“With Russia… Together!” Patriot march in Odessa against the junta
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Republic of Crimea (RK) First Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev said that the Ukraine cut electricity supplies to the Crimea by 50 percent. When they noticed a reduction in the power supplied, the Crimean Electric Power System carried out scheduled rolling blackouts in keeping with rules of procedure. According to Temirgaliyev, now, about 30 percent of the RK is blacked out, and there’s more to come. He added that if all the RK suffered a blackout, the situation would be even more difficult. Earlier, Igor Sluniayev, head of the Ministry of Regional Development, said that the 80 percent of the Crimea’s electricity comes from the Ukraine. He expressed confidence that the Ukrainian junta won’t go as far as triggering off a humanitarian crisis and that the Crimea wouldn’t have any of its vital resources blockaded.
Editor:
If you needed proof that the Timoshenko junta is bunch of amoral terrorists, this is it. John Herbst and Victoria Nuland cackle in glee (the ROCOR elements who brought in Herbst to the ’07 Sobor stand revealed as quislings and traitors). After all, the junta took over kid’s summer camps and handed them over to the Right Sector to use to train terrorists. Do I truly need to go on?
BMD
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Electricity is now back on in blacked-out areas of the RK; the outages lasted more than four hours. RK First Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev said that the RK has three high-voltage power transmission lines (LEP-330) linking it to the Ukrainian power grid, explaining, “The Ukrainian supplier UkrEnergo halved the amount of electric power supplied via these LEP lines. The Peninsula now receives 50 percent of the planned amount of electricity”. Temirgaliyev said that the RK was ready for such an action by the junta, and promptly reacted to the decline in power supply.
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On Monday, Kryminform cited RK First Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev as saying, “The power supply reduction was an attempt by Kiev to blackmail the Russian Federation via the Crimea, aimed at gaining something. The only reason for this is these people’s stupidity, I can’t think of any other explanation. We have no debts. There are no grounds for blackouts whatsoever. They’re just ‘shafting’ us, so to say. We prepared for such a turn of events. We walked into it with our eyes open. We’ll have to cut consumption, but we won’t have any catastrophe, crisis, or collapse, that’s for sure. Kiev used its last lever of influence on the Crimea when it cut down the power supply”.
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At a meeting focusing on providing socio-economic assistance to the RK and the Federal City of Sevastopol, Chairman of the RF Government Dmitri Medvedev said, “Our first priority is to raise pensions for residents in the new territories to the general Russian level. By preliminary calculations, we expect to budget about 36 billion Roubles (998 million USD. 1.12 billion CAD. 1.09 billion AUD. 720 million Euros. 605 million UK Pounds) for this purpose before the end of this year. The budget has the resources, we’ve planned for this”.
Editor:
Russia cares for the elderly… the Timoshenko junta kicks them in the face. Any questions? Do note that the USA (especially, the Republican Party) applauds those who kick the elderly, not those who help them. That’s not very “Pro-Life”, is it?
BMD
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RIA-Novosti quoted RK First Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev as saying, “All Ukrainian soldiers have either rallied to Russia or are leaving the Crimea” said Crimea’s first deputy prime minister Rustam Temirgaliyev, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency.
Editor:
Russia gave all Ukrainian troops who left 2,000 gryvnias (6,780 Roubles. 188 USD. 210 CAD. 206 AUD. 136 Euros. 114 UK Pounds)… you see, the junta hadn’t paid them… Yatsenyuk, Turchinov, and Timoshenko needed the money for their mansions. Washington supports the thieves, not the almsgivers… what a concept…
BMD
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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) stated that Moscow can’t understand why Ukrainian law enforcement agencies refuse to probe an incident at the Vinnitsa railway station, where Ukrainian nationalists plundered Russian passengers on a Moscow-Chisinau train. As Moscow-Chisinau train Nr 65 pulled up at the Vinnitsa railway station platform on 21 March, the horrified passengers saw people in Ukrainian Insurgent Army uniforms enter and start checking their IDs. If a person produced a Russian passport, the terrorists stole their money and jewellery. The MID said that the Ukrainian side only offered political explanations for the robbery of the Russian passengers. The MID pointed up, “One can’t really understand why the local police refused to collect reports that the plundered passengers tried to file”, adding that the incident signals a revival of a revival of the anarchy of the early 20th century, saying, “So this is the kind of law-governed state that’s currently being formed in the Ukraine”.
