Fascism Comes to Ukraine -- From Russia
By Cathy Young - May 21, 2014

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/05/21/fascism_comes_to_ukraine_--_from_russia_122700.html <<< Click here to read with hyper links.

Despite multiple debunkings, claims that Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution brought about by the Maidan protests was really a fascist (if not neo-Nazi) coup persist, and not just from the Kremlin propaganda machine and conspiracy-minded fringe websites that seek the evil hand of American imperialism everywhere. The other day, it turned up in a column in The Guardian by veteran journalist John Pilger, who depicts the Kiev leadership as a fascist junta and its supporters as homicidal thugs—and Vladimir Putin as “the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.” Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that the Putin regime is not fighting fascism but promoting it—not just in Europe, where it is cultivating ties with far-right movements, but in Ukraine, where the separatist movement in the east is a nest of Kremlin-sponsored Russian ultranationalists.

The narrative of the United States colluding with neo-Nazis in Ukraine has a lot of currency on the left. Late last month, the subject came up repeatedly during an appearance by Ukrainian Jewish leader Josef Zissels, a strong Maidan supporter, at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. During the question-and-answer period, an angry man in the audience berated Zissels for downplaying the fascist threat: “Neo-Nazis” from the Svoboda party, he insisted, had captured key national security posts including the ministry of defense and were certainly never going to relinquish that power. When Zissels, clearly impatient with the topic, pointed out that the Svoboda-affiliated defense minister was already gone from that post, the man—who turned out to be NYU professor of politics and veteran Marxist Bertell Ollman, armed with an article from the far-left online magazine Counterpunch—was visibly skeptical.

But, of course, Zissels was right; Ihor Tehnyuk, the first acting minister of defense in the interim government and a Svoboda politician, had been dismissed on March 25 and replaced by a nonpartisan career military officer. Even apart from being dated, the widely cited Counterpunch piece contains several inaccuracies. It misidentifies unaffiliated Education Minister Serhiy Kvit as a Svoboda member, describes national security chief Andriy Parubiy as a “co-founder of Svoboda” without mentioning his post-2004 move to moderate and even left-of-center parties, and promotes Dmitro Yarosh, head of the paramilitary group Right Sector, to deputy national security chief when in fact he sought that position but did not get it.

Zissels, like most Maidan revolution supporters, believes that Ukrainian fascism is a Russian propaganda-inflated phantom menace. (He also echoed the view, common among Ukrainian liberals, that both Svoboda and Right Sector were created by the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime—both as tools to control nationalist activism and as bogeymen to scare the liberal opposition.) Other observers, such as University of Ottawa political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, argue that militant far-right nationalists did play a key role in the violent turn of the protests against the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in February.

Sorting out these conflicting accounts, in a situation as volatile and chaotic as this year’s events in Ukraine, is a daunting enterprise. Among those interested in facts rather than propaganda wars, there is also considerable debate about the extent to which either Svoboda or Right Sector can be described as “fascist.” Katchanovski, who takes a fairly harsh view of the role of right-wing nationalist groups in Ukraine, has said that Svoboda is currently “radical nationalist” but not “fascist or neo-Nazi” or overtly anti-Semitic. At his New York appearance, Zissels stressed that, whatever this or that nationalist leader may personally think of Jews, anti-Semitism is not considered acceptable rhetoric in Ukrainian politics right now.

No less important, events since the fall of the Yanukovych regime strongly suggest that the current influence of far-right groups is negligible. Svoboda lawmakers were initially able to push through a bill repealing the 2012 law that guaranteed the status of Russian as the country’s second official language—but it was promptly vetoed by acting President Oleksandr Turchynov. Right Sector was the target of a government crackdown in late March: Its most militant fighter, Oleksandr Muzychko, was gunned down during a police chase, the group’s headquarters was raided in Kiev, and the parliament voted to disarm all paramilitary units. If anything has hindered the implementation of this decision, it is, above all, separatist unrest in the East and the threat of a Russian invasion.

