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| Ukraine; Ukraine & Russia - Putin backers & protesters | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 18 Dec 2013, 09:59 PM (3,470 Views) | |
| daib0 | 21 Jul 2014, 11:54 AM Post #81 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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BBC News Latest Ukraine Update MH17 plane crash: Dutch experts examine bodies Three Dutch investigators have examined bodies from the crashed Malaysia Airlines passenger plane, which are being kept on a train in east Ukraine. The experts said the train may later leave the rebel-held town of Torez to start the identification process. The US and other nations say there is growing evidence of Russian complicity in the downing of the plane last week. All 298 people on board MH17 died. Meanwhile, heavy fighting is reported in the main rebel-held city of Donetsk. Reports say clashes - involving heavy weapons - are going on near the city's airport and the railway station. At least three civilians were reported killed and one multi-storey building was seen on fire. BBC correspondents on the ground spoke of a number of refugees fleeing the city. In other developments on Monday: Ukrainian officials say 272 bodies have so far been found Ukrainian PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk proposes that the Netherlands will lead an international investigation A separate group of 31 international investigators is now in the eastern city of Kharkiv. They are expected to proceed closer to the crash site shortly. Russian President Vladimir Putin says it is essential to give international experts complete security so they can conduct an independent investigation The Dutch experts are the first international investigators to arrive in the region where the Boeing 777 went down on 17 July. Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have been at the accident site, but their access to the wreckage has been limited by the rebels. On Monday, the Dutch experts examined some of the 196 bodies kept in refrigerator wagons in Torez, some 15km (9 miles) away from the crash site. A second train arrived there on Sunday to take more bodies on board. Pressure has been steadily growing on pro-Russian rebels to allow experts access to the site. Flight MH17 crashed when it was reportedly hit by a missile. Russia has been accused of providing the rebels with an anti-aircraft system that was allegedly used in the attack. It denies the allegations. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose country lost 193 people, said all political and economic options were on the table if access to the crash site remained unsatisfactory. "We want our people back," he told parliament in The Hague. Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop earlier called on pro-Russian separatists not to use the bodies as pawns in their conflict with the Ukrainian authorities. "There are 298 bodies on that site - their families, their loved ones want them home now," she said. Separately, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the US had seen major military supplies moving into Ukraine from Russia in the last month, including a convoy of armoured personnel carriers, tanks and rocket launchers. Intercepted calls suggested a Russian SA-11 missile system - also known as BUK - had been transferred to the rebels, Mr Kerry said, and the US had seen a video of a launcher being moved back into Russia after flight MH17 crashed. "There's [an] enormous amount of evidence that points to the involvement of Russia in providing these systems, training the people on them," Mr Kerry said on a US TV network. He threatened further sanctions on Russia and called on European allies to get tougher with President Putin after the "wake-up call". Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister David Cameron said Europe and the West "must fundamentally change our approach to Russia" if Mr Putin "does not change his approach to Ukraine". The rebels say they will hand over MH17's flight recorders to the International Civil Aviation Organization, but the US state department said rebels had tampered with other potential evidence. Heavy machinery could be seen moving plane debris around at the crash site on Sunday. A Malaysian team of 133 officials and experts, comprising of search and recovery personnel, forensics experts, technical and medical experts has arrived in Ukraine. A separate UK group of air accident investigators is also there. But the government in Kiev says it has been unable to establish a safe corridor to the crash site. Fighting remains ongoing in eastern Ukraine between the separatist rebels and government forces in a conflict which erupted in April and is believed to have claimed more than 1,000 lives. |
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| Foxxinator | 21 Jul 2014, 02:17 PM Post #82 |
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This entire topic is so depressing I almost want to close it. Really hope they get a resolution and peace to the area soon. |
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| daib0 | 21 Jul 2014, 03:33 PM Post #83 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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to think they were holding the Euros nations not so long ago ... |
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| daib0 | 21 Jul 2014, 03:38 PM Post #84 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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Which reminds me of the Dutch fans there, just a couple of years ago ... Poignant ... http://royalsrendezvous.co.uk/topic/9608235/1 |
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| Owlish52 | 21 Jul 2014, 03:46 PM Post #85 |
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RR Foreign Legion - Across the Pond - View from Texas
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A report from the US magazine The New Republic (link: http://www.newrepublic.com/node/118782) on how this situation is being presented in the Russian Media. I find this frightening... Did you know Malaysia Air Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which looks strangely similar? Did you know that the crash of MH17 was all part of an American conspiracy to provoke a big war with Russia? Well, it’s all true—at least if you live in Russia, because this is the Malaysia Airlines crash story that you’d be seeing. As the crisis surrounding the plane crash deepens and as calls for Vladimir Putin to act grow louder, it’s worth noting that they’re not really getting through to Putin’s subjects. The picture of the catastrophe that the Russian people are seeing on their television screens is very different from that on screens in much of the rest of the world, and the discrepancy does not bode well for a sane resolution to this stand-off. Western media has been vacillating for days between calling Putin a murderer and peppering their coverage with allegedlys, telling the heart-rending tales of the victims, scrounging for anonymous leaks to link the Russians to the downed jet, and punditizing about exit ramps. But in Russia, television—most of it owned or controlled by the Kremlin—is trying to muddy the water with various experts who insist that there is no way that an SA-11 missile system could possibly have downed a plane flying that high. And, mind you, this is not part of a larger debate of could they, or couldn’t they; this is all