A friend of that Devil is that new friend of mine ? Or Welcome to Gulag 17

Crimea, it is more than a tactically favorable  place in the world,
 it is some really ancient , pivotal historical stuff they got there. Who knows what powerful artifacts are entombed in the mountains and the depths of the Black Sea? Mostly it is about the positioning of the Crimean territory.  All the gas routes, shipping, air transport corridors. As well as  the potential for ultra high end real estate development ...

Russia could not have done a better job of driving Ukraine into the arms of the NATO alliance. Ukraine will hopefully regain it's seized territory and eventually become a part of NATO, it's virtually a done deal. There was an opportunity for dialog early on, but that was lost well before the disruptions upon the Donbas began.

Often,  I have noticed how travel weary Ukraine's leadership is when they arrive in Washington for meetings, for them it's probably a super long day, getting to the airport at 7 or 8 in the morning, long ten to fifteen plus hour flight (depending if there is a transfer in Zurich, or some place like that.)

then some further  hours of navigating through traffic, dropping their bags , getting briefed and through security , all the protocol of getting in position to meet our officials. It would hardly seem to ruffle President Poroshenko's feathers that Donald Trump commits the gaffe of mis- stating Ukraine as "the Ukraine" just as recently at the UN,  he mis-spoke Namibia as "Nambia". He deftly gets away with this casual "working man" talk,  or call it "locker room talk" Like the way he says "This whole Rusher thing... it's fake news" you would think he's talking about the defensive line of the Philadelphia Eagles or the New York Jets (there is really no problem with the Pass Rush defense, it's the coaching) Go ! Philadelphia Eagles , by the way ! Nice to hear they got a surprise win this weekend.

 I'm just saying it as I see it" But I have to admit that,  while his speech seemed a trifle bombastic at the United Nations, he pretty much stuck to his script , and at least it was briefly like sweethearts together with the UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres. It felt more like Nikki Haley's speech than his, but it was crafted for him. But the blowback about "rocket Man" has ruffled many feathers, not the least of which would be Sir Elton John who clearly takes issue with the absconding of one of his signature song lines.

I was not able to discern if President Poroshenko actually met met with The President Donald Trump last week, yet I can only imagine what the hypothetical conversation might have been like. Imagine being like an insect on the wall of the room <

(A hypothetical exchange) 

President Poroshenko:  "Hello President Trump , it's really great to see  you again!

Trump:  "Yes it's truly great to see you again President Poroshenko, you should come out to my Golf course, you play golf, don't you? I have lovely  Golf courses, and the fees are really reasonable, considering what you get

Petro Poroshenko: , I will try to join you sometime, yet I am very busy fighting a hybrid war in my country. My Government pays my fee at your Golf course, or you are offering a gift ? If it is a gift, I have to report that on my disclosure forms

Trump: "Oh yes,well, don't worry about the fees, I am  making a lot of money (arched eyebrow) on the President of USA thing, about that,  it's that Rusher thing, are they getting at you along the sidelines, or straight down the middle ? I hear that you got a really solid group of guys holding down the middle line and a great right tackle.
Poroshenko : Yes their new containment strategy of their proxies  in my Nation appears to be something like a fresh variant  of the___ Gulag system. If you resist, you are arrested and summarily prosecuted.  People are detained and imprisoned without trial or access to lawyers, including children. The sentencing is usually indefinite and arbitrary. Our laws don't apply in the Russian occupied territory . Russia has created a set of miniature Gulags in which we have no say or authority.
Trump: " Oh yes, I remember those things, they are constructed like an Archipelago in the Siberian wilderness, a lot of Intellectuals and bad sorts of criminal people go there. Is it true that people have to drink each other's blood to survive ? SO they have reinvented and exported this antiquated SYSTEM OR REPRESSION INTO UKRAINE ? I AM TERRIBLY SORRY ABOUT THAT.  How can we Help you ?
Poroshenko : yes Mister President, all this and more is true, historically. They captured our prisons within the territories they occupied , and even the norms of Russian Justice system doesn't apply, nor the Geneva Convention. Our people are tortured and deprived of basic human rights...
Trump : well that's not so different than Guantanamo Bay. I have been trying to close it down, it's a very expensive waste of money for our country.
Poroshenko : Yes Mister President, we are both of us Business men, we understand about cost cutting matters. Perhaps you would like to return to us our Nuclear Material that deterrent and it's  associated technology which we agreed to dismantled (then, the world's third largest Nuclear arsenal at the time ) when the Budapest Memorandum was signed ? 
We know that you don't like the Clinton people so much. Why not reverse one of the significant initiatives of his presidential term ? With our full arsenal of Nuclear apparatus once again in our possession, we can maybe take less money from your Nation that we get for the defense,  and manage our negotiations with the Russian Federation without your further help. We are not fully sold on the NATO concept just yet..
Trump: yes,  the  NATO is a big problem, those people in the coalition, they don't really take care of their share of the business. It is really a lot of bother and distraction for our military, now that we have to make a deal around DPRK to disable their nukes.
Poroshenko : Well, so we shall continue this dialog in the future?
Trump : I don't know what to say, I have to ask the Generals what they think of this. I know we were going to try to work with Russia to prevent further election hacking. Are you willing to form an anti election hacking coalition with the Russian Federation?
Poroshenko, "well yes of course it's possible, as long as we can gain access to the Siberian territories where our citizens were sent by Stalin, sent away to the Gulags, to make our case that they are free to join us in a quest for independence from Moscow and Saint Petersburg" Remember this in your dealings with the Russian State, that "there is no free cheese, in the mousetrap"