The tragic deaths of more than 40 people (mostly pro-Russia activists) in a fire in Odessa on May 2 after a clash between pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine demonstrators has added fuel, as it were, to the “Ukrainian Nazis” narrative—particularly since it easily lends itself to World War II parallels of people being burned alive by Nazis. In his Guardian piece, Pilger baldly accuses anyone who treats the circumstances of the fire as “murky” of complicity in the coverup of a massacre. But in fact, the circumstances are murky—to such an extent that even some “alternative” media pushing the “neo-Nazi atrocity” angle have suggested that the incident was a “false flag operation,” with the dead slaughtered inside the building before the fire and the pro-Maidan “fascists” disguising themselves as separatists to stage the street fight. Just why Maidan supporters would engineer this horrific hoax to make their opponents look sympathetic is not explained.

Meanwhile, Pilger recycles an already discredited (and removed) Facebook post by an “Odessa doctor” claiming that the nationalists stopped him from helping injured people who managed to get out of the building and chased him off with anti-Semitic threats. (Video footage shown on Russian TV—with voice-over narration claiming that fire survivors who managed to get out were beaten and hacked to death outside—actually shows people in the crowd assisting a woman who climbs down a rope from a window.)

There is little doubt that the Ukrainian nationalist movement, like any nationalism, has its ugly side—from thuggish soccer fans, implicated in the violence in Odessa, to more sinister groups that flirt with Nazi imagery and speak of “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” But the overwhelming evidence is that these elements are marginal and very far from controlling Ukraine’s agenda. If there is a “neo-Nazi junta” in power in Kiev, it would be the first such junta in history to have the active support of the Jewish community and give key posts to Jews.

Meanwhile, in the east of Ukraine, the separatist movement is giving key posts in its puppet governments to people like Russian “political consultant” Aleksandr Borodai, the new “prime minister” of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Even leaving aside the fact that this new servant of Ukrainian federalism is a Russian citizen rumored to work for Russia’s state security agency, the FSB, Borodai has a long history of involvement with Russian ultranationalist circles.

In the 1990s, Borodai worked for the newspaper Zavtra (“Tomorrow”), run by the eccentric journalist and novelist Aleksandr Prokhanov—a devout Stalinist and notorious anti-Semite whose ideology bears strong marks of Russian fascism if not Nazism (including fascination with the idea that Russia is the true “mystical womb” of Aryan civilization). This week, Prokhanov sang Borodai’s praises to Russia’s National News Service, calling him a true “White Russian nationalist.” And Borodai’s involvement with Russia’s nationalist lunatic fringe—which, these days, is scarily close to the mainstream—is not limited to the past. In December 2011, he and Prokhanov co-founded the “patriotic” Web TV channel Den-TV (“Day”); today, Borodai is one of the channel’s three editorial board members, along with Prokhanov, and one of its regular hosts. Among Den-TV’s other regulars: Konstantin Dushenov, a writer who has actually served time in a penal colony for anti-Semitic incitement. Dushenov is the author of a video series titled “Russia With a Knife in its Back: Jewish Fascism and the Genocide of the Russian People,” and the publisher of a 2006 open letter asking for a ban on all Jewish organizations in Russia.

This is just one example of the key role nationalist extremist groups from Russia have played in separatist militancy in Eastern Ukraine. On May 7, the Ukrainian security service, the SBU, released the audio of an intercepted telephone conversation in which a man said to be Aleksandr Barkashov, the leader of Russian National Unity—a paramilitary group that can, without exaggeration, be called neo-Nazi—was instructing an organizer of the Donetsk independence referendum, Dmitro Boitsov, on making up the required results.

On his page on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, Barkashov implied that the audio was fake—but on the grounds that he was actually in Donetsk and had no need to talk to Boitsov on the phone when they could chat “over a cup of tea.” (For good measure, he mocked the Ukrainian security agency as “the Yid-Khokhol SBU”; khokhol is the Russian pejorative term for Ukrainians.) However, Yuri Vendik of the BBC Russian Service notes that a May 5 post on Barkashov’s Vkontakte page, since taken down, recounted a phone call from “our brothers and comrades-in-arms in Donetsk” that sounds exactly like the SBU intercept. In any case, Barkashov’s page fully confirms his extensive involvement in the events in Donetsk, where he says the RNU is organizing volunteer troops to fight “the vicious Kiev junta.”

