Some good news for a change

In times of misfortune, one must learn to be thankful for small things.  There is peanut butter in Ukraine.  It is "Good Energy" brand and we ordered it on line, though it is carried in some shops according to their website. http://tm-good-energy.com/nasha-produkciya/

It is not bad at all.  Paler than Kraft Smooth and dryer but still spreads well and tastes every bit as good.  And made in Ukraine.

We ordered four 250 gm jars to try it out and it cost $15.50 CAD or $13.85 USD including postage.  I forget what we paid for 2 kg at Costco but it cost $10 to ship it over here through MEEST, so we have to find a place to buy it locally.

And if there is one brand of peanut butter here there may be another and soon shops will carry it in stock on a regular basis and the price will come down.  Hurrah.

The War to Come

The "Truce" continues here in Ukraine. Both sides, fully realizing that the fat lady has not yet sung are using the lull to regroup, rearm and prepare for further combat when hostilities resume. Russian troops and equipment build on the Kherson border of occupied Crimea and to the east of Mariupol.  Donetsk airport, still held by the Ukraine Army, is under daily attack by the terrorists backed by Russian military. The importance of Donetsk airport to the breakaway region and to Ukraine is described in this article which compares it to the Grozny airport held by the Chechens during their war with Russia in the 90's.

In the meantime, the propaganda war continues with Russia seemingly winning that one.  There have been enough documented war crimes committed by the Russian side to haul the entire Kremlin to the Hague so Russia is determined to create a few they can blame on the Ukrainians.

The terrorists claim to have discovered three mass graves in areas previously controlled by the Ukrainian army. They contain something like 2, 4 and 9 bodies, likely of Russian fighters killed in action and initial information is that they were created AFTER the Terrorists regained the territory.  Russian TV is reporting 400 bodies, showing signs of torture and execution and using pictures of rows of bodies from the Malaysian airplane which was shot down over Russian occupied territory.

Russia is calling for creation of a forensic investigative commission to determine the truth, so they can have some Ukrainian war crimes to prosecute.  This is similar to the one Stalin used to determine that the Germans has massacred the 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn.  They stayed with that lie until Poland regained independence in 1989 when they were forced to admit the truth.

Mychailo Wynnyckyj, of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, provides 10 reasons why he forecasts a full scale overt invasion of Ukraine by Russia before the Parliamentary election scheduled for October 26.

1) Putin needs to establish a land link between the Russian Federation and Crimea before the onset of winter

2) Occupying territory in Ukraine without the use of air power is now impossible.

3) Once air power is used, all pretense as to the supposed non-involvement of Russia in military action in Ukraine (as if anyone still believed the Kremlin’s official line) will be lost.

4) Once Putin makes the decision to overtly engage Ukraine’s army and volunteer battalions, limiting his own use of air power makes no tactical sense.

5) During the past few days, Putin has expressly denied his intent to disrupt the election in Ukraine on Oct 26. Whenever Putin has expressed positive feelings towards Ukraine publicly during the past months, Ukrainians (with good reason) become intensely nervous…

6) Opinion polls show that the two pro-Russian political forces running in the current election (Serhiy Tihipko’s “Strong Ukraine” and the “Opposition Bloc” headed by former energy minister Yuriy Boyko) may not gain enough support to cross the 5% barrier required to be represented among the 225 MP’s elected by proportional representation.

7) According to Ukraine’s constitution, if a state of war is declared in the country, all elections are cancelled. and all existing MP’s (including, in the current case, those who largely support Putin’s anti-EU/anti-NATO policy for Ukraine) remain in office.

8) The longer Putin delays his inevitable invasion, the better armed, trained and organized the Ukrainian forces will become.

9) The war with ISIS/ISIL in the Middle East has begun, and US forces are fully engaged; China is preoccupied by protests in Hong Kong; the US public is preoccupied with ebola, and the US elite is in the final stages of the mid-term election cycle; the European Council Presidency and the EU Foreign Policy Commissioner posts are both in transition; NATO has a brand new Secretary General (as of Oct 1).

10) Protests in Russia against the war in Ukraine have already begun, and will only intensify during the coming months, unless a crackdown in Russia (under the pretext of war) occurs.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong in this prediction.

The full article is here.

About cats and stuff

For a week I have been trying to write a post about the situation here and how we seem to be inexorably headed to WWIII with nucs.  It is too depressing so I am going to write about cats and stuff.

At 5:00 am, Tigritsa meowed at me to let her out.  Whoever defined a door as something a cat is always on the wrong side of had it right.  I have been awake since then though I tried to grab a couple naps to no success.  Today has been a two pots of coffee kind of day.

We have a bread making machine now and it churns out a loaf a day.  (Family like their share too, you know). Bonya is the cooking supervisor.  Whatever Tanya is doing at the counter, he is right in there to see what it is and sticks his nose into anything that looks new or interesting.  Tanya uses fresh yeast not dry so it goes into the pan first. So when Tanya added the yeast to the bread machine, he stuck his head right to the bottom of the pan to see what it was.  Nothing doing but Tanya had to give him some yeast which he ate readily.  We are crazy cat people, I guess.