Editor:
The MID is conjuring up the image of the Civil War (“a revival of the anarchy of the early 20th century”)… that’s big juju for Russians; it’s not bandied about casually. Besides which, the USA slobbers its approval of it all… remember, the American foreign policy apparat is under Zbig’s spell. I met him twice (in a group)… he’s an utterly focused and utterly evil man. Hatred for Russia consumes him… no doubt, he blames all Russians for the downfall of the Polish fascist junta (his father was part of the apparat of that dictatorship, being their Ambassador to Canada). This is sheer lawlessness… yet, this is what the USA wants…
BMD
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Over the weekend, Americans of Ukrainian and Russian descent rallied together outside the UN headquarters in New York, in what was a display of unparalleled unity and friendship in the face of a widening chasm that in the past few months between Moscow and the junta in Kiev. The rally brought together anti-fascists of all nationalities. Russian tricolours and Ukrainian flags flew above the crowd, sprinkled with posters that damned the Ukrainian neo-Nazi junta. Activists carried placards, “The US must stop supporting Ukrainian Nazis!” and “Let Crimea and Eastern Ukraine choose their future!” Vladimir Tatyanenko, a Ukrainian-born American resident who crossed the Atlantic about 20 years ago, told RIA-Novosti that the demonstration aimed at supporting like-minded people in Russia and the Ukraine, telling reporters, “It’s an act of resistance to neo-Nazism that’s running rampant across the Ukraine. After Egypt and Syria, havoc and military thuggery crossed over to my native country”, adding that Russians and Ukrainians gathered outside the UN in New York to show the world that they weren’t enemies.He said,”I can’t understand or accept it when they say that the Ukraine is for Ukrainians. I feel hurt and I’m also ashamed of people that believe they are better than someone else”.
Philipp Yurchenko, who arrived in the USA from Germany, told journalists that he was there to protest against “the régime of imposters in the Ukraine. This so-called ‘government’ doesn’t represent the Ukrainian people. That’s why I’m here”. Another activist from the Ukrainian city of Zhitomir, who said his name was Aleksandr, emphasised that he wanted to show his support of Ukrainian-Russian friendship, “It was a coup, an illegal coup. The people of the Ukraine rallied against the régime and corruption, not against Russia or for Europe. Foreign-funded nationalists and radicals, who got their money from America, among others, hijacked it [the uprising]. I’m against the fascism that has reared its head in the Ukraine”. Yuri Selinsky, who came from a Russian émigré family that moved to the USA in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, said that he joined the demonstration to speak up against an attempt to tear the two neighbouring nations apart, saying, “We’ve always had one destiny, Russia and Ukraine, and now they’re trying to separate us”. Thomas Djordjevic, a Serbian-American activist, was also at the protest. Djordjevic called on the people to remember the Yugoslav experience when dealing with the Ukraine’s current political crisis. He emphasised that there were but three possible scenarios for Russians and Ukrainians, “to stay together, break up peacefully like Czechoslovakia did, or brace for a civil war. Ukrainian, Russian, and other communities in Ukraine must learn to coöperate. Even if they aren’t entirely satisfied with the outcome, they’d still be better off with it than at war”.
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Editor:
After a month of junta misrule, the situation in the Ukraine is less clear than ever before. I warn all concerned… there’s much crank intel out there. For instance, Yuliya Timoshenko allegedly made a phone call saying that we should turn Russia into ”scorched earth”. That sounds barmy… and probably is. However, do mark this down… for the past month, the Ukrainian economy has been at a standstill… no one’s getting pensions… the army isn’t getting provisions… the government is in shambles as the junta shitcanned many career bureaucrats and employees. In particular, the junta purged the army and gutted the MVDU/SBU. They proclaimed a new untrained (but armed) “National Guard and the junta uses kids’ summer camps to train youth terrorists.
In short, the near term is vicious and ugly in the extreme. God have mercy on the suffering people of Little Russia… this is too much of a muchness.
