Eleven civilians, seven policemen died in what was Ukraine’s bloodiest day since it gained independence in 1991.
Ukrainian riot police charged protesters occupying a central Kiev square early on Wednesday after the bloodiest day since the former Soviet republic, caught in a geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West, won its independence.
Police battled their way into Independence Square – center of three months of protests against President Viktor Yanukovich – but demonstrators, some armed with clubs and wearing helmets and body armor, tried to stand their ground.
Smoke billowed from burning tents and piles of tires and wood as thousands of protesters held on to the centrer of the square, a Reuters cameraman said. Several floors of a trade union building, used as an anti-government headquarters, were on fire.
At least 18 people, including seven policemen, died on Tuesday during hours of violence between security forces and civilians. Many were killed by gunshot and hundreds more injured, with dozens of them in a serious condition, police and opposition representatives said.
Alarmed Western governments demanded restraint and dialogue. US Vice President Joe Biden called Yanukovich, urging him to pull back the government forces and to exercise maximum restraint, the White House said.
Earlier, the state security service set a deadline for the demonstrators to end disorder or face “tough measures”. Then the police advanced up to the square before launching a full assault in the early hours, throwing stun grenades.
Nationwide demonstrations erupted in November after Yanukovich bowed to Russian pressure and pulled out of a planned far-reaching trade agreement with the European Union, deciding instead to accept a Kremlin bailout for the heavily indebted economy.
Western powers warned Yanukovich against trying to smash the pro-European demonstrations, urging him to turn back to Europe and the prospect of an IMF-supported economic recovery, while Russia accused them of meddling.
Ukraine has been rocked periodically by political turmoil since gaining independence from the Soviet Union more than 22 years ago, but it has never experienced violence on this scale.
As the security forces moved forward, opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko reacted defiantly, telling supporters on the square: “We will not leave here. This is an island of freedom. We will defend it.”
The world champion boxer-turned politician later arrived at Yanukovich’s office for talks, Klitschko’s spokeswoman said, but he and another opposition leader, former economy ministerArseny Yatsenyuk, were still waiting to see the president an hour later.
Earlier on Tuesday the State Security Service (SBU), in a joint statement with the interior ministry, signalled the government’s intentions. “If by 6 p.m. the disturbances have not ended, we will be obliged to restore order by all means envisaged by law,” they said.
The riot police moved in hours after Moscow gave Ukraine $2 billion in aid for its crippled economy which it had been holding back to demand decisive action to crush the protests.
@ ArnoldHarris:
“Indecisive”? — don’t know about that. My understanding is that he made a deliberate decision to not do so when Kornilov demanded that he crack down. He was myopic and should have known better than to trust the likes of Lenin. (They’d been schoolmates in law school & the two families were closely acquainted.) Eventually he did go after the Bolshies, but by then it was too late.
Only after he had finished destroying what was left of the burgeoning middle class that was strangled in its crib by the October Revolution.
And without a strong middle class, what you’ve called “western-style democracy” is impossible.
But that’s just IT, Arnold; don’t you see? — IF you’d been “born & raised as a Soviet citizen,” you absolutely WOULDN’T know what you presently know.
That’s one of the shortcomings of “counter-factual history” (one of many, but surely the most glaring).
@ ArnoldHarris:
This wasn’t prescience, but demagoguerie. Hitler didn’t even come to power till 1933 (and even THEN it wasn’t yet clear as to where he was headed). In the 1920’s, Stalin had no reason to suspect that projects like Operations Barbarossa & Typhoon were in the offing. He did what he did because he just wanted to consolidate power in his own person — and would’ve said or done whatever it took to DO that.
You mean by (literally) starving the Kulaks to death?
@ dweller:
Dweller, I have my own assumptions, based on my education, experiences, and the operative social and political philosophies which have governed my long life. I assume you have yours.
Had I been born and raised as a Soviet citizen, and knowing what I presently know, I would have supported Stalin irrespective of his harsh rule and the fact that I think communism does not work as a coherent economic system. I prefer governments whose policies are predictable and whose leaderships are under the management of tough-minded persons rather than the imbeciles and wastrels too frequently put into power by the American political system.
The fact that Kerensky failed to eradicate the Bolshevik party when he had the power to do so merely proves that he must have been Russia’s leading indecisive imbecile. Russia is not the kind of society that is long governed by weaklings. As for any of the other ifs and maybes you cited, they did not take place, and history is what actually occurred, not what might have been. Instead of Kerensky, who wound up as a school teacher in the USA, the Russian state was rebuilt mainly by Josef Stalin, who did exactly what he thought he had to do to make certain Russia would have the massive armies and air force his country would need to stop the armed Fascist coalition that invaded his country, including the Made in USSR heavy armaments that would take those armies right into the German heartland and conquer the Balkans as well.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
“Repeatedly shown”? — the only real examples you can point to are TWO:
1. the State Duma OF 1905-6, which failed because of its own inefficiency and Tsarist strictures imposed on it
— though the Bolshevist call for a popular ‘boycott’ of the Duma FAILED. The people supported the Duma & its reforms.