Excuse me, Mister President, I understand that your election is clouded by your association with Mister Manafort. He was associated with our previous president Yanukovych, who stole a very big amount of money from our treasury, something like 100 billion dollars , Mister Trump. We would like to get some of that money back, if you can find a way to repatriate his assets. Or is this collusion probe getting too inconvenient. We have some files that will implicate him in participating in the theft from our treasury, or files that will exculpate him. Which do you prefer ?

All of my fictional banter to the side  / Please excuse it ! 
I do actually hang out with banking scholars in Ukraine , people who teach banking and the math is fairly simple, one looks at the balance of the National Bank/ treasure when Yanukovych took office, and the bank balance when he left. Your mathematics  have to include his tenure as Governor of Donetsk, there was a slow up tick with  in his clan's thieving and taking from the public till. It went into overdrive when he finally became President in 2o10, as I understand it.
One also needs to include the cost of paying for debt on funds that were looted from various ministries and the National bank, the lost investment potential of the looted capitol. I am certainly pro-capitalism. In my mind, Jazz music would not exist without capitalism.
 Rock and Roll tends to exist one way or the other )

Ukraine should be a wealthy , prosperous Nation, It will become one some day.
they did actually steal roads under Yanukovych, and the new Prime Minister Grosyman , he is actually doing a great or pretty decent job of implementing nuts and bolts improvements and keeping the work of building the infrastructure (as they can afford to ) in a fairly efficiently coordinated and managed fashion . 

Many of the roads in the NorthEast and SOuth Central parts of the country seem like they have the bomb craters left in them from WW 2, 70 years ago !! The Euro 2012 soccer match was a huge opportunity for stealing money, and no opportunity was wasted.

 I am still trying to ask one   basic question here : Why was the young 19 year old boy,  Pavel Hryb abducted from Belarus by the FSB,  for an alleged  terrorist intent, then  transported to Krasnodar  Russia? 
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/2314107-ukrainian-consuls-not-allowed-to-visit-pavlo-hryb.html

DO the honest, hard working Russian citizens, be they public servants, independent business people, waiters, gardeners, and everyone else, do they want their tax money spent to export a Gulag style system of punitive control into friendly neighboring nations? 

As to my previous posts about a fictional dishwasher network that shares intelligence, maybe it's not so cool maybe to invent such a fiction. But if this dishwasher network was to exist, wouldn't it have a creed that you leave no dishwasher behind ? 
Now I have to admit my unique circumstance. I haven't any money, no property to claim or inherit. I am a proud American, love my country, and I love Ukraine. At one point in time ,  I harbored the physical archives of what Steve Jobs had recognized as " the internet before there was an internet" during a  speech he gave at Stanford.
I have a neutral opinion of Russia, I could care less,  that they closed the Russian consulate in my City. it's the policy of their government that I question . They hosted my mom and step Dad in the Glasnost era It is a big history they have and a big area of the world. Most of them are nice and decent people. I recently finished David Browder's book "red Notice" and well it's a hard story to finish. Interesting to read. One item he avoided was what type of bribes he hypothetically might have paid to get some of that investment information. That was pretty much obligatory for that era. What they did to Magnitsky was inexcusable. And it paints a partly unflattering portrait of Senator John Kerry that I was unfamiliar with. I trust most of the narrative to be genuine. What will the Russian people push for, going forward, I can't imagine. 

I know that the Kremlin polls obsessively about many issues. It may be subtly more Democratic than we realize. Yet Russian Federation is quite possibly pulling a lot of the herky Jerky strings of DPRK's Kim, just another privileged kid , like President Trump with control of Nuclear weapons.

