Author: insomniacresurrected

The Russophobia of Attempts to Remove the Statue of Ivan Konev

Something ridiculous is happening in Prague 6 (one of  the self-governing parts of Prague)…

In August, somebody painted over the monument to Ivan Konev, the Soviet general that led the liberation of Prague. The municipality of Prague 6 decided not to clean the statue because, as they say, the statue gets vandalised every year. The anonymous vandals blame Konev for suppressing pro-democracy revolt in Hungary 1956, building the Berlin Wall, and lending support to Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, the monument itself commemorates liberation from the Nazis. The statue has been the target of vandalism for the last four years, it has survived for most of the post-Communist era without eliciting any passions. The municipality seeks ways to remove the statue built in 1980. They have asked the Russian Embassy to take it, which I understand the embassy refuses.

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No to the bloody Marshal, we will not forget!

Activists, some say pro-Russian activists, have therefore decided to clean the statue themselves, which they did within three days. According to their words, the paint was easy to remove without application of chemicals.  The cleaning attracted a number of weirdos, a guy with a Soviet flag, a guy with a far right Czech party symbolica, and yet another guy with a ROA t-shits, and even mainstream politicians. Then the municipality put up scaffolding over the stature, and covered it with a screen. The screen was immediately torn down by activists. Mind you, this is a municipality that does not take care of other monuments very well.

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A “smart bench” that cost a quarter million CZK, that is $10,000 USD, a bench with a garden. The garden dried up because there was nobody to water the plants.

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^Expectations…

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^Reality

A monument to a Czech war hero, a pilot in the RAF, Frantisek Fajtl, which featured a grass silhouette of an airplane, overgrew because nobody was mowing the lawn.

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^Expectations

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^Reality

Somehow the municipality finds money to pay for scaffolding, and the works to cover the statue of Konev. The municipality also found money, some 50,000 CZK (more than $2000) to pay to the Playboy Magazine for a feature story about the mayor, Petr Kolář. This is him…

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Update 2020: Another example of utterly unexplainable spending at the municipality of Prague 6 is the construction of public toilets for 3.6 million CZK, which is the price of a flat in some parts of Prague.

This apparently costs almost 4 million CZK

In the Czech Republic, one finds it difficult to locate a public toilet when in need. I hope Prague 6 has improved the situation.

The issue of Konev’s statue has already reached Russia. The Russian Culture Minister, Medinsky rather disingenuously called Kolář a Nazi. However, the campaign against the statue has all the hallmarks of Russophobic campaigns elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Prague for instance features the statue of Winston Churchill, who has starved out the Indians, and sold Czechoslovakia off to Stalin. And nothing happens to it. There is an attempt on the part of the East European countries to diminish and tarnish the contribution of the Red Army to victory over Naziism. The motivations might vary; nation building, or building support for NATO. The bottom line is that support for anonymous vandalism by the Prague municipality is an unfriendly act… 

Ukraine Will Again Forego Conducting a Census of the Population

The last census of the population was conducted under the president Kuchma in 2001…

…in contrast to the Russian Federation, which conducts censuses every decade, and where the next one is planned for 2020.

I was watching one of my favourite YouTube channels (if you can follow content in Russian and Ukrainian, please give it a sub) and around the 3:33 mark, a video is played, featuring a newly elected representative, David Arakhamiya, who says this:

Census is, of course, needed but a census is a statistical action, and it would cost 90 million Euros, which is the preliminary estimate. We don’t have the money to conduct this every 5 years or something… We will conduct a census simultaneously with the distribution of new electronic ID cards…

Interesting, I wonder whether this would stop the guessing as to how many people are left in Ukraine. 25 million? 33.5 million?

Trump may Block Military Aid to Ukraine

Reuters reports:

The White House is reviewing whether $250 million in military assistance should be sent to Ukraine in keeping with President Donald Trump’s view that U.S. foreign aid must be justified, two senior administration officials said on Thursday.

The money is intended for use by Ukraine in its struggle with pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow.

“The president has made no secret when it comes to foreign assistance that U.S. interests abroad should be prioritized and other foreign countries should also be paying their fair share,” said one of the officials, who shared details of the plan on condition of anonymity.

The officials said chances are the money will be allocated as usual but that the determination will not be made until a policy review is completed and Trump makes a final decision. The federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

“Agencies are under no restrictions from preparing to obligate those funds, and agencies still have adequate time to obligate those funds prior to the end of the fiscal year,” the official said.

Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.

How Murica Cucks the Ukrainian Industry

The internet is abuzz that John Bolton is heading to Ukraine to explain to the American puppets… I mean “strategic allies” how to do business so that American hegemony isn’t threatened…

I quote:

U.S. national-security adviser John Bolton is seeking to scuttle the pending Chinese acquisition of a Ukrainian aerospace company on grounds that it will give Beijing vital defense technology, according to senior U.S. administration officials familiar with the matter.

Mr. Bolton’s personal interest and involvement in the deal, acknowledged by the senior administration officials, underscores the growing importance of this case to the U.S. national-security establishment.

