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THE UKRAINE WAR
WHAT DO RUSSIANS KNOW? UATV ... Sudden understanding? Regular russians in social media start suspecting that they are terrorists Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le4l4sfujrw Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I spent some time in the former Soviet Union in the early/mid 90s after the 'Wall came down' and there was optimism about 'Glasnost'. I got to do work related to Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. I wish I had known then what I know now ,,, but that is water under the bridge. One of the things I had known from my student days some 30 years before the Wall came down was that the 'freedoms' that most people in the West take for granted do not exist in many places including the many countries in the Soviet orbit. In retrospect consultants like myself should have been much better briefed as we launched into all sorts of initiatives to advise the leaders of the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) on the new policy framework they would need to benefit from Western capitalisn. During the Soviet era, government accounting records in the Soviet Union were very precise and complete ... way better than in the United States and somewhat better than in most of Europe. From a management perspective Soviet accounting records were difficult to use for most management needs even though the basic data was on the record. Frankly, if the Western consultants had done little to change the detail rocording of accounting data but had focused on improvement to the way the data got summarized and reported, the story of Government Financial Management in the FSU would have been a very different story and the emergence of ultra-wealthy kleptocrats much more modest. Sadly, this was not on the Western agenda, and the major consulting firms ... like KPMG ... served more to enable the kleptocrats than to make their emergence more difficult. I did some of my work in Kazakhstan working with a KPMG team in Almaty ... a team that was surprisingly weak, as were most of the other international consulting teams that were deployed around the FSU after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union. I did not realise it at the time, but a lot of what has gone wrong in the last 40 years in US foreign policy has its genesis in the policy options chosed by George Bush 41 who was looking for an economic 'peace dividend' for the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A UN assignment I was working on in Afghanistan at that time was summarily terminated when the US pulled back on many of its international initiatives and support for UN programs. I did not realize how deep and widespread these cuts had been until recently (in 2022) when Jeffrey Sachs was describing his own experience in Moscow around the same time and lost all development funding from the USA. During the past 30 years, there have been big changes in the profile of corruption in the countries of the FSU with Russia topping the corruption league tables, but followed by many others pretty impressive in terms of corruption. Ukraine is not immune from corruption ... but it seems that it is less endemic than in other countries of the FSU. While the military of the Russian Federation seems to have been hollowed out by grand corruption, this does not seem to have happened within the Ukrainian military at enything like the same scale Peter Burgess | ||
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Sudden understanding? Regular Russians in social media start suspecting that they are terrorists...
Jul 7, 2022 UATV English ... UATV is funded in whole or in part by the Ukrainian government. 309K subscribers ... 436,406 views The discussion behind iron curtain doesn't seem good for the authorities. Only after more than 36,000 killed occupiers and unprecedented sanctions Russians begin suspecting that something is wrong. Here is what they write in local social media... Subscribe to UATV English:
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