I know that I have attracted some attention recently , and as a person I am far from perfect. Perhaps I even spoiled a brilliant plan in my previous post, however fictional it may have been. Rather than falsely promoting a future feed forward Russian Invasion of DPRK , it just came out this weekend that a Russian Telco TKK , associated with their  railway Company had provided North Korea with a new high speed internet backbone. SO perhaps they have begun a virtual invasion of North Korea ?

it would probably be much more easy if they un-invaded Ukraine, in fact, before they fictionally invade DPRK. It is normal for easy answers to complex geo-Political issues to get stalled in perceptive complications, yet a win, win, win  answer to the mess is remotely possible

As much as it might be , I am sure that Inna, my fictional Russian Navy Signals intelligence officer who serves in Sevastopol , Ukraine , who had a fictional tryst with Mister Trump during the Miss Universe pageant. That she recently got a talking to about the fact that "the loose lips sink ships" I hear that she has recently had a cleaning problem in her apartment in Sudak. 

And yes, the Russian/ Ukraine world is very prejudiced. Being a dish washer at a restaurant is certainly a non- starter  George Soros was a dishwasher during his college years in England, and I actually have a personal connection with him,  through private channels. And well enough a personal connection with the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, though at this point it's another Ghost in the machine. Sound like Barcelona should be a fabulous batch of musical fun ! The disco scene in Ukraine is like a micro-version of a Rolling Stones concert, they understand the innately subtle , subtle theater of moving bodies to the pulse of a beat

If one ascribes to the sentiment that all men and women are created equal, one's feelings should stay open to that truth. A dishwasher or a busboy can have a place in history. If one does scowl at , deride, make small of such modest people ,  without appreciating the scope of their lives, then only one in that position  becomes more smaller and of lesser personal power.
Just as this young fellow, Pavel Hryb can have the potential to be the next George Soros,  if he is set free. I hope that they can find some error in the paperwork to justify relaxing him. All that I can think about is the thought that what if he was a visiting scholar of political science in Ukraine attending Yale, Harvard, Stanford or the Claremont McKenna College . That he was lured out of Ukraine via social media as a 19 year old freshman, to meet up with a 17 years girl for a roll in the hay, a cup of coffee, a stroll in the forest. Abducted forcibly from Belarus via fabricated, artificial charges, held without a way to contact his family, or access to a lawyer for weeks. It is simply a new low of bad form. In that Russia may possibly  act in the same fashion as DPRK as they did with Otto Warmbier, to truly identify itself as a rogue, outlaw state. Now it's quite true that the USA has some truth work
 to deal with about it's own actions. If the Minsk accords are to be implemented, then have done with it, exchange all prisoners, all for all. It would seem difficult for us in USA to see a forced change to our constitution based on essentially a matter of Nuclear blackmail, yet Ukraine has that on their plate.

A lot of the Ukraine analysts are pointing to the fact of DPRK being more literally a legacy client state of Stalinist Russia .  For many years it was perceived as a subservient  state of China, but that mainly pertained to the 80's, 1990's. USSR BOLSTERED North Korea in the 1950's when they brought a war to our forces in Inchon, etc.
 It could be quite probable that the Russian influence has increased substantially in DPRK due to the dearth of hard currency. And there were recently well documented fuel shipments via Vladivostok to DPRK. Who knows what other vital goods and supplies were hidden away in those merchant ships?
.In Lviv, well it's a touristic town, and they are regionally chauvinistic as well. 

Simferopol, in Crimea, it was one of those places where people were not chauvinistic, it was quite literally an open city, open society. There was no election in Crimea during the alleged annexation. 

It was a deal done at the point of a gun. The Tatar community is undergoing another from of forced relocation, into Jails, prisons. Even for publicly   expressing the position of the United Nations via a placard. That is an imprisonable offense . And a long jail term in a Russian prison, or a Ukrainian prison for that matter, can be equal to a death sentence (for an older or younger person as well) Yes indeed, the Gulag system of the Stalin era has been brought to life anew, exported into Ukraine.

