17:36 16-12-2013
Òèìîòè Ñíàéäåð. Êàê âñåãäà, â òî÷êó.
Imagine the following: the American Ambassador to France goes on French television and declares, “Americans and Canadians are one nation. It’s like the Bretons and the Normans in France. You can’t separate them.” The ambassador would be summoned to Washington and, from that moment forward, Americans would be reminded of the foolish incident every time they set foot in France. After all, diplomats don’t usually go around claiming that neighboring nations don’t exist.
[...]During the Ukrainian crisis Russia announced the third trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch who challenged Putin. It now seems unlikely that he will leave prison while Putin is still alive. It is hard to imagine that the Ukrainian oligarchs did not get this message, although of course it simply reaffirmed what they already knew: they can flourish only within a sovereign Ukrainian state. Beyond this basic question of personal freedom, the Ukrainian oligarchs have actual business interests in Europe, and seem to support the trade agreement with the EU. The company owned by the most important of them, Rinat Akhmetov, issued a press release intoning its allegiance to “European values.”