Ukrainian-Canadian businessman Eugene Melnyk, owner of the Ottawa Senators, is leading a boycott of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia

 

Analyst: “Pro-Russian forces are disappointed in the failure of the rebellion in Odesa to gain any momentum. They seem to have had high hopes that pro-Russian fervor in Odesa would have paved the way for launching the Novorossiya independence movement openly promoted by Putin.”

 

The New York Times in an excellent article by Sabrina Tabernise points out the obvious, i.e. Ukraine is at war and appears likely to lose the war and more of its sovereign territory to Russian control. There are options as we point out in commentary below, but the options involve Barack Obama, Angela Merkel – and Petro Poroshenko – moving quickly and decisively to change the rules – and the results of the bloody game started by Russia.

A group of criminals identifying themselves as "Russian Orthodox Cossacks" this morning barged into a local church of the Kyiv Patriarchate in Crimea in village Perevalne during Sunday Divine Liturgy and beat members of the faithful, including a pregnant woman and a young girl with cerebal palsy.

Dr. Joseph Goebbels* was an amateur compared to today’s Kremlin propagandists. However, Goebbels’ budget for propaganda activities was probably less than that of the Kremlin and he didn’t have the Internet to facilitate his wholesale lying like the Kremlin enjoys today.

 

Ukrainian Catholics lost their churches, had no legal protection and survived as an underground church during the Soviet era. Russian Mennonites also were not officially recognized by the Soviets and assimilated with the Baptists. “Both churches faced repression under similar circumstances from the same oppressor and had to make costly choices to keep faithful,” Snyder Belousek said.

 

“Putin’s Russia is on the same path as North Korea and is currently on the same path as that isolated and increasingly impoverished regime that can take pride only in its army and nuclear weapons, while Ukraine has a chance to emerge from its current poverty because it is democratic and open to the world,” says Rashit Akhmetov, the editor of Kazan’s Zvezda Povolzhya

 

Ukraine is a classic example of how Putin is using right wing parties to lobby for support in Europe, said Anton Shekhovtsov, of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies… “As things are, Russia cannot compete with the EU in terms of economy, human resources, capital and IT– it's only chance to dominate is if Europe is reduced to separate nation states.”

 

Photo: Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Yakovenko meets Nigel Farage in a Russian TV appearance

 

“…our company is temporarily halting work on the project and is not planning to resume it for now.”

 

The answer to the headline question posed by BBC News is obviously positive. However, the BBC article goes on to make a well documented and quite convincing case that Russia, using Chechen and other irregular forces is managing, financing and supplying what is in effect a civil war designed to spread Russian influence in eastern Ukraine – and killing large numbers of Ukrainian citizens in the process. In what can only be described as the most blatant hypocrisy imaginable, Russia is fomenting in Ukraine actions that it would never tolerate on its own territory.

 

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