In 1970, the year the Beatles released their hit single “Let It Be,” Sevastopol — home to the Soviet Union’s legendary Black Sea Fleet — was a closed port. The city answered to Moscow, rather than the Ukrainian administration under whose territory it was located, and in order to enter or exit, a special permit was required. Other cities on the Crimean Peninsula — like Yalta, Sochi and Artek, famed for their Black Sea beaches and resorts — drew elite apparatchiki and ordinary citizens from across the Soviet Union. State radio piped out schmaltzy pop hits by singers like the Ukrainian Volodymyr Ivasyuk, while the music of the Beatles, which the state-run record label refused to release, circulated underground.

Today, Sevastopol belongs to an independent Ukraine. Anyone who wants to can freely visit the city. The Black Sea fleet has been divided between Russia and Ukraine, and in 2017 Russia’s lease on the port will expire, forcing the fleet to leave what has been its home for more than three centuries. While new international borders and an end to state-financed vacations may have made it harder for CIS residents to visit their once favored resort spot, today Americans like me can travel to the Crimea.

In yet another sign of how times have changed, the orchestra of the Black Sea Fleet now includes “Let It Be” in its repertoire. Check out this video circulating on YouTube:

Sporting the fleet’s seafaring uniforms, the singers look like they’ve stepped out onto the small stage from an earlier era. The lead singer gesticulates and croons to mother Mary in accented English. The performance is pegged as one of the “worst cover songs ever.” That said, comments in English and Russian are surprisingly uplifting — “This is genius!,” “The heart with which he sings inspires me” — although not all are convinced: “He should have stayed in opera.”

Whatever you think of the lead singer’s tremulous bass and the dancing girls swaying and waving their hands, you can’t deny that a performance like this would have been inconceivable 39 years ago. And that, in my view, is what makes it so wonderful and poignant today.

- Christine Kiernan

Georgia announced on Wednesday that it will pull out of the contest after refusing to choose a different song or change the lyrics of its entry, the disco-funk song “We don’t wanna put in.”

Considered a swipe at Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over the five-day war between Russia and Georgia last August, the tune ran into trouble because of rules against political lyrics and was disqualified.

Watch a video of the song from YouTube user EurovisionPL:

Blogger “Anna Ershova,” a Russian student at Yale University, weighs in on Georgia’s pop protest:

I can see why the Georgians are so tongue-in-cheek regarding their behemoth neighbor, but that’s a petty way to deliver a protest, isn’t it? Georgia, if you are still mad over Abkhazia and Ossetia, go to a court of law, not the performance stage.

Russia’s own entrant to the contest has created a separate debate. Ukrainian singer Anastasia Prikhodko was selected on Tuesday to represent Russia after she had been disqualified from Ukraine’s contest.

Andy Young blogs at “Siberian Light” about her song, “Mamo,” and the uproar it is causing:

The controversy?  Well, Prikhodko is Ukrainian, and Mamo is sung partly in Russian and partly in - gasp - Ukrainian. Oh yes, and Prikhodko only entered the Russian qualification contest after she’d been kicked out of the Ukrainian qualification contest.The biggest complaints about Prikhodko’s victory came, not too surprisingly, from Yusif Prigozhin the husband of the singer who finished second. “It’s a disgrace… A song performed in Ukrainian can’t have anything to do with Russia.”

Finally, singer Mira Awad will be the first Arab to represent Israel in the song contest. She is slated to perform a duet in Arabic, Hebrew and English with Israeli Jewish singer Achinoam Nini.

The news has been criticized by Arab artists in the wake of the Gaza conflict, and the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has called on Awad to refuse to participate in the contest:

To represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest will serve to polish the international image of an aggressive occupying state that has long been engaged in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. It will communicate to the rest of the world that Israel’s war crimes and violations of international law are acceptable to us as Palestinians! [...] You may feel that it is important for you to represent Israel to demonstrate the full spectrum of Israeli society, which includes Palestinians living in Israel. This is utterly misguided. Until Palestinians living within Israel have full rights and do not suffer systemic discrimination and violation of their human and political rights, Israel has no right to portray itself as a healthy, multicultural society.