BMD
24 March 2014
Voice of Russia World Service
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_24/Raising-Crimean-pensions-first-priority-Medvedev-3324/
Voices from Russia 
24 March 2014. A Note to My Readers on the News Focus Lately… And a Kind Word on What This Blog Is and What It Isn’t
Tags: Christian, Christian ethics, Christianity, Cold War, Consistent life ethic, Eastern Orthodox Church, ethical orientation, ethics, Kosovo, moral stance, morality, morals, Orthodox, Orthodoxy, political commentary, politics, poster, Religion and Spirituality, Republican, right-wing, Russia, Russian, Russian Orthodox Church, Sarah Palin, South Ossetia, Ukraine, United States, USA, USSR
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Editor:
This is in third parts. The first is about the current news. The second is about the relationship of politics and religion. The third is more about what I believe… and how it affects my life. God willing, all will interest (and be of use) to you.
BMD
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We’re heading into an uncharted future…
Lately, there’s been much focus on the situation in the Ukraine… it’s an event of epic historical dimensions. I’m going to be 60 on 8 April… there’ve been only two other events of comparable import. The first was Reagan’s accession to power in 1981… that brought in the present Dark Age of Rapine. The second was the fall of the USSR in 1991… that ushered in the Second Smuta… a Time of Troubles worse than the first one was. These two streams worked on one another… a fable arose in the West that crapitalism had “defeated” socialism. That wasn’t so… the Cold War ended in mutual exhaustion… the collapse of the USSR was due mostly to Gorbachyov’s incompetence and stupid misrule, not to any systemic rot in socialism.
We saw the American/German-fomented breakup of Socialist Federal Yugoslavia. The peoples of that region still haven’t regained the standard of living that they had under socialism. It’s true that the richest 5 percent are FAR better off, but it was the expense of the other 95 percent. Fifteen years ago, we saw the aggression against Serbia… the USA ripped Kosovo away from Serbia without a referendum or plebiscite. This war still isn’t resolved… Kosovo only exists due to an US/EU occupation force. After Bush the Simple’s election, we saw new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that haven’t worked themselves out, either.
Then, in 2008, Russia turned aside the American-led invasion of South Ossetia. That started with a rocket attack on sleeping civilians… the Georgian invaders attempted to overrun the Russian peacekeepers and South Ossetian Opolchenie. In particular, the Ossetians fought like devils… they fought the only war worth fighting, defending the motherland against a foreign foe. After all, the Georgians had tried wiping out the Ossetians in the early 90s, and memories in the Caucasus are long. That war was my first experience of covering the news… it taught me much. The most important takeaway was the American media never told the truth (and most of its “journalists” were dirt-ignorant “pretty faces” without a stitch of knowledge about Russia and the Orthosphere). However, they were far above American official spokesmen, chosen for their telegenic looks and mawkish “sincerity” (Sarah Palin is a model of the breed… Jen Psaki is typical of them in her “expertise”).
The Russian victory broke the spell that America had held over the world since the collapse of the USSR. Russia turned America back… and decisively so. The post-1991 world was over… but what was going to replace it? We’re seeing the opening acts of that now. The USA intervened in the Ukraine to place a neoliberal crapitalist junta in place… to destroy the semi-socialist system in place there (the US Republican Party, in particular, hates what it calls “socialism”, as they’re the obedient running dogs of the American oligarch class). However, to put their neoliberal clients in power, the Americans had to include fascists in the coalition. This was THE red flag to Russia. Russia hasn’t forgotten the Great Victory… nor has it forgotten the cost. Russians HATE fascism… and including the Right Sector and Svoboda in the junta guaranteed a reaction not only from Russia, but also from Russians in the Ukraine.
The present Ukrainian state can’t continue in its present form. The Anglo-Saxon Americans saw to that. If anything shows their stupidity, ignorance, and petulance, this does. If they had simply waited for the promised election, Yanukovich would’ve been gone. It was only a matter of months. I think that one reason for the haste is that their mentor, Zbig, is getting on in years, and he feels the cold breath of mortality… and he wanted to see Russia “humbled” before his death. Ergo, the haste.
The Americans stupidly lit the fuse… and it hasn’t reached the dynamite yet. Yet, the status quo ante is gone, irremediably so. Either the Ukraine becomes a rather loose federal state (more like Switzerland than Germany), as Pyotr Simonenko of the KPU has insisted for quite some time, or the situation will become so muddled that no one could give you a reasonable answer. Zbig lost his gamble… Nuland and Herbst showed their incompetence (Kerry is a political buffoon; he’s no real diplomat like the Old Master, Sergei Lavrov). We’re all in a hurtling train with no bloody idea on where’s its going. When the dust settles, the present order will be gone. God alone knows what’ll replace it.
