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Russia’s Terrorizing Market Prices
According to Simon Jenkins, asking for market prices is terrorism.
Russia will not lay aside oil and gas as weapons to terrorise former colonies on its western border, any more than the west is going to stop attacking Putin for suppressing free speech.
Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian
Let’s consider this terror. In 2006 U.S. average wellhead prices for natural gas were about $275 per 1000 cubic meters.
The old price Ukraine paid was about 486% lower than Turkey paid Gazprom (Turkey pays $243 to Russia, $236 to Iran for gas).
Russia-Ukraine gas dispute
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An hour after Gazprom threatened to cut off supplies, the firm announced that Tbilisi had agreed to pay $235 per 1,000 cubic metres, up from $110.
Georgia ‘agrees Russia gas bill’
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The deal more than doubles the amount Belarus will pay for Russian natural gas in 2007, and will raise it to European levels by 2011.
Belarus, Russia Sign Last-Minute Gas Deal
There you have it – Russia threatened Georgia, Belarus and the Ukraine by asking them to pay the market price for its natural gas. For Jenkins this is the equivalent of suicide-bombing in the London tube.
It is terrorizing.
Depicting these countries as ‘former colonies’ as Jenkins does is ahistoric. Ukraine has been in a union with Russia since the signing the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654. Belarus was annexed by Imperial Russia in 1795. Before that it was not independent but under the rule of the Poland and Lithuania union. Georgia was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1800 which prevented it from being conquested by Persia.
Until the 1990s these countries were integral parts of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years. They never were colonies like those the British Empire exploited.
But Jenkins’ tirade fits the current British propaganda theme about the nasty Russians who don’t extradite their citizens based on flimsy accusations.
Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that Britain had been less successful than Russia in convincing its European partners of the merits of its case. "Quite a lot of people are convinced by the Russian argument that we lecture them about the rule of law and now we’re asking them to overrule their own constitution," he said.
The rules of markets and constitutional laws – truely terrorizing.
to be sure, ukraine was basically a colony of russia, depending on how “little russia” was defined geographically and culturally.
Daedalus, Vol. 126, Issue 3 – A New Europe for the Old? – Summer 1997, Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State
pp. 85 – 120:
Did Ukraine then become part of Russia three and a half centuries ago? Only a small part. Before 1648, virtually all Ukrainians lived within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern frontier extended to the east of the Dnieper River. Only after 1667 did a part of that vast territory – today’s regions of Poltava and Chernihiv, with the city of Kiev – come under rule of the tsar in Moscow. After 1667, Warsaw ruled more Ukrainian territory and more Ukrainians than did Moscow. The land to the west of the Dnieper remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1793-1795. The Polish nobility was the dominant group in the area until 1830, if not 1863, and the Poles retained great social and cultural influence until after the Russian revolutions of 1917.(4)
…
Before long, the Russians began to understand the connection between the Polish and the Ukrainian questions. They did so in a manner characteristic of a police mentality. Drawing a number of conclusions from the 1863 Polish uprising, which was finally suppressed by the summer of 1864, the government in St. Petersburg modified the terms of the emancipation of 1861 in regions that had been the scene of the Polish uprising; further, it announced a number of anti-Catholic measures. St. Petersburg also concluded that the Ukrainian movement was a product of the Polish plot to dismember the Russian nation.
In 1863 the so-called Valuyev ukaz, named after the minister of the interior, introduced the first restrictions on the use of the Ukrainian language. The government, which enjoyed the support of a large segment of the public in this respect, concluded that the Ukrainian phenomenon was dangerous – even though the Ukrainians limited their activities to literary and scholarly pursuits, in marked contrast to the Poles. What the Ukrainians were doing, some Russians came to realize, subverted the very unity of the Russian nation, which in the view of educated Russians consisted of three major ethnographic or folkloristic subdivisions – the Great Russians, the Little Russians, and the White or Belo-Russians – yet was one nation, united in its common higher culture and in politics.
The Russian government did not believe that the Ukrainian movement was an expression of any authentic and legitimate aspirations of the population of Little Russia and chose to treat it as a product of foreign (in this case, Polish) “intrigue.” This set the tone for how Russia would view Ukrainian nationalism for decades to come: in the future, “Ukrainianism” would be viewed as a product of German, Austrian, or Vatican plots, besides being seen as, in one way or another, an originally Polish invention.
In 1876 the imperial government went even farther in its identification of Ukrainian language and culture with political separatism when, in a secret edict signed by the tsar at Ems, it forbade the publication of Ukrainian writings and the performance of Ukrainian plays and songs. According to Grabowicz, in taking this step the Russian government helped, albeit ironically, to raise Ukrainian literature out of its provincial mode, giving it newfound political import by casting it as something subversive, separatist, or protonationalist: “It goes without saying, of course, that these qualities must already have existed – more or less openly, as in Shevchenko, or in potentia.”(27)
The model of the Russian nation and society promoted by the tsarist state encountered challenges from two directions. One might say figuratively that there emerged, in approximately the same historical period, two alternative ways, or models, for seceding from the empire. One path of secession amounted to the rejection of, and eventually a challenge to, the fundamental principle on which the empire was built – autocracy. This became the basis of a deep cleavage in Russian identity, as revealed in the title of Alexander V. Riasanovsky’s book A Parting of Ways, which examines the relations between the government and Russia’s educated elite in the first half of the nineteenth century.(28) The other mode of “secession” was represented by the Ukrainian idea.
note the word “secession”
after the revolution, the “autonomous republic” was ruled by the communist party, and ukraine’s subsumption into empire was total–a brutal fact demonstrated by among other events, the murdering of kulaks and peasants, mass deportations, and complete disregard for ukranian sovereignty.
so, yeah, you’re wrong.
but thanks. more than i wanted to know about ukraine today.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 18 2007 21:19 utc | 16
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