of Russian television and state-friendly papers pushing one line: The pro-Russian separatists we’ve been supporting all these months couldn’t have done this. Watching some of these Russian newscasts, one comes away with the impression of a desperate defense attorney scrounging for experts and angles, or a bad kid caught red-handed by the principal, trying to twist his way out of a situation in which he has no chance. And that’s when they’re not simply peddling conspiracy theories, which have become a kind of symbiotic feedback loop between state TV and the most inventive corners of the Internet. The best of the bunch is, of course, an elaborate one: MH17 is actually MH370, that Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared into the Indian Ocean. According to this theory, the plane didn’t disappear at all, “it was taken to an American military base, Diego-Garcia.” Then it was taken to Holland. On the necessary day and hour, it flew out, bound for Malaysia, but inside were not live people, but corpses. The plane was flown not by real pilots; it was on autopilot. Or take-off (a complicated procedure) was executed by live pilots, who then ejected on parachutes. Then the plane flew automatically. In the necessary spot, it was blown up, without even using a surface-to-air missile. Instead the plane was packed with a bomb, just like the CIA did on 9/11. The theory also notes that the passports of victims at the crash site all look brand new even though there was an explosion and a fire. “That is, the passports were tossed in [after the crash].” And, most damningly, all the victims’ Facebook pages were created in one day and the media is not showing any of the victims’ families, just the crash site. Though this is not true of Western media, Russian television has not featured any of this. “There’s very little talk about the human cost of this catastrophe,” says independent television analyst Arina Borodina, formerly of the prominent Russian daily Kommersant. “Instead we’re seeing these unbelievable versions. For example, that someone had actually been hunting for the president or that some of the locals saw parachutists coming down from a height of 30,000 feet.” But though it may look unconvincing to us in the West, that is because we have seen and read other things that contradict it. The Russian media space has become so uniform and independent voices so cowed and marginalized that there is no counterweight and, when there’s no counterweight, if you repeat a thing often enough, it becomes the truth. ---- This isn’t an innocent you-say-tomato moment; this is a very problematic development. The result of all this Russian coverage is that Russians’ understanding of what happened is as follows. At best, the crash is an unfortunate accident on the part of the Ukrainian military that the West is trying to pin on Russia, which had nothing to do with it; at worst, it is all part of a nefarious conspiracy to drag Russia into an apocalyptic war with the West. So whereas the West sees the crash as a game-changer, the Russians do not see why a black swan event has to change anything or they want to resist what they see is a provocation. To them, after a few days of watching Russian television, it’s not at all clear what happened nor that their government is somehow responsible for this tragedy. And the more we insist on it, the less likely the Russians are to agree. Floriana Fossato, a longtime scholar of Russian media, says that this, coupled with the media’s conscious use of the Soviet language of crisis—“traitors,” “fascists,” “fifth columns”—quickly brings to the surface the psychological demons of a society massively traumatized by the twentieth century, traumas that society has never adequately addressed. The result, she says, is a kind of collective PTSD-meets-Stockholm Syndrome. In Russians' view, “Americans have recreated the situation where they have excuse for intervention,” Fossato says. “No one admits that they are afraid, but they are. They are panicked. And they are right in being afraid because they know what happened, and they know there must be an answer to what is going on. And so they lock onto Putin for protection. This is why they don’t turn to Putin and ask him to do something.” But in addition to the Russian public not clamoring for decisive action from Putin, there is a far more serious problem. As The New Yorker's David Remnick noted in his column on the crash of MH17, Putin has become prisoner to his own propaganda machine, much as he’s become prisoner of the rebels he thought were doing his geopolitical dirty work in Ukraine. After Putin’s ascent, media became the flexible element that could be readjusted for any twist or turn of the political rudder. “Today, it’s the opposite,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who helped Putin win his first election and was a Kremlin advisor for years afterwards. “It’s almost impossible to turn the rudder of the picture that’s formed on television because it would mean losing the audience they formed in this year” of sword-brandishing and imperialistic conquest. This audience is now fired up and brandishing its own swords, and the propaganda apparatus, much like the rebels in eastern Ukraine, has rolled on and on, fed by inertia and paranoia, reproducing and magnifying itself with each newscast. The sensationalized newscasts are now neck-and-neck, ratings-wise, with the sitcoms. “It keeps people in a traumatized state,” Pavlovsky says. “It’s notable in media metrics, and in conversations with people. They lose their sanity, they become paranoid and aggressive.” This has had a noticeable impact on the ruling class, Pavlovsky says, which has to watch this stuff in order to stay au courant. And they become less sane as a result, too, which limits their ability to adequately assess a situation such as this and devise a good way out of it. “It’s noticeable that the Kremlin is much more tempered than Russian TV but can’t change it,” Pavlovsky says. “It’s fallen into a trap, so it's now trying to function within the strictures of this picture.” He cites the example of the PR contortions the Kremlin had to use just to announce that it would not send troops into eastern Ukraine. “In this seemingly controlled media, any rational political arguments of the state have to be hidden and packaged in idiotic, jingoistic rhetoric,” Pavlovsky says. None of this looks very good for the West, which is clearly hoping that MH17 is the thing that will bring Putin to his senses and get him to agree to some kind of off-ramp, or, at least, a deescalation. But that’s hard to do if neither your public nor your political class see it as a game-changer or as anything that should force Russia to end this game. “Of course it gets in Putin’s way. He has to be the hero of this TV material, he’s not free from it anymore,” says Pavlovsky. “I have a feeling he's not very comfortable right now.” When we see significant deviations in public opinion and response to events, we need to be aware that in some (perhaps many, possibly _every_ ) country, those opinions and responses may be guided by a very different (and sometimes ridiculously so) set of 'facts' as presented in the public media. I hope that the West, with multiple 'independent media sources' is less prone to such distortions, but we can often see legitimate differences here on RR, with UK, US and Spanish media providing information sources that are at times not congruent with one another.