Earlier, Russian neo-fascist guru Aleksandr Dugin (the subject of an admiring interview published in English in 2012 on the white supremacist website Countercurrents), was intercepted in a Skype call mentoring another Ukrainian separatist activist, Yekaterina Gubareva, wife of then-imprisoned Donetsk separatist leader Pavel Gubarev (formerly active in Barkashov’s RNU).

Then there’s “the Wolves’ Hundred,” a group of Russian Cossack militiamen fighting in Ukraine. As Time’s Simon Schuster has pointed out, there is a certain irony in the Cossacks parroting the Kremlin line about fighting Ukrainian Nazis: The group’s founder, Shkuro, was a Nazi collaborator executed by the Soviets in 1947. Have the Cossacks evolved since then? Maybe not: In a video statement released this week, one of the group’s leaders, the colorful “Babay” (Aleksandr Mozhaev), explained that its goal was to destroy “the Jew-Masons,” who are “fomenting disorder all over the world” and “causing us, the common Orthodox Christian folk, to suffer.” Another Cossack in Slavyansk told The Guardian’s Luke Harding that Russians and Ukrainians were one people “before Jews like Trotsky divided us.”

While the infamous Donetsk leaflet ordering Jews to register and pay a special fee to the separatist “government” was almost certainly a hoax, Russian political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov, who studies right-wing radicalism, points out that there have been real and numerous manifestations of anti-Semitism in the anti-Maidan movement in southeastern Ukraine. Among them: street posters, Internet posts, and even speeches at rallies attacking the new Kiev government as a Jewish clique seeking to use Ukrainians to defend the interests of wealthy Jews, or depicting the Maidan revolution as a “Zionist coup.” The Euro-Asian Jewish Congress notes that when pro-Russian separatists seized control of the television station in Slavyansk on April 17, their introductory broadcast was a video bearing the logo and Web address of the rabidly anti-Semitic Popular Liberation Movement and promising that their broadcasting would be a counterattack against “the Zionist zombie box.”

Of course, Moscow is not directing all these activities, but it takes full advantage of them and manipulates militant nationalism for its own purposes. The extent to which the Putin regime’s drive against the Maidan revolution in Ukraine is enmeshed with extremist nationalist forces in Russia is revealed by a startling fact: One of the two journalists currently reporting from Ukraine for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia’s highest-circulation newspaper (owned by a corporation with strong government ties), has a long history of involvement with nationalist extremism. The journalist, Dmitry Steshin, used to write for Russkiy Obraz (Russian Image), a magazine of the now-banned movement by the same name. Steshin was even called as a witness in 2011 when a friend of his, fellow Russkiy Obraz member Nikita Tikhonov, was tried (and convicted) in the slaying of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova.

Russia, fighting fascism in Ukraine? There’s a claim that gives a new meaning to chutzpah.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/05/21/fascism_comes_to_ukraine_--_from_russia_122700.html

Borodai — a ruler in the tradition of Plato?
Author: Dale Street

In mid-May the previously unheard-of Aleksandr Borodai was declared Prime Minister of the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’.

This fact alone should disabuse anyone deluded enough to believe that there is anything ‘progressive’, ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘left-wing’ about the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and its Lugansk counterpart.

In 1992 Borodai fought as a volunteer in the war in the predominantly ethnic-Russian Transnistrian region when it broke away from Moldova. In 1993 he took part in the defence of the Russian Parliament after its dissolution by Yeltsin.

Borodai went on to write for the Russian newspaper “Zavtra” – poisonously anti-semitic, full of nostalgia for Stalin, rabidly Russian nationalist, and arguably outright fascist. According to the newspaper’s owner and editor, Aleksandr Prekhanov:

“I’ve known him (Borodai) since 1991. In terms of his ideology he is a Russian nationalist. He is a supporter of a strong Russian state. … He’s always been close to me, and has preached the idea of a Russian national white – not red – imperial consciousness.”

Apart from turning his hand to running his own PR consultancies and working as deputy editor of the magazine “Russian Businessman”, Borodai helped Prekhanov to launch the “Djen” television channel in 2011.