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We can respect one another… we can fight for a better world together
I have two very different readerships here. One focuses on politics, in particular, leftist politics. The other focuses on religion, Russian Orthodoxy, in particular. It all depends on the news flow, what receives priority. Lately, there hasn’t been much religious news… Russian Orthodox people here in the diaspora are knackered after dealing with overheated “church politics” for some time. They want peace (and, rightfully so). Of course, that means less “news”.
Yet, these groups aren’t mutually exclusive. Firstly, my religion informs my political beliefs, and, indeed, if I’m to follow the REAL leaders of the Church such as Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev (“HH”: His Holiness), I have to turn leftwards! HH is friends with many leftist leaders, and stood by Fidel Castro Ruz when many others turned their backs. HH thinks that the Cuban healthcare system rocks and he believes that the present crapitalist economic order is evil (a position reiterated by his spokesman, Fr Vsevolod Chaplin).
Secondly, I believe that leftist believers and secularists have much in common. We both want a world with justice and equity; we both want a fair share-out of resources. We both oppose crapitalist greed and aggression; we share a wish to build a better world for our children. In any case, the antitheistic left is dead (save for some leftovers here and there)… the left grew past that. Crapitalism is static greed, the Left is more dynamic… the dialectic means that it changes as it faces new facts and situations. Antitheism proved to be a dead-end, just as enforced “religion” did. With that out-of-the-way, we can concentrate on what we hold in common… and that’s quite a bit. The Cross and the Red Banner are natural allies… Christ wasn’t tacked up for being an apologist for the powers-that-be! G A Zyuganov gives Easter greetings to believers… that’s the Communism of today!
I think that we have to think of terminology… I prefer “secularism” to “atheism” or “irreligion”… the latter focus on what they aren’t, the first is a positive statement. Besides, it doesn’t have any of the negative baggage of the latter two terms. Just as there’s much common ground between leftist believers and secularists… there’s much common ground between rightwing believers and seculars. I’d go so far as to say that a leftist believer has more in common with a leftist secularist than they have with a rightwing “believer”. Indeed, to accommodate the greed and aggression of the right, believers have to make major assaults on Christianity… that is, the loud Pat Robertsons and megachurch pastors aren’t in the Christian mainstream at all.
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My God-given duty is to love you as you are… and that’s that
I am NOT a theologian, cleric, or monastic. I’m a very secular laywoman, with a strong Russian Orthodox faith. Therefore, even when I talk about religion, I’m coming from a very secular slant… in the sense that I’m not clerical or monastic, and you shouldn’t expect that from me. What I say isn’t “the teaching of the Church”… it’s my take on things; it’s how I see them. I’m not spouting theology… I’m not going to gush pietism and “holy spiels”. I’m going to tell it as I see things, and that’ll mean that I use rather “unholy” language at times.
I go to liturgy because God’s there… I don’t go to listen to sermons or show off my “piety”. I don’t believe in preaching at people… if my behaviour doesn’t tell you what I believe in, all the words in the world couldn’t help. In any case, I don’t believe in proselytising… God brings the increase, not me! I’m no exemplar… I’m an ordinary sinful-ginful, who does her best to live as she should. I’ll give you a hand… but I’ll never preach at you… that’s sinful pride! I’m going to do my best to live as I should… and that means that I won’t go about trying to change you.
I believe in “Unholy Holiness”… that’s not a contradiction in terms. I believe that we should stand unflinchingly for what’s right and true… and if that means that we stand against “religious people”… so be it. We should have the courage to make the leap of faith (as Kierkegaard put it)… knowing that means that we must have child-like trust in our hearts. I’ll confide to you that many secular people are comfortable with that. There’s much too much demonisation on both sides. Religious people aren’t Duck Dynasty cut-outs. Secularists aren’t ravening church-burners.
We’re all rather human. The older that I get, the less comfortable I am with categorical denunciations. Not all “Pro-Lifers” are angels (indeed, most are supporters of the most evil anti-people platforms out there)… not all “Pro-Choicers” are devils (most see abortion as a messy solution, best avoided). Mind you, I say “amen” to the Church’s real teaching, which is that we should try to protect life at all levels… I happen to believe that waving placards and supporting Republican pro-war politicians isn’t a good or proper way to do it. We’ve fallen… and all too many of us REFUSE to get up.
BMD