Edited by Owlish52, 21 Jul 2014, 03:48 PM.
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| "It could have been worse with Hillary..." - Owlish52 | |
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| daib0 | 22 Jul 2014, 11:11 AM Post #86 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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Just read on a Hammers forum - "Just to add. Before the Newcastle v Sydney Fc game in Dunedin tonight, Pardew & Collicini both put a wreath on the seats where the two Newcastle boys would have sat. Total respect to them and the Dunedin crowd who to a man observed a full minutes silence. Btw Newcastle won 4-0, but I suspect the result was a bit meaningless." |
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| bmb | 22 Jul 2014, 06:34 PM Post #87 |
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Invading AFCB Fan & sole member of the Viktor Kassai fanclub!
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Liam Sweeney was the son of a referee so the referees Association are going to/have set up something in conjunction with Newcastle on behalf of the referee community. |
| AFCB fan in peace! | |
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| daib0 | 31 Aug 2014, 03:43 PM Post #88 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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Well-respected writer on the BHS forum writes: "With regard to Russia's interference in the Ukraine, will it step up sanctions and risk having the gas supplies shut down, so many countries rely on Russian gas and oil some more than others. Are the imposed sanctions currently in force actually hurting Russia, or are they for the benefit of the electorate in thinking that the mighty EU is actually doing something and just how close are NATO in taking Ukraine into the fold and therefore getting directly involved with Russia. The loss of the Crimea is now largely forgotten as attention has switched to the East of Ukraine, the downing of the Malaysian aircraft and the deaths of several thousand looks more like the work of a national army than a group of insurgents so will a full scale war develop between Ukraine and Russia and will Russia only be happy by annexing part of Eastern Ukraine to support the Russian speaking population there. We are getting close to a finale, winter will be with us soon and the EU if more sanctions are imposed could find it a little colder than usual. Russia I believe sees Ukraine as part of Nato or the EU a step to far, perhaps the only way out of this mess is for the Ukraine government to give some sort of autonomy for the Russian speaking people of the East and to guarantee to Moscow that it will remain independent not under the Nato umbrella and not a member of the EU. " |
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| daib0 | 31 Aug 2014, 03:44 PM Post #89 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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and I've just replied: "I wish I could have a bit more enthusiasm for what you suggest Whits; but it's a huge area we're talking about. Few centres get mentioned on the news, but lots of cities are involved, and it tends to be the heavy industrial richer part, not the very west of Ukraine which is more more rural. This shows a bit to the readers: ![]() There have been various weird proposals also; one is the divide the country up in half - give the east to Russia and the west to Poland (before WW II large chunks of West Ukraine were in fact Poland!) But I do think it's too big for the average politician today to contemplate; in my opinion most politicians are now largely 'mere' small-minded economists and not forward visionaries, unfortunately ..." Edited by daib0, 31 Aug 2014, 03:55 PM.
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| daib0 | 31 Aug 2014, 03:53 PM Post #90 |
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Inter-Forum Gamemaster!
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And even that map is not complete; it's almost DOUBLE of that shaded yellow area!! Few now remember that in mid-April Pro-Russian demonstrators announce Kharkiv's independence - here goes: http://www.ibtimes.com/pro-russia-protesters-donetsk-kharkiv-declare-themselves-independent-ukraine-donetsk-asks-1568635 |
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) country, those opinions and responses may be guided by a very different (and sometimes ridiculously so) set of 'facts'
as presented in the public media. I hope that the West, with multiple 'independent media sources' is less prone to such distortions, but we can often see legitimate differences here on RR, with UK, US and Spanish media providing information sources that are at times not congruent with one another.



8:32 AM Jul 11