Like “Zavtra”, the channel’s output consists of anti-semitism, Russian nationalism, conspiracy theories, homophobia, misogyny, denunciations of the decadence of European civilization, and, more recently, treatises on the ‘fiction’ of a Ukrainian national identity.

Along with Prekhanov, Borodai is on the channel’s editorial board and, until recently, regularly hosted its programmes.

Another “Djen” regular is Konstantin Dushenov. He has served time for anti-semitic incitement and is the author of a video series entitled: “Russia with a Knife in its Back – Jewish Fascism and the Genocide of the Russian People.”

In early 2014 Borodai turned up in the Crimea, working as a “political strategist” for the peninsula’s “governor” (and mafia boss) Sergei Aksyonov at the time of its annexation by Russia.

From the Crimea Borodai moved directly to south-east Ukraine: ““The territory of the Crimea is quite closely connected to the Donbass, and naturally the people who set up these popular movements are the same people, they are connected to each other. So when I finished in Crimea, I automatically came here.”

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More information about Borodai’s politics can be found in an interview recently published by “Russkaya Vesna”, the website of the Donetsk and Lugansk ‘People’s Republics’:

“Aleksandr, how did it come about that it was you who ended up as the head of the republic’s government?”

“Fate decreed it to be so. I cannot answer any differently. I was prepared to take this responsibility on myself and to take up this role simply by virtue of my personal characteristics.

I see what is happening as a confirmation that history has not ended, contrary to the claims of fashionable philosophers. Today it is happening in front of our eyes. And the most important thing is that it is the history of my native country.”

“You are a product of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, the son of a philosopher. You’ll recall Plato’s idea that philosophers must rule. I know you fought as a volunteer in Transnistria and defended the Russian Parliament in 1993. What are your opinions?”

“To put it briefly and simply, I am a Russian patriot. I consider that the extent of the Russian world was artificially reduced as a result of certain circumstances, and that the Russian world was divided by artificially created borders. Those borders divide people of Russian culture.

I am convinced that the difference between the inhabitants of, say, the Rostov and Donetsk regions is to a certain degree imaginary. I therefore see my task as defending and supporting my compatriots.

Basically, we are at one of the first stages (this became particularly obvious after the reunification of the Crimea and Russia), the gathering together of the Russian world, which was violently dismembered after the geo-political catastrophe of 1991.”

“Is it true that you were personally acquainted with the philosopher Lev Gumilev (see below). Could one say that his creativity has influenced your own views?”

I was still a child when I had the good fortune to associate with him. He was often a guest in our home and spent summers in my father’s dacha. Once he even had something like a mystic revelation, but I’ll talk about that another time.

Many early but valuable memories link me to this mystic. I highly value his contribution to Russian culture and science. Absolutely, he has influenced me.”

“In that case, could what is happening in the Donetsk Republic be regarded as an eruption of passionarity (see below)?”

“What’s happening confirms that the Russian cultural archetype is far from having exhausted his vitality. Just as in Transnistria, so too in the Donetsk Republic we are confronted with the process of the self-organisation of the Russian world, in response to the uncompromising challenge it faces.

What is happening in the south-east of Ukraine can be characterized as a Russian uprising. Russian in the broad sense of the word – in terms of culture, mentality and civilization. But I’d also like to point out that ethnic Ukrainians are massively involved in the resistance movement. This process is not to be stopped.”

The Lev Gumilev praised by Borodai was a Russian ethnologist and anthropologist (and anti-semite) who theorized that ethnic groups went through a particular life-cycle. Such groups expanded, through conquest, when their national “passionarity” reached maximum heat.

“Passionarity” is stimulated by external, mostly natural, events (such as oscillations in solar radiation levels). Similarly, it is natural events which set cultures apart. Hence, according to Gumilev, the border between Russia and the West coincides with the negative isotherm for January.

For Gumilev, the Mongol domination of medieval Russia saved Russia from the West and Catholicism and created a Russian “super-ethnos”, through a merger of Eastern Slavs (currently: Russia, Ukraine and Belorus) with Tatars and Mongols.

Gumilev contrasted the “passionarity” of the Russian “super-ethnos” with “parasite states” which exercised only “chimera statehood”. Examples of the latter states were America and France, both of which has been created by Jews (who, lacking a “passionarity” of their own, are necessarily parasitic on other peoples).