A gas station in Budapest.

Russia’s dispute with Ukraine over gas prices has impacted other European nations whose gas shipments pass through Ukraine. Hungarian imports from Russia were down more than 20 percent on Tuesday, but the country still has more gas than others cut off in the dispute — Hungary plans to deliver gas to Serbia, which has no gas reserves.

Gazprom, a state-controlled Russian energy company and the world’s largest producer of natural gas, reduced gas supplies to Ukraine after accusing the country of stealing 65.3 million cubic meters of gas since Jan. 1.

Eva S. Balogh is a Hungarian academic and blogger who writes at “Hungarian Spectrum” about her country’s position in the gas dispute. 

Crisis after crisis: now it is gas

There is a Hungarian slang expression: “there is gas” (gáz van). It means there is big trouble. The big trouble now is that there is no gas. That is, there is no gas coming from Russia via Ukraine. Of course, the trouble would be greater if Hungary didn’t have enough reserves to survive for at least two more months. Other countries–Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Serbia, for example–are in much bigger trouble because they have practically no reserves. Serbia already turned to Hungary yesterday for help. The initial Hungarian answer was negative, but by today the Hungarian government decided that after all it could spare a couple of billion m³ of gas because yesterday Hungarian consumption was lower than expected. Also Hungary has some natural gas of its own and a smaller amount reaches the country from Austria as well. Thus while Bulgaria and Slovakia are entirely dependent on Russian gas, Hungary relies on Russian gas for somewhere between 50% and 75% of its needs. Today, for example, 4 billion m³ gas arrived from Austria. The problem is that countries in Eastern Europe that depend on Russian gas can’t really help each other because there are no pipelines between Romania and Bulgaria, or Hungary and Slovakia, or Romania and Hungary.

No one knows what the real situation is between the warring business partners, Russia and Ukraine. If one can believe the Russian ambassador to Hungary, there are four “faucets” that can be turned on or off. Three of these were shut off by Ukraine yesterday morning and only then did Russia move to shut off the one remaining “faucet.” The Ukrainians’ version of events, not surprisingly, is different. They claim that they would be most willing to send on any natural gas that arrives in their pipelines. But there is none. The Russians have shut off the flow of gas.

Then there are the two entirely different interpretations of the Russian-Ukrainian feud. There are those who claim that it is simply a business quarrel while others think that it is fundamentally a political issue. Russia is putting economic pressure on Ukraine to keep it within the fold. Ukraine, on the other hand, is looking westward; it wants to belong to NATO and eventually to the European Union. A Hungarian political scientist currently in Kiev views the crisis solely in political terms, a manifestation of Russia’s imperial aspirations. Even the Russian ambassador to Hungary admitted that Russia is unhappy with Ukrainian political ambitions. I’m inclined to think that Russia’s dispute with Ukraine is not solely economic. Russia’s loss of Ukraine must still be hard to swallow. After all, with the exception of a very brief period after World War I when Ukraine became independent, it was an integral part of Russia for over three centuries. Also there is a huge Russian population within Ukraine’s borders.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user zsoolt under a Creative Commons license.

Edward Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaks with Martin Savidge about the political and business aspects of this complex situation. Chow recently published an article on Ukraine’s importance for European gas in The Washington Quarterly [PDF].

For more on the gas dispute, read what a Worldfocus contributing blogger had to say: Ukraine squares off against Russian gas giant. 

Gazprom, a state-controlled Russian energy company, is the world’s largest producer of natural gas.

Russia’s dispute with Ukraine over gas prices is now impacting other European nations whose gas shipments pass through Ukraine to places like Greece, the Czech Republic and Austria.

Gazprom, a state-controlled Russian energy company and the world’s largest producer of natural gas, reduced gas supplies to Ukraine after accusing the country of stealing 65.3 million cubic meters of gas since Jan. 1.

