The Kremlin now appears engaged in a two-pronged effort to assure that its puppet regimes in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts manage to survive and also to do everything possible to abort Ukraine’s planned June 27 signing of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. The Russian ability and desire to meddle in other country’s business seems to be without bounds. 

Analyst: “The wheels have been set in motion for parliament to dissolve the Communist Party faction, as the legal grounds are entirely in place. In early elections, we doubt the Communist Party, or any radical pro-Russian force, will earn enough votes to qualify.”

Ash: “…I have been receiving [reports] of increasingly difficult challenges for business in the SE to keep up production, and transport/distribution of product, against a backdrop of banditry in the areas affected by the conflict.”

“With regard to patriotism, nationalism, and hatred to the enemy, everything is in order in Ukrainian civil society.” But in Russia, that is not the case.  The Russian nationalist project has indeed suffered a defeat, but “the liberal project [there] has suffered a no less crushing one. More than it, [in the case of the latter] it is not simply a defeat but a fatal trauma.”

 

“The Russian government has called repeatedly for Ukraine to stop its military crackdown on the separatists but has also insisted that it does not control, or speak for, the separatists.”

 

In spite of significant challenges, the Bleyzer Foundation concludes: “With good progress on structural reforms, pledged by new Kyiv authorities, Ukraine may achieve a quantum leap in economic development.”

“…this year there was no doubt who should get the award since both leaders had dedicated their whole lives to the struggle against Communism, were subject to persecution, and spent many years in the Soviet gulags.”

 

Poroshenko’s first major appointments all appear to be highly qualified, Western-oriented professionals who are “very credible, pro-Western, market and business friendly people.” If the top tier – Gontareva/Klimkin/Yatsenyuk/Sheremeta – indeed do represent what Standard Bank’s Tim Ash calls “something of a dream team” then we could be on the way to the most productive presidential administration in Ukraine’s short and tumultuous history as an independent, post-Soviet nation.

The commentary below is an excellent example of the blatant hypocrisy that has become the hallmark of the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin. Kremlin policy is now to push federalization on other countries, while “Moscow has no interest in promoting federalism at home.” Federalization is nothing than an “updated version of Stalin’s classical ethnic engineering in which he included ethnic minorities within the borders of union republics to be a check on the titular nationality by ensuring Moscow reliable allies among minority groups.” All we have in Moscow today are new dogs with old tricks.

 

"I can say that the cease-fire time will be pretty short. We expect that disarmament of military groups and restoration of order will take place right after it," Poroshenko said.

 

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