The cats were all in sleeping this afternoon so I let Volk go for a run on his own cognizance.  He is welcome to the neighbours' cats if they are dumb enough to get caught. he seems to be recovering from Bobik's death but needs more company than he gets.  We need another dog.

On Monday, I turned 67 so we had folks for a 3:00 pm dinner.  Tanya asked what I wanted her to cook.  I said SIMPLE, not fancy.  Plov (an Uzbek rice dish) and Salade Olivia (traditional Russian salad).  Oh, sure.  When 11 of us sat down to eat, there were pickled mushrooms, smoked salmon, cheddar cheese, black olives, three kinds of salad - Olivia , Vinigrette, and a broccoli and grape salad she learned in Canada.  There was Plov, true.  And two roasts - pork and beef.  Dessert was fruit salad, ice cream and cake.  This is my wife's idea of a simple meal.

 Tanya was up at 6:30 am that morning putting bread on to bake and when I came down at 7:00 she was mopping the floor.  Seems the hot water pipe to the sink had burst.  The "Happy Birthday" had just a tinge of sarcasm.  The plumber was in yesterday to fix the pipe and again today to fix the taps at the sink and put on a new filter mechanism.  When we were in Canada I bought him a couple wrenches that were better quality than he could get here so he is happy to do work for us.

The roof on our outbuilding was in bad shape so Tanya hired a man to replace some of the broken asbestos panels with not bad old ones from our house roof.  Our house sure looks good now with the new brown metal roof and real eaves-troughs.

I have some wood now to build a dog house for Volk which I will do this weekend.  This is rough cut true dimension lumber so the house should be solid enough.  But it is green wood (pine?) so who knows how much it will shrink.

Enough ramblings for now.  Scary blog another time.

Truce or Consequences

The "truce" continues to hold while everyone pretends to work out a permanent solution and the EU considers backing off some sanctions because Russia is acting as a responsible peacemaker.  Which is to say, terrorist attacks have been focused mainly around Donetsk airport and Ukraine says no troops will pull back unless the terrorists pull back.  But there is less shooting and fewer deaths.  A third white convoy of "aid" from Moscow was suddenly rerouted to Donetsk instead of Lughansk and reports claim it delivered military supplies while other reports claim it was empty and would take back military factory equipment.  Either way, neither Ukraine nor ICRC ever got a look at it though of course Russia "says" they were invited.

The ball will reopen most likely sooner than later with attacks on the Donetsk airport, possession of which will allow (unmarked) Russian military aircraft to be used in support of the terrorists.  The second attack will be on the port of Mariupol to allow Russia easier transportation of military equipment by sea and more important as the next step in creation of a land route to Crimea.  It is cheaper and faster to militarily create a land access than to bridge the Kerch Strait which may not even be technically possible.  The Germans apparently bridged it during WWII but ice washed it out over winter, according to one report.

The occupation of Crimea is rapidly becoming a major problem for Russia.  There is only enough fresh water left for 15 months (with NO irrigation). Rough seas threaten to cut off the Kerch ferry which is the only easy way to bring food to Crimea.  Winter storms on the Black Sea make it difficult to supply Crimea even by sea-going vessels. The peninsula is connected to Ukraine by a very narrow neck of land and depends on Ukraine for electricity, gas and water, and prior to Russian occupation on Ukraine for food supplies and markets for agricultural production. A bit of history on how Crimea found itself (and sensibly so, given the above dependency on Ukraine) as part of Ukraine SSR in 1954 can be found on two of my older blogs here and here.

Russia has been massing troops and hardware on the narrow border with Kherson. Russia, operating on the assumption that the West will do nothing anyhow, could launch an up-front full scale invasion to open a land route from the south, linking up with continued invasion from the east.  This is not likely to happen until AFTER the G20 in Australia in November as Putin is still on the invitee list and it is likely he is anxious to attend and rub people's noses in it.

Fall is Burning Time

Fall is traditionally clean up time in Ukrainian yards and gardens and there are fires going everywhere as folks try to get everything burned before the October rains start. It has been one of the driest summers on record around here.  Grass and weeds are tinder dry.  So is the marsh/river to the east of us.  Someone must have started a grass fire to the NE on the other side of the marsh from us.  The wind was strong enough to take it into the marsh where the tall reeds were dry enough to burn vigorously.  So Volk and I went to have a look.

Looking west, back across the marsh towards our home

Possibly close to where the fire started, looking SW

And where it spread towards the marsh, looking SW

Back on our side of the marsh, looking north east, towards the burned off area

Looking SE towards the road we initially were on

Loaded with rose hips, a sure sign of fall

We "took a shortcut" on a plank bridge across the marsh

Even Volk wasn't keen on crossing the rotten structure.
The sections only got worse from here

Tanya's roses still blooming like it was summer

Background on Russia's war on Ukraine

Some of this has been covered before.

1. The Russian empire/USSR was land based unlike for example the British Empire.  It was not greedy for territory, only wanting what was next to its borders at any given time.  Access to year-round salt water ports was limited to the Baltic and Black Seas and the Far East.  The Baltic and Black Seas are bottlenecks and the Far East is just that - far.

