Your Tuesday Briefing: Kyiv is Attacked by Iranian-Made Drones
Ukrainian President and self-styled “strongman” Petro Poroshenko said he wants an international military court in Kyiv, as the government and its Russian backers struggle to resolve a crisis over $1 billion in cash that the Russian-backed insurgents want from the bank.
Boris Yeltsin, the man who created the Russian state and established Yeltsinia, has died. He was 95 but rarely spoke, in fact he said very little. Yeltsin was the president of the Russian state, the chairman and editor of the Russian Daily Telegraph (which had a circulation of 3 million). Yeltsin once said that “the state” was not only the people, but also “the property of the people,” he continued:
“To me state doesn’t mean a nation, it means the sum total of everything – a nation is the sum of the people, but the state is the sum of everything that can be a state, a nation and everything else that is not. State is the property of the people. It is not a property, a state is the property. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the property. In fact, it’s the only property. But a state is the property of the people.
It is the same with politics, Yeltsin continued.
“The state is not a person, it’s not an institution… The state is a means of the people, the only means of the people. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with it… It’s all right. The state is not the state of the masses, it’s the state of the elites.”
The New York Times, via the Los Angeles Times, reports another sign of the deteriorating political situation in Kyiv:
Ukraine’s acting president did not rule out the possibility last night of a civil war breaking out in the country should Kiev and its Russian backers fail to find an agreement on the country’s economic crisis.
“If something like that happens now, it would certainly have implications. And I mean, at least, to some degree, it is already happening,” Mykola Azarov, who took the helm of Ukraine after President Viktor Yanukovich fled the country, said in an interview on his website. Ukraine’s president has until now been reluctant to publicly