Tag: Russia

Ukraine: Chomsky’s view

~ The Koboi Project

In an interview recorded on 10 Jan 2022, Chomsky unpacks the crisis that has sinse led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He echoes John Mearsheimer’s vie wanout the necessary neutrality of Ukraine with regard to NATO-Russian relations. He decribes the decision by the USA in 2008, taken against the wishes of France and Germany, to invite Ukraine to enter NATO as being utterely unacceptable to any Russian leader (ie this is not a question of Putin’s megalomania). Like Mearsheimer, Chomsky implicates the expansion of NATO contrary to gurantees given to the Soviet Union at the time of the unification of Germany as an significant cause of the present crisis.

He also suggests that the implementation of the Minsk 2 agreement (2015) which would establish the neutrality of Ukraine, as a possible way forward. However, as Duncan Allan notes, “Minsk-2 supports mutually exclusive views of sovereignty: either Ukraine is sovereign (Ukraine’s interpretation), or it is not (Russia’s interpretation)” he calls this “the Minsk conundrum”.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/05/minsk-conundrum-western-policy-and-russias-war-eastern-ukraine-0/minsk-2-agreement

Ukraine: Dovzhenko’s Earth

~ The Koboi Project

Alexander Dovzhenko’s last silent film Earth (Zelmya) 1930 (third part of his Ukraine Trilogy which includes  Zvenyhora, 1928, and Arsenal, 1929) is a tragic and violent narrative of the Soviet collectivization is set within a lyrical Ukrainian landscape. The film features images of the cultivated Mammoth Sunflower which produces a single golden flower that grows up to 10″ across and is filled with edible seeds.

I bring up this imagery from nearly a century ago in response to the video making the rounds on social media and raising to the mainstream, that of a Ukranian woman confronting a Russian soldier in the early days of the invasion, symbolically offering him sunflower seeds so that flowers would grow where he died on Ukrainian soil, ‘Take these seeds and put them in your pockets” she seems to say, “so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.’

This powerful image raises, for me the difference I have with Andrei Tarkovsky’s premise that image can be separated from its symbols – Ukraine > Sunflower> Seeds > Death > Life > Ukraine.

https://www.thedigitalfix.com/film/dvd_review/the-dovzhenko-war-trilogy-zvenigora-arsenal-earth/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/feb/25/ukrainian-woman-sunflower-seeds-russian-soldiers-video

Ukraine: The Boy from Kharkiv

~ The Koboi Project

Ya Mogo Govorit

There are few scenes in 20th-century cinema that I hold as dear as the opening scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo (Mirror). I have identified with the young man in that scene in terms of the struggle to express myself in my art and, in terms of getting through life itself in difficult times …. as Russian forces assault the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv … I am reminded how the young man in this scene struggles to say that he hails from Kharkov (Russian for Kharkiv) …. My prayers are with that boy from Kharkiv.

https://eturbonews.com/3019230/kharkiv-is-fallen/

https://koboiproject.com/2020/07/25/tarkovsky-monument-2-2/
https://koboibalikkampung.wixsite.com/berhijrah

Ukraine: A prescient analysis from 2015

~ The Koboi Project

Given the derth of intellect and integrity in the mainstream media here in Canada, I thought I would share a prescient analysis on the crisis (the 2014 crises) in the Ukraine by John Mearsheimer, who is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. There is no doubt that there are those in North American establishment who are, today, in the position to say to their political leaders, “I told you so!”

Have we reached that disastrous point of rupture – the balkanization of Ukraine, that Mearsheimer was hoping would be avoided?