Whose snipers in Kiev?

This is a partial transcript of an intercepted phone call between Estonian foreign minister, Urmas Paet, and European Union high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton, which seems to have taken place about 1 March 2014. Paet had visited Kiev briefly, and Ashton asked for his impressions. Paet remarked how low public trust is in the new Ukrainian government. These people have ‘dirty pasts’, he said. Then he talked about ‘Olga’, who is a medical doctor. Ashton had also met her. Olga told Paet how the same snipers killed both civilians and policemen in Kiev. To Ashton’s evident surprise, Paet says ‘… behind the snipers it was not Yanukovitch but it was somebody from the new coalition.’ This transcript, which the Russell Foundation has compiled, is taken from the last three minutes or so of the conversation. The web link to the intercept itself is given at the end.

ASHTON: ... I’ve said to the opposition leaders, shortly to become government, you need to reach out to Maidan, you need to be, you know, engaging with them, you also need to get ordinary police officers back on the streets under a new sense of their role, so the people feel safe. I said to the Party of the Regions’ people you have to go and lay flowers where the people died, you have to show that you understand what has happened here.

PAET: Absolutely.

ASHTON: Because what you’re experiencing is anger of people who’ve seen the way that Yanukovitch lived, and the corruption, and they assume you’re all the same. And also the people who’ve lost people and who feel that, you know, he ordered that to happen. There’s quite a lot of shock, I think, in the city, a lot of sadness and shock, and that’s going to come out in some very strange ways if they’re not careful. I think all of this we just have to work out, so we’ve done a big meeting here today—

PAET: Ok…

ASHTON: —to try and get this in place – but yeah, very interesting, your observation.

PAET: It is and, well, actually the only politician the people from civil society have mentioned positively was Poroshenko.

ASHTON: … Yeah. Yeah.

PAET: So that he has some sort of so-to-say trust among all these Maidan people and civil society in fact, and what was quite disturbing, the same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.

ASHTON: Well that’s… Yeah, that’s…

PAET: And then she also showed me some photos, she said that as a medical doctor she can, you know, say that it is the same handwriting, same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition don’t want to investigate what exactly happened, so there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers it was not Yanukovitch but it was somebody from the new coalition.

ASHTON: … I think they do want to investigate, I mean I didn’t pick that up. That’s interesting. Gosh.

PAET: Yeah. So this is disturbing that if it starts now to live its own life very powerfully that it already [discredits] from the very beginning also this new coalition.

ASHTON: I mean, this is what they’ve got to be careful of as well – that they need to demand great change but they’ve got to let the Rada function. If the Rada doesn’t function then there could be chaos – complete chaos. So that, it’s all, you know, being an activist and a doctor is very, very important but it means you’re not a politician, and somehow they’ve got to come to a kind of accommodation for the next few weeks, with how the country’s actually going to run – and then we get the elections and things can change, and that’s, I think, going to be quite important. I’m planning to go back early next week, probably on Monday, so […]

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.ca/2014/03/intercepted-phone-call-between-estonian.html

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i...

'Not as dumb as he looks' - Muhammad Ali on Bertrand Russell

In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story , Muhammad Ali recounts how Bertrand Russell got in contact with him, and their ensuing correspondence: *** For days I was talking to people from a whole new world. People who were not even interested in sports, especially prizefighting. One in particular I will never forget: a remarkable man, seventy years older than me but with a fresh outlook which seemed fairer than that of any white man I had ever met in America. My brother Rahaman had handed me the phone, saying, ‘Operator says a Mr. Bertrand Russell is calling Mr. Muhammad Ali.’ I took it and heard the crisp accent of an Englishman: ‘Is this Muhammad Ali?’ When I said it was, he asked if I had been quoted correctly. I acknowledged that I had been, but wondered out loud, ‘Why does everyone want to know what I think about Viet Nam? I’m no politician, no leader. I’m just an athlete.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a war more barbaric than others, and because a mystique is built up ...

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91. In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas . He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface. Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No Mor e Hiroshimas . At the station exit, my bundle in hand, Early the winter afternoon's wet snow Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun. I had forgotten to remember where I was. Looking about, I see it might be anywhere - A station, a town like any other in Japan, Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store; Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons, Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs o...

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