A long but interesting read: The Sugar Conspiracy.

Presentation about Ukraine

• Goal: general introduction of Ukraine.
• Target audience: German and international students, including PhD students.
• Duration: approximately 25-30 minutes.
• Presented: January, 16, 2015, in Canossa, Universität des Saarlandes, Campus, 66123 Saarbrücken, Deutschland, during the Ukrainian Evening (Landerabend Ukraine).
• Presentation planning group: Dima Panfilenko (Landerabend organizer), Bogdan Tokovenko, Varvara Obolonchykova, Zarema Ibragimova, Ivan Pryvalov.
• Slides: Dima Panfilenko (initial version of tourism slides and text), Bogdan Tokovenko (all the other slides/text and final tourism slides/text).
• Useful feedback and criticism: Varvara Obolonchykova.

Презентація про Україну

• Мета: загальне ознайомлення.
• Цільова аудиторія: німецькі та міжнародні студенти, аспіранти.
• Тривалість: приблизно 25-30 хвилин.
• Представлена: 16 січня 2015-го року у Canossa, Universität des Saarlandes, Campus, 66123 Saarbrücken, Deutschland, під час українського вечора (Landerabend Ukraine).
• Цей твір ліцензовано за ліцензією Creative Commons Із зазначенням автора – Розповсюдження на тих самих умовах 4.0 Міжнародна.

You can also download slide notes as a text file.
Original PowerPoint presentation file is available on request.
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Note: this post was written on the 18th-23rd of May 2014, but was not published at that time. I am publishing it now, after minor edits of tenses used. I think that after Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of August 2014 it is absolutely clear that any prior publications regarding “right extremists” in Ukraine were either paid-for Russian propaganda, or simply insufficient analysis of the situation. It is still worth publishing this short text; consider this a cure for minds with only minor propaganda poisoning.

On Sunday, the 18th of May, the sad 70th anniversary of Crimean Tatars deportation by the Soviet regime, in Saarbrucken journalist Olaf Sundermeyer was giving a lecture titled “Ukraine: Die rechte Freiheit – Nationalismus und Rechtsextremismus” ( http://www.a3wsaar.de/aktuelles/details/d/2014/04/15/ukraine-die-rechte-freiheit-nationalismus-und-rechtsextremismus/ , or as a PDF).

I was unable to attend it, but looking at the abstract I felt the need to analyze and criticize the viewpoint Olaf presented. To do so, I went sentence by sentence through the abstract from the link above, picking items I cannot agree with, and providing my arguments.
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Since December 2013 Russian state mass-media were supporting the former president of Ukraine V. Yanukovych and his criminal, authoritarian kleptocracy.

Manipulating and distorting facts, and even making up fictitious “events”, Russian state mass-media (and personally Dmitri Kiselyov) tried very hard to depict protesters in the least favorable light possible – as violent gangsters, thugs, fascists, attackers of innocent policemen. (Dmitri Kiselyov, apparently for his fervent propaganda services, was promoted by Putin to become the head of the newly-created Russian state news agency.)

Russian state mass-media never reported about kidnapped and tortured and murdered protesters, protesters who lost eyes after being shot to the head with rubber bullets, heavily beaten protesters with broken ribs and internal organs rupture.

They also somehow failed to notice that after the night of November, 30, 2013, the protests were no longer about the EU association treaty, but about the responsibility of those guilty of badly exceeding authority during the night beatings of protesters in Kyiv.

Further escalation of the crisis and street protests was always the (delayed) consequence of authorities using illegally excessive force against the protesters. After the “Party of regions” tried to basically forbid the entire protest movement with a set of laws in mid-January (while the president-controlled police and prosecutors office were opening hundreds of criminal prosecution cases against the protesters), Euromaidan, out of well-understandable desperation, escalated into open fighting with the now-disbanded “Berkut” special police forces. The Russian propaganda machine was omitting causal events, while depicting the protesters’ response to (unrevealed) oppression, and this was probably the least disgusting technique used.

Further Yanukovych actions made crystal-clear the primary reason for strong Russian media support: Yanukovych response to the protests was fully coordinated with (and, highly likely, suggested or even ordered by) Moscow. Multiple pieces of evidence support this claim, I’ll only mention two:

• according to, if I remember correctly, Inna Bohoslovska (member of parliament, the former president’s “Party of regions” faction), every time after tension-decreasing agreements were negotiated and nearly finalized between the former president and opposition leaders (who were representing protesters), the phone call to Moscow followed, after which negotiations were aborted without finalizing any agreements;
• when the EU officials had a night-long negotiation with Yanukovych, discussing ways out of the crisis, Yanukovych interrupted negotiations to call Putin.

Clearly, Yanukovych was good for Putin because he was, in fact, a nearly-puppet “president”. Had Yanukovych survived the crisis, the 2015 presidential elections in Ukraine would be as clear and honest as the Crimean referendum, most likely extending Yanukovych presidency for the 2nd term. He could have then followed in the steps of the presidents of Belarus or Kazakhstan (who keep being presidents for many years and even decades). A controllable president of Ukraine was a clear win for Putin, and he didn’t care (and still doesn’t care, of course) about the citizens of Ukraine.

But I digress, as there is indeed a lot to write on the subject. When the Russian military invasion into Ukraine started at the end of February, Russian mass-media kept generating propaganda; now it had the goal to help Putin gain support inside Russia, to brainwash the citizens of Russian Federation (and, to a certain extent, the Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens who haven’t yet realized that Russian mass-media are poisonous) into believing in (totally ungrounded) scary tales about the hardships and life-threatening conditions of Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.

To counter Russian propaganda, a group of journalists and volunteers created an anti-propaganda, anti-lies website StopFake.org, which collects lies from Russian mass-media and finds materials proving those are indeed lies.

Rule of thumb: don’t trust Russian media.
Especially when they are talking about Ukraine.

One of the primary independent news websites in Ukraine is Українська Правда (The Ukrainian Truth).

There exists, however, an imposter website, which blatantly edits news reports to discredit Ukrainian people disagreement with the recent actions of the president and the government.
I call this website “imposter”, because they have the same name (but in Russian) as the above-mentioned original website, a similar domain name, and they also use exactly the same short-name (“УП”). Not a single serious news website would do so.
They, however, only post news in Russian, while the original website is published in both Ukrainian and Russian (with blogs available in the language of the blog’s author). It is clear that the idea behind the fake news website ukrpravda.ua is to influence and manipulate the opinions of the Russian-speaking people unaware of the true nature of that imposter website.

It should be of no surprise that domain name of the imposter is currently hosted by a Russian web-development company “rossiysky.net”:
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Dmitri Tabachnik is the Minister of education in the new (Yanukovych team) government.
He is well-known for his anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and for the denial of everything Ukrainian.

The other day he canceled obligatory Ukrainian language university entrance exams, proving again with his actions that he does intend to enact his phobia of Ukrainian identity.
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“We only value what we loose”, they say.

Fortunately, I haven’t lost anything valuable, and don’t plan to. However, I did come to realize that false leads may and actually do obscure some simple happiness bits we fail to notice in our everyday life. Especially when that happiness comes from someone close, someone you literally got used to as to something inseparable from your life – but still fail to give value to.

Take care of your happiness and inner peace – do stop sometimes to thank and praise and value the oh-so-inseparable people around you.

Copyrights note: this is not my image, and I do not know who is the proper copyrights holder. It is used here for illustrative non-profit purposes, with a proper disclaimer. Contact me if you own the copyright and wish this image removed.