet, is between Russia's version of the Ukrainian revolution - according to which foreign-backed fascists staged a coup, leaving lynch-mobs to rule the streets - and reality, which is that mass protests toppled a grotesquely corrupt president, and that a broad-based interim government is peacefully preparing for new elections.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-borderland-on-the-edge-anna-reid-ukraine
Soviet Russia established itself as a reliable supplier of reasonably priced gas to Western Europe during the Cold War. It is easy to forget how unlikely this seemed at the time. The driver was the development of colossal Siberian gas reserves that far exceeded the requirements of the Soviet Union and its Comecon satellites. Relatively modest relationships were established in the Seventies with companies in West Germany, France and Italy, but larger and more ambitious contracts, and the pipelines to go with them, were forged in the early 1980s in the teeth of opposition from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
These contracts have been expanded and adapted since the Soviet Union's collapse, and post-Soviet Russia remains an integral part of Europe's energy industry, supplying 24 per cent of the EU's gas last year. Revenue from energy exported to Europe is equally important to Russia, representing about a fifth of its GDP.
But when the foundations of this trade were laid, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and there seemed no danger in running all the export pipelines across its soil. That calculation looks very different now to people in the West, but to be fair to the Russians, it has seemed problematic since the breakup of the USSR
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-europe-cannot-do-without-putin-gas-patrick-heren-ukraine
There's nothing new about the Russian conservatism Putin stands for, and it is something worth understanding, even if it makes us weep with frustration at the heavy-handed seizing of Crimea and the evident will of most Ukrainians not to be subject to Russian rule.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-father-russia-conservatism-lesley-chamberlain-putin
Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea has overtly challenged the familiar contours of the post-Cold War world. The inadequacies of the Obama doctrine and lack of strategic thought have brought Europe to the most dangerous point since the end of the Cold War. Critics of American power have found in Barack Obama the leader they have clamoured for since President Carter - and the results are calamitous.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-14-america-retreats-the-world-goes-to-hell-alexander-woolfson-crimea
The truth is that Russia is at best a middle-ranking nation in economic terms. According to the International Monetary Fund's database, its share of world output was just under 3 per cent last year. But that figure was calculated in terms of so-called "purchasing power parity", a technical method which is best if living standards in different countries are being compared. If the economic size of a nation is instead to be measured by its ability to import from other nations and to participate in international trade, the right technique is to calculate gross domestic product "at current prices and exchange rates".
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/marketplace-april-14-myth-russia-military-spending-tim-congdon
(В російському інтернеті гуляє паганий переклад цієї статті («из британского журнальчика») - почитайте оригінал)
I blinked at Maidan. This was where it happened: the remains of the revolution that overthrew Viktor Yanukoych three weeks earlier. Between the baroque Stalinist edifices were the barricades: rubble, earth and singed tires, planks and smashed glass, netting of copper wire - as high as sand dunes.
Pale sun shone. It was not quite spring. Maidan was peaceful. Maidan was a family day out. Mothers held the hands of little boys. Father stopped for photos with happy daughters. Militia, unshaven, held court in tarpaulin tents with their "exhibits" hammered to wooden planks: bullets, shrapnel, shields and helmets of the riot police who had tried to kill them.
The revolution was over. But the militia were still there. Military tents and makeshift tarpaulins squatted the avenue and covered the square. Maidan, a pretty Facebook activist told me, had changed. Maidan kept changing, beginning with the internet-savvy and ending with the unemployed who still camped waiting for the war.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-april-14-russians-are-coming-ben-judah-kiev-maidan
The current sour state of relations between Russia and the West contrasts strikingly with high hopes on both sides when Communism fell. Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of a "common European home", and Boris Yeltsin pressed for Russian membership of Nato and economic support for the transition to a market economy. Meanwhile President Bush was enthusing about a "new world order" and Western companies were queuing up to enter what looked like a huge new market and investment opportunity.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-march-14-snubbing-vladimir-putin-at-sochi-did-not-help-ukraine-tony-brenton-kiev-protests
"An elite without an ideology is a threat." This is the central point in an article by Aleksei Podberezkin in the first issue of 2014 of the Moscow weekly Zavtra. This is the organ of the Russian far-Right, Podberezkin being a leading figure in these circles. He is a strong believer in Russian nationalism and therefore critical of the present state of affairs in Russia in which politicians are preoccupied with "technical" issues such as macroeconomics, but he also wants to preserve much of Soviet Communism. As a politician he was not very successful: competing in the elections for the presidency of Russia he scored 0.1 per cent of the vote. But he still is a respected figure in these circles as a political thinker. Whether the absence of an ideology is really a threat is not at all clear; Russia has suffered from many disasters in its history but they were more often caused by a surfeit of ideology rather than the absence.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-march-14-the-Russian-enigma-is-the-bear-turning-east-walter-laqueur-vladimir-putin
"Passion, honesty and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, mendacity and false modesty that disguises crime," Tolokonnikova said in court. These are words for a dissident to live by. Yakunin considers Tolokonnikova a person graced with "exceptional gifts". He believes that once they have established their new human rights group, Justice Zone, she and Alyokhina will found a political party - a "genuine Christian democratic party" - that will drive out Putin and transform Russia. That really would be a miracle.
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/underrated-march-14-nadezhda-tolokonnikova-rachel-polonsky-pussy-riot