Month: August 2014

The political map does not show corruption schemes, diagrams of wealth, transactions to the offshore zones, structures of the world economy, hidden political agreements, maps of domination and alienation.

When I listen to the conversations about “United Ukraine”, I get a feeling that translators of this message do not really understand what they are talking about. What does the annoying Ukrainian flag in every corner of the TV-screen mean? What do we have to understand in the outline of the map of Ukraine, which has been known to us for the last 23 years?

“Not every recession-hit country in Europe is like wayward Greece, Portugal and Spain, amazingly Lithuanian unions went along with the government’s policies. There were no street riots a la Greece”

-Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 2010

caption on a Mayday poster in Lithuania (on the left): “He who saws hunger, reaps anger.”

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that shook the globe, the Baltic states were praised internationally as exemplary models for the successful implementation of austerity measures.

On July 24 the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Oleksandr Turchynov announced the disbanding of the parliamentary group of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) over a ridiculous technicality. The court trial over CPU’s ban as a political party started the same day with the next session of the court scheduled for mid-August.  The CPU is accused of supporting ‘terrorism’ and the separatism of Eastern Ukrainian pro-Russian rebels. While Ukrainian and international left should not have any illusions about the CPU just because of the “communist” word in its name, nevertheless, we should worry and actively oppose its ban pushed forward in the context of a major anti-democratic assault after the president Yanukovych has been toppled down.