But whereas Gumilev, who died in 1992, thought that the life-cycle of the Russian “super-ethnos” had entered into a period of decline (as manifested in the collapse of the Soviet Union), Borodai believes that the Russian “super-ethnos” retains its vital force of “passionarity”.

On 23rd May Borodai’s ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ opened its first foreign ‘consulate’ – on the premises of the Moscow branch of the Eurasian Youth Union (EYU).

The EYU is the youth wing of the Eurasia Party, headed by fascist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin. Like its mentor, the EYU’s politics are anti-semitic, Russian-imperialist, authoritarian and ‘Eurasian’ (i.e. in favour of the creation of a new Eurasian Empire, centred on Russia).

A particularly important day in the EYU’s calendar of annual celebrations is 29th December – birthday of the late Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a czarist officer, anti-semite and staunch monarchist who established a short-live dictatorship in Mongolia in 1920.

According to a biography of the late baron – who dreamt of leading an Asian empire against the decadent West and had a habit of riding into battle bare-chested and necklaced with bones – the baron’s politics were “proto-fascist, with motifs of racism, feudal hierarchy, regenerative bloodshed and mystic communion with primitive virility.”

The consulate is to assist “the cause of re-unifying the territories of historic Russia which were artificially split up in 1991” and has already been recognized by a number of Russian “patriotic organizations”, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR – another Russian-imperialist, semi-fascist, etc., etc. party).

To mark the opening of the consulate, representatives of the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and the LDPR held a joint press conference, which also announced a formal signed agreement between the two bodies, whereby the LDPR is now the ‘official’ collector in Russia of ‘humanitarian aid’ for the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’.

The next time British Stalinists want to stage a protest about fascism in Ukraine – perhaps they could direct their anti-fascists endeavours towards Prime Minister Borodai and his supporters? Or are they incapable of recognizing fascism when it comes draped in a Russian tricolour?

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/05/26/borodai-%E2%80%94-ruler-tradition-plato

Putin's Western Allies
Why Europe's Far Right Is on the Kremlin's Side

Given that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stated reasons for invading Crimea was to prevent “Nazis” from coming to power in Ukraine, it is perhaps surprising that his regime is growing closer by the month to extreme right-wing parties across Europe. But, in both cases, Putin’s motives are not primarily ideological. In Ukraine, he simply wants to grab territory that he believes rightly belongs to him. In the European Union, he hopes that his backing of fringe parties will destabilize his foes and install in Brussels politicians who will be focused on dismantling the EU rather than enlarging it.

In Hungary, for example, Putin has taken the Jobbik party under his wing. The third-largest party in the country, Jobbik has supporters who dress in Nazi-type uniforms, spout anti-Semitic rhetoric, and express concern about Israeli “colonization” of Hungary. The party has capitalized on rising support for nationalist economic policies, which are seen as an antidote for unpopular austerity policies and for Hungary’s economic liberalization in recent years. Russia is bent on tapping into that sentiment. In May 2013, Kremlin-connected right-wing Russian nationalists at the prestigious Moscow State University invited Jobbik party president Gabor Vona to speak. Vona also met with Russia Duma leaders including Ivan Grachev, chairman of the State Duma Committee for Energy and Vasily Tarasyuk, deputy chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources and Utilization, among others. On the Jobbik website, the visit is characterized as “a major breakthrough” which made “clear that Russian leaders consider Jobbik as a partner.” In fact, there have been persistent rumors that Jobbik’s enthusiasm is paid for with Russian rubles. The party has also repeatedly criticized Hungary’s “Euro-Atlantic connections” and the European Union. And, more recently, it called the referendum in Crimea “exemplary,” a dangerous word in a country with extensive co-ethnic populations in Romania and Slovakia. It seems that the party sees Putin’s new ethnic politics as being aligned with its own revisionist nationalism.

