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In reply to the discussion: Kerry privately urges Poroshenko to provide evidence of Kremlin involvement with separatists in Ukra [View all]bemildred
(90,061 posts)Separatists? Fascists? Disguised Russian special forces? Theories have multiplied to explain who exactly the armed men who have wrested control of parts of Donetsk, Luhansk (Lugansk in Russian), and other areas of eastern Ukraine from the Ukrainian state, cutting its residents off also from participation in the recent presidential elections. Very likely, martial law will follow in the region upon completion of the transfer of presidential powers to Ukraines newly elected leader, Petro Poroshenko. The separatist forces have clearly exposed the limits of Kievs capacity to govern, and in so doing they have acted in accordance with Russian state interests and swelled the waves of anti-state violence presently engulfing eastern and southern Ukraine.
But these facts alone do not mean that those armed men are simply Russian agents, or even Russian-trained militias. Instead, alongside Russia, the forces of the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Lugansk Peoples Republic serve first and foremost what we call a mafia state.
The idea itself is not new. It gained currency particularly in reference to Russia in the wake of WikiLeaks, which disclosed the details of a January 2010 briefing by Spanish prosecutor José Grinda Gonzálezone of Europes top experts on organized crimeanalyzing Russia as a virtual mafia state. One year later, British journalist Luke Harding published Mafia State, a memoir detailing the intimidation and Cold War spy-game-like scare tactics that he faced at the hands of Russian secret services while he was The Guardians bureau chief in Moscow, an assignment that ended when Russia denied him re-entry in 2011. In recent months, commentators have increasinglyand rightlypointed out the need to think about Ukraine not just as a state, but also as the sum of its regions. Here the mafia state idea can help us to understand the events of recent months, especially the perverse phenomenon of the separatist militia-driven peoples republics of the Donbas. Even allowing for the distinctiveness of Soviet legal culture, rule of law as such was a myth in the Donbas even before the Soviet collapse. Combine might-trumps-right with the long-standing culture of anomie and graft classically described by Aleksandr Zinoviev as Homo Sovieticus, and you can see that the mafias and peoples republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have been decades in the making.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118010/eastern-ukraine-mafia-state-can-kiev-impose-rule-law