Gazprom recently increased its gas prices, which have long been a source of dispute with Ukraine. Worldwide, oil prices reacted to worries about Russian exports.

Steve LeVine covers foreign affairs for BusinessWeek and is a former correspondent with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He writes at “The Oil and the Glory” about the reasons for the dispute.

Russia-Ukraine: A Market Dispute

Are the Russians and Ukrainians simply fated to go to the mat every year about this time, causing grief to their neighbors? Or is something else at work in their antagonism?

The philosophical answer is that, while it’s hard to imagine these two former Soviet states living as friendly neighbors any time soon, the current dispute is a separate matter.

It can be reduced to a difference of outlook: Do you expect oil prices to rise to $60 a barrel this year, or to drop back down to between $30 and $40 a barrel? (Oil has surged in the last two trading days to about $46 a barrel because of the fighting in Gaza.)

In Europe, natural gas prices follow oil, and Russia is clearly of the consensus view that oil will average somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 a barrel this year. That corresponds to a natural gas price of about $350 per 1,000 cubic meters. (Here’s the loose formula to get the natural gas price: divide the oil price by six, then multiply the result by 35.3).

Hence the claim by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the demand by Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas behemoth, for $250 per 1,000 cubic meters from Ukraine this year amounts to a “humanitarian gesture.”

Ukraine, however, has embraced oil’s most recent price band. It’s arguing that oil will average $40 a barrel this year, or $235 per 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas. That’s precisely what Ukraine has counter-offered to Gazprom. [...]

The subtext is the nature of the two countries’ contract, which is based not on the spot price of natural gas, or a forecast, but a formula that lags current prices by eight months. In other words, when Gazprom is retorting that it in fact could charge Ukraine $418 per 1,000 cubic meters if it so wishes, that’s Russia’s estimate of the price of natural gas last May.

To read more, see the original post.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user basb under a Creative Commons license.

An ethnic group called the Transcarpathian Rusins, or Ruthenians, in original folk costume in Ukraine.

Earlier this week, an ethnic group called the Ruthenians asked Russia to recognize their independence from Ukraine.

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. He blogs at Window on Eurasia.

Window on Eurasia: Another ‘Unrecognized Republic’ is Born – This Time in Ukraine

Vienna, December 24 – The Transcarpathian Rusins (Ruthenians), who are estimated to number more than a million, are calling on Moscow to recognize the independence of Subcarpathian Rus because Kyiv has ignored their demands for autonomy within Ukraine, an appeal that could create yet another “unrecognized” republic in the former Soviet space.

That appeal, which was given prominence two days ago when Petr Getsko, the self-proclaimed prime minister of the self-proclaimed republic, gave an interview to the Russian government newspaper, “Rossiiskaya gazeta,” in fact has deeper roots.

On the one hand, there has been a resurgence of Ruthenian activism across eastern Europe, with most countries in the region providing some support to what is the fourth largest East Slavic group in the world. And on the other, Kyiv has infuriated many Rusins by refusing to acknowledge them as a separate nation, anger that Moscow has clearly sought to tap into.

The current Ruthenian campaign for greater rights began at the end of October when the Second European Congress of Ruthenians met in Mukachevo and formally demanded that Kyiv grant them the status of an autonomous republic before December 1. If that did not happen, the participants said, they would see national self-determination outside of Ukraine.

December 1 came and went, but on December 19, an international scientific practical conference on “Genocide and Cultural Ethnocide of the Rusins of Carpathian Rus (the end of the 19th Century to the Beginning of the 21st Century) assembled in Rostov-na-Donu and adopted a resolution on the Ruthenian cause.

Among the resolution’s key points was an insistence that alongside the Armenians, the Ruthenians were the victims of the first genocide of the 20th century, one carried out by the Austro-Hungarians. Today, the resolution continued, Kyiv is extending this through “a policy of cultural ethnocide.”

In addition, the resolution insisted that the Ruthenians are recognized as a unique people in all countries of the region except Ukraine and that they enjoy the support of international organizations like the UN whose committee on the liquidation of racial discrimination in August 2006 criticized Kyiv for not supporting them.