2. Russia has always suffered from xenophobia, especially where the West was concerned.  When Constantinople was taken by the Ottomans, the intellectuals fled to Italy, helping spark the Renaissance, which the churchmen fled to Orthodox Russia taking with them a (well-earned) distrust of Western Europe.  There were times in Russian Tsarist history when even thinking about traveling abroad was considered treason.  This anti-Western-ism manifest itself again in Soviet times and is being pushed to new levels of hysteria under Putin.

3. Putin, certainly, and Russia in general, never accepted the breakup of the USSR into 15 new independent countries of which Russia was simply the largest.  Rather the 14 new independent states are viewed as breakaway provinces, much as China views Taiwan. Putin seems intent on recreating the empire as it was in the early 20th century.

4. There seems to be some kind of Russian mindset that people are unable to think or organize politically for themselves.  Everything is a conspiracy.  The CIA organized the Orange Revolution and EuroMaidan.  Yatsenyuk is PM because Victoria Nuland wanted him to be. (Actually it is because we wanted him to be - Tanya and I said several days before Nuland did that he would be a better PM than Klitschko.)

5. Anyone who thinks differently, does not agree with, or opposes Putin in any way is branded as a fifth columnist, traitor or foreign agent under the control of the CIA etc. This black/white, we/they view of the world is not unique to Putin but is a characteristic of other populist leaders who border on authoritarianism eg Erdogan in Turkey "WE are Turkish; who are you?"

6. Putin's vision for Russia has been called "Eurasianism" (see 1984 for irony).  Russia, (with Putin at the helm for life), is the heart of conservative Christian values fighting against the decadence of the liberal democratic West.  America and the EU are his sworn enemies because they stand in his way of establishing Russian hegemony "from Lisbon to Vladivostok".

7. Russia accuses everyone else of being fascists and neo-Nazis, however ultra-nationalism is dangerously on the rise in Russia and is condoned if not encouraged by the Kremlin.  You can also draw your own conclusions about how the country is governed.  Putin actively supports extreme right wing parties in the EU eg France, Hungary, Britain, Greece, Austria etc because they hate the EU and strengthening them weakens the EU.

8. While the Kremlin has been harassing the Baltic states since their independence, Putin has begun preparing a Ukrainian type intervention by claiming that Russians in the three countries are being deprived of their rights, requiring Moscow to step in.  Please read these two articles here and here. They are important to convince people that Ukraine, regardless of what happens here, is not the end of it. Keep in mind that everything Russia falsely accuses others of doing, it is actually doing itself.

Bobik 13/01/2008 - 04/09/2014

Bobik

Bobik died accidentally a few days before I got home. He tried to jump and climb over the side fence in the dog's yard, fell back, caught his collar and broke his neck.  Andrei buried him under a tree in the abandoned yard next door.

Even Bobik couldn't climb over that

Bobik was too smart for his own good.  Once he learned how to climb over the front gate there was no keeping him inside until I rigged a meter-high mesh on top of it two years ago.  That held him but didn't look too fancy.  We replaced the front gate this summer.

We always figured he could climb the side fence if he took a notion but he never did as all activity was in the front.  Until this fall when a stray female came along outside the side fence.  Over Bobik went.  It was one or two nights later when he tried it again that he didn't quite make it.

New front gate and side fence

He'd had the best summer of his life.  Tanya's niece, Sveta, who looked after our place while we were away, loved to walk and took the dogs on two and three hour walks every day.  In hot weather she took them to the river to swim.

Volk, of course, is heart broken.  He stopped eating and just lay there.  Tanya bought him liver sausage and cooked porridge for him and he ate a little of that.  Yesterday I went to see him and he wagged his tail a little but didn't move otherwise.  I picked him up and sat and held him.  He just lay there limply in my arms.  I set him down and he lay against my leg and went to sleep.

Last night I could hear him crying for about five minutes.  Short howls full of sadness and loneliness. I cried for Volk.  The two of them were never apart unless one escaped and the other didn't.  I had to smile when I was holding Volk as I noticed a huge partially healed gash on his front leg from the last time they tried to kill each other.  Brothers!

Today when I picked up his leash to take him for a walk he actually bounced a little and wagged his tail happily.  We went for a good 45 minute walk (all I could handle) and he walked beside me quite well behaved.  He will make it.

Tanya is talking about getting a 6 mo old spayed female to keep him company but we'll see how he does.

Tanya didn't tell me until I got home as she didn't want to spoil the last few days of my time in Canada.  She did right, I suppose.  But it reminded me of the Ronnie Corbett monologue describing how on holidays he got a letter from his friend to tell him his cat died.  He was devastated and wrote his friend chewing him out for not breaking the news to him gently.   "You could have written that my cat was up on the roof.  Then the next day write and tell me it had fallen off the roof. The third day write and tell me it was injured and the fourth day tell me it had died.  That way I would have time to get used to the idea".  The next year he was on holidays and got a letter from his friend that started "Your mother was up on the roof".

Bobik my good dog, Volk and I will miss you. As Mark Twain said, if you didn't go to heaven, I want to go where you went.