The Kremlin’s ties to France’s extreme-right National Front have also been growing stronger. Marine Le Pen, the party leader, visited Moscow in June 2013 at the invitation of State Duma leader Sergei Naryshkin, a close associate of Putin’s. She also met with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and discussed issues of common concern, such as Syria, EU enlargement, and gay marriage. France’s ProRussia TV, which is funded by the Kremlin, is staffed by editors with close ties to the National Front who use the station to espouse views close to National Front’s own perspective on domestic and international politics. The National Front wishes to replace the EU and NATO with a pan-European partnership of independent nations, which, incidentally, includes Russia and would be driven by a trilateral Paris-Berlin-Moscow alliance. Le Pen’s spokesman, Ludovic De Danne, recently recognized the results of the Crimea referendum and stated in an interview with Voice of Russia radio that, “historically, Crimea is part of Mother Russia.” In the same interview, he mentioned that he had visited Crimea several times in the past year. Marine Le Pen also visited Crimea in June 2013.

The list of parties goes on. Remember Golden Dawn, the Greek fascist party that won 18 seats in Greece’s parliament in 2012? Members use Nazi symbols at rallies, emphasize street fighting, and sing the Greek version of the Nazi Party anthem. The Greek government imprisoned Nikos Michaloliakos, its leader, and stripped parliamentary deputies of their political immunity before slapping them with charges of organized violence. But the party continues to take to the streets. Golden Dawn has never hidden its close connections to Russia’s extreme right, and is thought to receive funds from Russia. One Golden Dawn­­–linked website reports that Michaloliakos even received a letter in prison from Moscow State University professor and former Kremlin adviser Alexander Dugin, one of the authors of Putin’s “Eurasian” ideology. It was also Dugin who hosted Jobbik leader Vona when he visited Moscow. In his letter, Dugin expressed support for Golden Dawn’s geopolitical positions and requested to open a line of communication between Golden Dawn and his think tank in Moscow. Golden Dawn’s New York website reports that Michaloliakos “has spoken out clearly in favor of an alliance and cooperation with Russia, and away from the ‘naval forces’ of the ‘Atlantic.’”

Finally, a cable made public by WikiLeaks shows that Bulgaria’s far right Ataka party has close links to the Russian embassy. Reports that Russia funds Ataka have swirled for years, but have never been verified. But evidence of enthusiasm for Russia’s foreign policy goals is open for all to see. Radio Bulgaria reported on March 17 that Ataka’s parliamentary group “has insisted that Bulgaria should recognize the results from the referendum for Crimea’s joining to the Russian Federation.” Meanwhile, party leader Volen Siderov has called repeatedly for Bulgaria to veto EU economic sanctions for Russia.

In addition to their very vocal support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea within the EU, Jobbik, National Front, and Ataka all sent election observers to validate the Crimea referendum (as did the Austrian Freedom Party, the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, Italy’s Forza Italia and Lega Nord, and Poland’s Self-Defense, in addition to a few far-left parties, conspicuously Germany’s Die Linke). Their showing was organized by the Russia-based Eurasian Observatory For Democracy & Elections, a far-right NGO “opposed to Western ideology.” The EODE specializes in monitoring elections in “self-proclaimed republics” (Abkhazia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh) allied with Moscow, according to its website.

The Putin government’s cordial relations with Europe’s far right sit oddly, to say the least, with his opposition to “Nazis” in the Ukrainian government. Yet Putin’s dislike for Ukrainian “fascists” has nothing to do with ideology. It has to do with the fact that they are Ukrainian nationalists. The country’s Svoboda and Right Sector parties, which might do well in the post–Viktor Yanukovych Ukraine, stand for independence in a country that Putin does not believe should exist separate from Russia.

Similarly, Russian support of the far right in Europe has less to do with ideology than with his desire to destabilize European governments, prevent EU expansion, and help bring to power European governments that are friendly to Russia. In that sense, several European countries may only be one bad election away from disaster. In fact, some would say that Hungary has already met it. As support for Jobbik increases, the anti-democratic, center-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has tacked heavily to the right and recently signed a major nuclear deal with Russia. Russia plans to lend Hungary ten billion euro to construct two new reactors at its Paks nuclear plant, making Hungary even more dependent for energy on Russia. Jobbik’s Vona wants to go even further, taking Hungary out of the EU and joining Russia’s proposed Eurasian Union.

European parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for the end of May, are expected to result in a strong showing for the far right. A weak economy, which was weakened further by the European Central Bank’s austerity policies, has caused the extreme right vote to surge. Current polls show the far-right parties in France and Holland winning the largest share of seats in their national delegations. Brussels strategists worry that 20 percent of members of the new European parliament could be affiliated with parties that wish to abolish the EU, double the current number. That could cause an EU government shutdown to rival the dysfunction of Washington and deal a major blow to efforts to enlarge the Union and oppose Russian expansionism.

It is strange to think that Putin’s strategy of using right-wing extremist political parties to foment disruption and then take advantage -- as he did in Crimea -- could work in southern and western Europe as well. Or that some of the extreme right parties in the European parliament, who work every day to delegitimize the European Union and whose numbers are growing, may be funded by Russia. Yet these possibilities cannot be dismissed. Russia might soon be able to disrupt the EU from within.

To counter Russia, European leaders should start launching public investigations into external funding of extreme-right political parties. If extensive Russia connections are found, it would be important to publicize that fact and then impose sanctions on Russia that would make it more difficult for it to provide such support. Pro-European parties must find a way to mobilize voters who are notoriously unwilling to vote in European parliament elections. Europe will also have to rethink the austerity policies that have worsened the grievances of many Europeans and pushed them to support the anti-system, anti-European right. Although Germany has banned extreme right parties from representation, other countries have not. Germany may have therefore underestimated the extent of damage austerity policies could do to the European project and should rethink how its excessive budget cutting, monetary prudence, and export surpluses are affecting politics in the rest of Europe.

Putin’s challenge to Europe must be taken seriously. Rather than making another land grab in his back yard, he might watch patiently from the sidelines at the end of May as pro-Russia far-right parties win a dramatic election victory in European parliamentary elections. These elections could weaken the European Union and bring Russia’s friends on the far right closer to power.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141067/mitchell-a-orenstein/putins-western-allies

What a bunch of BS. Sorry for your wall of text, but it's load of crap.
So much stupid speculation based on ... nothing.

So the elections are over. Poroshenko it is, as expected. The only slightly surpising fact is he managed to win the elections in the first round. I'm wondering what is the pecetage of those who voted compared to those who have legal right to vote? That might be indicative.

Two main questions to ask. Will these elections be recognized by the PRD and PRL? No, they won't. Is Poroshenko going to end the war on the East? Judging by recent activity, no, he won't. Conclusion. Elections haven't changed much aside from slightly legitimizing junta.

As for the real results of Maidan, I wish to cordially congratulate Ukrainians with this epic vicotry of Maidan. Death of hundreeds, loss of Crimea, Donetsk and Luganks, on-going civil war, devaluation of national currency and questionable prospects of national economy are absolutely worth the prize of having oligarch Poroshenko, one of many funders of Maidan, in the presidental office. People of Maidan are against corruption, oligarchy and injustice!

How can there be corruption if the president is already rich enough ;)

Answering my own question, over 60%. At first I was like, really? But then I've checked the number of electoral districs, which is 188 versus 225 as it supposed to be :D So they've exluded all districts out of their control along with electorate from the statistics. I'd understand Crimea and Sevastopol, but (even though elections have been sabotaged there, no doubt) why exclude Donetsk and Lugansk districts? It's still Ukraine.

Overall the activity of the South-East was so-so, including the regions where there's no war. Given the existing options of these elections, I don't blame them for the lack of enthusiasm.

Polish guys in Donetsk, fightnig on the Rebels side. "We represent free Polish people, who are against bases of NATO terrorists in Poland".

To illustrate my point. Activity of the voters compared to last elections according to electoralgeography.com. Red -- down, green -- up, white -- no data.

Even so called pro-SE candidats like Dobkin (Kharkov governor) or Tigipko (Party of Regions deputy) didn't make it to the top-list. Clearly South-East doesn't care about these elections that much.

People on the ground reports that nor the post behind them, nor depicted BRDM belongs to the people's army of Donbass. I wouldn't hold my breath until confimation. There's Vostok interbattalion and people from neighbouring republics of Russia, including Crimea, there were rumors about people from Central Asian republics, probably Afghanistan vets from so called Muslim bats. Could imagine people from Armenia and Abkhazia might appear there someday, but that's about it for now.