The company, Motor Sich, is one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of helicopter and airplane engines, and for years has supplied engines for the bulk of the Russian military-helicopter fleet. A sale to a group of companies, including Beijing Skyrizon Aviation, controlled by Chinese businessman Wang Jing, is pending.

Staffers at the National Security Council and the U.S. Embassy in Kiev are working to schedule a meeting between Mr. Bolton and the aerospace firm’s chief executive next week in Kiev, where Mr. Bolton plans to attend a security conference, a senior administration official said.

“We are going to have a conversation with the Ukrainians about China’s ambitions and what our view is of what China’s up to,” said another senior administration official. “This is all part of the national-security strategy and the national-defense strategy. It’s a strategic competition with China.”

Ukraine is a strategic U.S. ally in the region, and was the recipient of $250 million in U.S. military aid this year. Donald Winter, a former secretary of the Navy, was appointed this year as the Pentagon’s senior defense-industry adviser on Ukraine.

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In 2014, the US supported coup d’etat deprived Ukraine’s industry of Russian markets, now the Americans want Ukrainians to stop trading with China. But since the Americans have technology comparable to the one produced in Motor Sich, they are not going to compensate for the losses incurred and will definitely not compensate for the ruined reputation the Ukrainian company will suffer.

But this is not the first time something like this happened. I quote from Wikipedia:

Ukraine’s Turboatom was to supply a turbine, but cancelled the deal after the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright‘s visit to Kiev on 6 March 1998.

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An American Colonel is Dismayed by his Ukrainian Trainees

An interesting text is making rounds online, and it is not the first of its kind since 2014, painting Ukrainian soldiers in not so favourable light…

I quote:

My soldiers’ efforts are focused on boosting Yavoriv Combat Training Center and training instructors to see the defense capabilities of the Ukrainian Ground Forces getting stronger each day.

For reference, Yavoriv is in the extreme West of the country, very far from the Russians. The author quickly moves to the quality of his trainees:

Firstly, they don’t speak English. The truth is, they don’t truly care about actually learning it. Given the amount they seem to care about English, my instructors need an extra platoon of interpreters during training. But it doesn’t work in all cases. Thing is, they don’t have a complete understanding of each other! They are kind of a mishmash of different folks being trained here. Some of them speak only Ukrainian or only Russian, whereas others can only speak Romanian or Hungarian.

If they get people, who only speak Hungarian or Romanian, that means they are recruiting in the most remote villages of Western Ukraine. The other possibility is, this is a form of sabotage by some of the recruits. These dudes must be some complete unfortunates that were caught up in a mobilisation wave, and lacked the funds to buy the recruiter off. The latter is sort of confirmed further in the text…

Secondly, Ukrainian soldiers are lazy slackers who are reluctant to work, they tend to intentionally sabotage any move of their U.S. instructors. Taking into account their greed for money, one has to be aware that Ukrainian military tend to steal and sell anything once they think they have found a good deal.

I am guessing, these people are not entirely voluntarily in the training center.

Thirdly, heavy consumption of alcohol is a common event. All Ukrainian soldiers at Yavoriv Combat Training Center drink dangerously high levels of alcohol. With that in mind every time we had to start training with a BAC test. But that was of little help. Drunk Ukrainian soldiers who even couldn’t stand up straight because of the booze were banned from training. Some of the training activities were either canceled or rescheduled. What struck me most is their commanders’ omission with regard to that improper behavior. Their unwillingness to tackle alcohol abuse suggests that they could be immersed in a culture of booze together with their subordinates.

Sounds like they are really enjoying their time at the training center.

Fourthly, most of Ukrainians are poorly educated and of low intellect. The easiest tasks seemed challenging for them. It’s no wonder taking into account that the majority of soldiers come from disadvantaged backgrounds whereas the best part of the population left the country for a better life abroad.

The irony of the whole thing is that the labour migration has only been exacerbated by the US supported coup d’etat of 2014, and Ukraine’s subsequent economic decline. Unfortunately, the US military presence only perpetuates this toxic situation Ukraine has found itself in. Utterly meaningless endeavours like this one in Yavoriv, or the Sea Breeze Naval Exercise, perpetuate the myth, on a more or less symbolic level, that the civilised World supports Ukraine.

However ultimately, the country needs Russia…

100 Days of Volodymyr Zelensky as President of Ukraine

I do not believe Zelensky would amount to anything promising. I did not believe it back during the elections, and I don’t believe it now after 100 days of him being the president. But he does have a potential, he has been given an enormous credit of confidence in the parliamentary elections, when his party won a decisive majority. Whatever he will use it for good, we will see in the coming months…

Feral Hogs

I used to troll Ukrainian nationalists by saying that Ukraine’s economic and demographic decline will lead to a country of wild boars and feral hogs. And while, I may have been exaggerating, something that brings us closer to the ideal has happened in the Poltava Region…

In the village of Kizlovka, almost hundred of hogs have escaped from a local farm where they were allegedly held in unsatisfactory conditions. They are feeding on the produce of local fields, which is driving many locals to despair, since many rural Ukrainians depend on what they themselves grow. They can’t eat the pigs since they are the property of the farmer from whom they escaped. It is said they are hard to catch as they act aggressive towards humans, they became feral, and would defend their freedom…

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