2. Kerensky & 1917, and the only reasons it did not “flourish” were his errors:
— failing to give land to the rural peasants, who needed it to survive;
— staying in the War, when the people clearly wanted out;
— choosing to not arrest the communists when he had the chance.
NONE of these reasons, however, has anything to do with “western-style democracy” failing to “flourish.”
What’s more, in a real sense, your assertion [as blockquoted here] is meaningless, since “western-style democracy” itself isn’t 1200 years old. It was an evolving phenomenon even BEFORE the Magna Carta of 800 yrs ago, and was still evolving at the time of the 1787-91 Constitutional Convention. Arguably it is YET evolving (or devolving).
Maybe so — but “the strongest and most-focused national leadership” need not be despotic at its core.
Strictly assumptions, both of them.
@ Laura:
Laura, how do you come to imagine that I care what governments of other societies — typically located other civilizational cultures — do to their own people? If those people happen to be Jewish, then I care about their fates. Otherwise, I am indifferent. And I must tell you that my indifference is based neither on ignorance nor cruelty, but on recognition of the impossibility of doing anything about all that you have suggested in your statement.
All sociopolitical values are culturally derived. And the overall outlines of each culture are created and nurtured by the outlines and specifics of the civilizations within which these separate national cultures were born and have matured. The civilizations of North America, South and Central America, Northwestern Europe, Southern Europe, the Orthodox Christian cultures of Southeastern Europe and Northern Eurasia, the Islamic belt, China and Japan all greatly differ from one another. Some of the differences are seen in their historical linguistic development. Other differences are based on religion. Still other differences on climate zones or the kinds of economies that they sustain and/or are sustained by. And so on.
Had you familiarized yourself with the civilizational studies of the late Professor Samuel Huntington, you would have given thought to the profound sociocultural differences of the Orthodox Christian societies of Russia and parts of the Balkan states, in contrast with the Western European and Western Hemispherical societies based on Roman Catholic and other Protestant Christianity. For example, the all but unbridgeable fault line of the Pravoslavci (“True Believers”) of the nationally organized Orthodox Christian lands to the east and south and of the Western Christians, runs right through the heart of Ukraine. Exactly the same way that in the early 1990s, the same fault line ran through the heart of former Jugoslavija and split the Catholic Slovens and Croats to the northwest from the Serbs to the south and southeast. That fault line destroyed Jugoslavija and I venture to say that a most likely outcome of what is beginning to look like a civil war in Ukraine will see that country split as well, with the Eastern Ukraine and the “New Russia” districts that comprise the Ukrainian southern provinces re-adhering to the Russian Federation.
And why not? Here in the United States less than 200 years ago, the groundwork was laid for a terrible civil war that tore apart this country neither on the basis of religious attachment, racial heritage or the European nationality of most of our country’s white and free inhabitants, but on the basis of attitude toward human slavery and the kinds of economies that grew around differences between societies based on slave labor, on one hand, and free paid labor on the other hand.
For all these reasons, it is next to useless to depend upon belief in and support for universal viewpoints of how governments rule the people they govern.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
How about what they do to THEIR OWN people? That is something you overlook. Russian regimes have oppressed their own people. I don’t expect governments to have moral obligations to other nations, but I would for example, expect the Ukrainian government to place its own people ahead of being subservient to the Kremlin.
@ dweller:
Dweller, it is true that any Russian government of any stripe would have had the same geopolitical interest and motivation as Stalin did in stopping the Third Reich which was overrunning all of European Russia in operations Barbarossa and Typhoon in the summer and autumn of 1941. But it is also evident that the prevalent social culture of the Russian nation responds most effectively to autocratic leadership, and especially so in the most severe national emergencies. In the 1200-year history of the organized Russian nation, they have repeatedly shown that western-style democracy does not flourish in their culture and that in time of need, most of them flock to the strongest and most-focused national leadership. That is precisely the circumstances that enabled Stalin to take control of the Communist Party leadership committees in the early 1920s and then extend that centralized control to everybody in Russia.
And who can show that was not the correct path for them to follow, given the circumstances that led to the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II? Stalin himself in one of his speeches in the 1920s accurately predicted that unless his country undertook massive and immediate industrialization and other national re-organizational steps, then Russia would be crushed exactly as Adolf Hitler attempted to do in 1941.