As to Lugansk and Donetsk, I can only speculate how people must to feel. 
(My fictional dialog)
Dude, I only stayed behind in the conflict area cuz I had saved up for 2 years to buy this big screen, internet capable big screen TV, we had a nice apartment, the remnant of a business we thought could be revived. I had heard that if I took my car through the checkpoint, they were taking valuables like my TV, so I simply stayed behind as I heard from my friends that there was no work, other than going into the army to face being sent back to make a war in my home town.
Friend : well of course it was hard to imagine that your neighbor in the building would drill a hole in his kitchen floor to plant a listening device in the box above your kitchen light. But you know it's illegal to even question if it could have been better if we simply stayed a part of Ukraine. It is forbidden now, and you know it, not even in the privacy of your home can you question this.
DUDE : Yeah man, those recordings are absolutely killing my case, but I was down with this idea, we even joked about how this was gonna be like a "Gulag style " thing. like "No way, it can't really be this is gonna go down hard core Gulag style.
long pause, the silence of an old clock ticking away high on the wall, with incorrectly set time
DUde : yeah I guess I should not have complained about the car registration fees
Friend, yeah buddy. You knew, should have known better. Welcome to the new Gulag. I had to testify against you, to keep my ass out of the pokey. Besides, now the revamped Gulag system is a feature of our territory, it allows anybody with a connection to the top leaders to have unlimited powers to gain property and wiled influence. That lends a value to our endeavors here ! Keeping the Capitalist investors out will retain the wealth potential for ourselves, or myself. You are now out of the game, due to your stupid naivety .
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Russia has brought with all it's best ability to Ukraine, the Gulagy 17. It is not a pretty gift. Has Russia also enabled the Kim Regime to Nuke endangered whales in the Pacific ? And how is the pal to pal talk between Dennis Rodman and Kim going ? It looks like Kim has Domestic problems, and I mean that with his inner family (his love life ). It looks like maybe he has a drinking and emotional crisis. Is the "bro" talk between Rodman and Kim yielding any results ? Does it truly serve Russian strategy to fake a failed DPRK Nuclear launch on it's territory and plant a Dnipro built rocket engine on their territory , or maybe the variant elements on the equation are working together? Do they want to invade a failed Nation State to gain leverage over China ?

For now I simply want to get the kid Pavel Hryb  out of the prison. If there is any way to modify the paperwork, exchange all prisoners for all, it could go a great ways to re-unite the formerly  brotherly Nations of Ukraine and Russia. Simply for the fact his father works as a border guard and military chaplain, it's simply very uncool to target people's children for political reasons

 I am sure this will get me in a bit of hot water, but what the Hell. I am only an ex professional dishwasher who believes in Peace and cooperation, over violence and bully tactics.
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well, I find some solace that there are still some pockets of normal life left in the East of Ukraine, I spent a long time enjoying the feeling of this news broadcast, it felt like I was partly there in
Berdyansk:
https://youtu.be/_iX65jtDxpI

And this bit from Info resist about the rerouting of Russian Visa applications through Kiev:

 And then the Americans remind that there is also an embassy in Kiev: welcome! Nothing unusual in this. The same Ukrainians put British visas in Warsaw, and not in Kiev. But Kiev for the Muscovite is by no means the same as Warsaw for the Kievite. Because the Kremlin not only interfered in the American elections. He even interfered in the very existence of Ukraine. The Russian will have to come to the city, where memorial plaques on the walls of the houses are killed in the war with his country. And this war is by no means over.

It is clear that in this situation Ukraine is visited by those who understand Russia's responsibility for this war. And they do not go for American visas. But it's not the Americans who are to blame for this!

The Kremlin deprived the Americans of the opportunity to work with Russian applicants. And the Americans just offer these applicants a logically convenient option. And they demonstrate - unwittingly - how much Russian power is hostile to any logistics and any logic.

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Certainly the Border Guard in Ukraine is composed of Kindly people who work with courtesy and professionalism. Nobody appreciates their family members being targeted just for the work they are involved in public service.  Luring Pavel Hryb to Gomel, Belarus , abducting him marks a new low in Behavior. I hope for his safe and soon return.

as to the potential that Ukraine can achieve true reforms, with the aid of a third set of eyes and ears, it's anybody's guess.   Actually , while I think that it's a wild fantasy to expect a perfect score card in Ukraine's reform match, they have done pretty well so far.. If it appeared too perfect, then people would probably say, "hey ! Wait a minute, something is off here, what's really going on that this all seems so perfect ?" 

Of course "Mike", Mikhail Saakashvilli did get 1.5 billion from DIck Cheney, was that a consolation prize for holding back the Russians but losing 20% of Georgian territory ? And will the upcoming Georgian elections bring his interests slightly back into favor, or significantly?  I think as we in the West, USA refer to our ex-presidents as some form of caped crusaders with super powers, so too do the FSU (Former Soviet Union) Ministers and Presidents, Prime ministers have that aura of being able to get something impossible done, if they work together. Mister Saakashvilli does know all the players on the field. He understands their issues