And the resolution specified that the status of the Transcarpathian Ruthenians has not yet been defined – Kyiv has not yet recognized the 1946 treaty which incorporated them into the Soviet Union – and that the Ukrainian government continues to ignore the December 1991 referendum in which Ruthenians voted for autonomy as well as for Ukrainian independence.

Eduard Popov, a Russian expert on Ukraine, subsequently argued that “Subcarpathian Rus has experience as an independent government and an autonomous republic” and thus has the historical basis for demanding recognition either from Kyiv or the international community.

And because of both that history and the higher status Ruthenians have received elsewhere, Popov continued, the refusal of the Ukrainian government to recognize them as a separate nationality and to offer courses in their distinctive language are increasingly offensive – all the more so since the ethnonym “Rusin” is much older than the one for Ukrainian.

At least some observers in Moscow dismiss the current Ruthenian cause as nothing more than the babblings of a few underemployed academics and any Russian government interest in them as a foolish policy that will infuriate the Ukrainian government and do little or nothing to advance Moscow’s interest in the region.

But however that may be, the Rusins of Ukraine are pressing ahead, and at least those who have taken part in these recent meetings believe that they have both a good case as a nationality whose interests have been ignored and a geographic advantage that makes them an even better candidate for Russian support than other “unrecognized” states have.

“Prime Minister” Getsko told “Rossiiskaya gazeta” that “we have sought autonomy for a long time and have appealed to the authorities of the country almost every month during recent years. But nothing came of this, and now we will seek independence” and international recognition.

Moreover, he pointedly told the paper in the kind of language the Russian government and business elite are certain to understand, “the lion’s share” of Russian gas on its way to European markets flows through Subcarpathian Rus, “twice more than through the Baltic states and twice more than through other neighboring countries.”

See the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Marek Silarski under a Creative Commons license.

In Ukraine, today’s political realities and yesterday’s revolutionary dreams may not be in line, and progress has come slowly.

In Poland, the anti-Soviet Polish Solidarity movement has reinvented itself in a democratic and economically strong Poland.

In the Czech Republic, the younger generation knows little about the Russian invasion and subsequent demonstrations that took place 40 years ago, and the country has problems discussing its past.

In Hungary, people still commemorate 1956 revolution — when approximately 200,000 Hungarians gathered in front of the country’s Parliament to demand an end to Soviet rule. Even as they move forward, Hungarians never quite leave the past behind.

Correspondent Dave Marash reports in a Worldfocus signature series: After the Fall.

Ukraine achieved independence in 1991 and again in 2004, when pro-Western forces peacefully took control of the country in what was dubbed the Orange Revolution.

Worldfocus special correspondent Dave Marash reports on today’s political realities and yesterday’s revolutionary dreams in Ukraine — where political progress has come slowly.

Telis Demos of Fortune Magazine explains these efforts and says that with many more classes of assets poised to fail, the economy has not yet hit bottom as the financial crisis continues.

High prices have created a public outcry — from tortilla riots in Mexico to protests over grain prices in parts of Africa.

Last year, more than 25,000 Indian farmers committed suicide.

In Iran, food prices climbed 50 percent in September alone.

Pakistan is stockpiling wheat and its military guards the flour mills.

And, Malaysia forbids people from taking sugar, flour or cooking oil out of the country.

Worldfocus producers traveled to Argentina, India, Kenya and Ukraine and reported on the causes and effects of rising food prices.

The government responded to the increases in food prices by restricting grain exports [PDF]. But the current food crisis in Ukraine — a country known as the breadbasket of Europe and the black-earth belt — presents challenges and opportunities. The cost of staple items like bread, eggs and vegetables increased by 20 to 70 percent.

High global prices and demand for grain result in reduced local supply, and therefore higher prices. Private investors are also lining up to buy and develop Ukrainian land, despite a legislative moratorium that prevents the sale of land.

Dave Marash reports from Kiev on Ukraine’s potential to open up land to private investors, feed the world and support its domestic economy.