The well-studied series of 5-year plans beginning in 1928 converted Russia from a vast agriculturally-oriented society to an industrial giant second only to the USA. That enabled the Soviet state to manufacture their own weaponry to arm the largest aggregation of armies in the history of the world, with an air force second only to that of the USA. While it was true that the USA supplied the USSR with large-scale wartime aid after the Nazi attack, very little of that aid could be gotten into Soviet use until 1943, after the key battles of Moscow and Stalingrad already had degraded the Nazi armies on the Eastern front, which meant that the German armies in July 1943 could attempt only a limited attack around the city of Kursk, at which the Soviet armies broke the remaining strength of the Nazi forces and maintained an all but continuous attack that liberated Western Russia and carried the Soviet armies all the way to Berlin, the Elbe River and the Balkan region of Southeast Europe.
And it is important to consider that without Stalin’s leadership, that vast reorganization and industrialization of the largest country in the world very likely would not have taken place, or if it had, would not have led to useful results in time to stop the Nazi armies in 1941.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
What has “totalitarian control of the Russian state” got to do with it?
Are you suggesting that only a tyranny would have had the desire or the wherewithal to arrest the eastward sweep of the Nazi juggernaut?
Surely any Russian govt — of ANY stripe — would have had the same geopolitical interest & motivation as Stalin did in stopping the Third Reich.
@ Laura:
Laura, it is true that I always come down on the side of the Russian or pro-Russian oppressors.
My reason for that political stance is that I greatly admire the way Russian traditionalist leaders such as Peter the Great, Josef Stalin and now Vladimir Putin utilize never put any foreign interest ahead of their efforts to protect the Russian state and the Russian nation by extending the national power of their state. Stalin, perhaps the hardest and most ruthless national leader in modern times, marshaled the Russian nation and the massive Soviet armies to crush the life of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
Without Stalin’s totalitarian control of the Russian state, I seriously doubt the Eastern front in World War 2 would have long kept the Mazi armies from occupying all of European Russia and making their military position in control of all of Europe unbreakable and impregnable. Not only would there have been no Jewish survivors left in the whole of Europe, but to make the situation infinitely worse, no Western Allied invasion of Europe would have been possible. In time, German scientists almost certainly would have achieved nuclear weaponry, and the Western allies would have found reason to back away from what otherwise would have been a hopeless situation.
I cannot really argue these ideas with you Laura, because I cannot accept the validity of what I think is your premise, namely, that nations and their governments owe any moral obligation to other nations and governments which essentially compete with them to whatever extent their national power permits them to act. We live in a world of utterly self-serving and sovereign national entities, one of which is the Jewish nation and its sovereign government, the State of Israel. As a member of the Jewish nation, I oww a degree of loyalty to that nation and its state. I would not consider it immoral of Israel to conquer the entire Middle East, if they had the power to achieve that goal and to force all other nations to back away from the Jewish state and nation while we devour the spoils we had conquered.
Nor do I consider myself any kind of criminal or moral deviant for espousing such conduct; because while individual persons must live up to a standard of conduct and behavior that renders civil society both peaceful and orderly, I posit that states and their governments — or at least those states and governments which have power to expand at the expense of other states and governments — rarely hold themselves answerable for their own periodic exercising of such policies. As a citizen of the United States, I freely acknowledge that my government has stolen all the lands of our part of North America from its original inhabitants. And because I am not an American Indian, I may for the sake of politeness show concern that they lost and our European-American ancestors beat them and herded them into our own uniquely American version of concentration camps. But such politeness, as you are well aware, masks hypocrisy.
Will the human race ever change the way we all operate? Perhaps so. But I would not wager any money on such a doubtful proposition.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
You always come down on the side of the Russian or pro-Russian oppressors. Of course you aren’t the one who suffers from what you defend, since you live in freedom in America. And that’s too bad. You should have to be the one who suffers under the violently repressive regimes you defend.
It would have been better to have been a lap-dog of totalitarian, Jew-hating stalinist Russia?
All of the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine are Great Russian in language, church affiliation, historical nationalism and political empathy. Moscow will never abandon them, and if they cannot get a government in Kiev (“Ky-yiv”, the western oriented Ukrainian nationalists purposely call it), then they will help break up Ukraine into separate parts, and re-annex the Russian-oriented parts back into the Russian Federation.
Russia has shown time and again that they will not allow the Western European-North American alliance shove them around in their own front yard or anywhere else their vital interests may be foolishly challenged. In any case, the Jews are mostly gone from that part of the world. As for letting the Russians and Ukrainians fight it out Syrian style, no such thing will happen. No outside country or alliance has the power to muscle Russia. Belarus chose early on to keep matters friendly with Moscow under all conceivable circumstances; and correctly so.
I have told all of you before, and I will say it again, that Israel made a serious error in 1948 becoming a lap-dog of Washington and spurning friendlier relations with Stalin’s Russia. Don’t make the same mistake dealing with China, which, with Russia and India, will dominate the world one day.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Given what unrelenting, irrational Jew-haters the Ukrainians have always been, I can’t say my sympathy meter is broken, because with regards to the Ukes, I don’t even have a sympathy meter to begin with.
Get the Jews out, them let them fight it out, Syria-style.