Historic Fail

Recently Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day.

I am not going into thin matters of how funny (and tragic at the same time) it sounds for me as an ex-Soviet citizen. I just wuold like to draw your attention to one of the tweets with which Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko celebrated the day.

Ukraine existed, exists, and will exist. And Novorossiya is a Tolkien's myth called Mordor.

He wrote it in Ukrainian, but our languages are so close that there's absolutely no trouble for me to translate it.

The matter is that the word Novorossiya (literally, New Russia) officially appeared in 1764, when Russian empress Catherine the Great established the Novorossiya governorate on the lands conquered during Russo-Turks wars.

Hell's Lifehack

A young woman (she's as real as you and me; I know her personally) living now in Donetsk region, writes in her LiveJournal:

Twig As a Door Lock

When there's a shelling, I take the locking bar off my door and change it with a twiglet. Why? There were lots of cases when doors got jammed during shellings and people could hardly get out. And how many deaths are unknown just because they failed? So, put a twig instead of your metal locking bar. It will be either a blast wave that breaks it, or myself. Thus, correspondingly, we shall survive :-)

It's My Life

Being born in 1970, for the first 21 years of my life I was a Soviet citizen, that is, a citizen of the USSR. As such, I went through all the stages form an infant to schoolchildren to a conscripted soldier to a University student — the Soviet way. Surely and undoubtedly, this background has much to do with who I am now. And many of my compatriots who have gone through more or less the same way.

My friend Phil Butler insisted I had to share the experiences of my life. I did.

My sincere hope is that it helps our so sadly imperfect world to be a friendlier place.

Because mutual understanding is the first and maybe the most important key to peaceful coexistence. We are all different — but that's normal, just natural. And the world evidently needs more tolerance. Not just that to sexual choices, but a wider one — to ideas, ways of life, traditions and beliefs, so far these do not threaten other people and nations.

I did not include all the details in my text: it is an online article, not a kind of "War And Peace". But in case you have any questions, or you'd like me to throw more light on this or that part of our former life, feel free to ask. You can also get some more information about me in some of my posts here, tagged "me & my background".

I am here (and there, in the "Our Russia") to answer. To build up understanding.

The Crimeans Are Happy

... right where they are. That is, with and in Russia.

So states Forbs' Kenneth Rapoza based on Gallup and GfK data in his short, but pretty cognitive article published quite a while ago, this March.

One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.

Little has changed over the last 12 months. Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit. At some point, the West will have to recognize Crimea’s right to self rule.

Gallup and GfK are among the most respected opinion researchers of the Western world, and they do not suffer from any pro-Russian bias.

Kenneth Rapoza: "One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev". Enjoy the reading, the truth is short enough and won't take more that 5 minutes of your precious time.