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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

If you actually read the laws that Yanukovych passed, they were hardly extreme, and are close to what is in place in most Western countries already.

Limits on shutting down infrastructure, arming yourself in a protest, wearing body armour, inciting violence, and setting up tents in public areas... Things which are illegal everywhere in the West.

But everyone gets their news through a filter here, no one reads primary sources, no one reads Ukrainian or Russian or even bothers with translation tools...

Edit - love the downvotes for suggesting people look into primary sources. Guess people love being sheep.

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Yeah, because 2 years in prison is a completely reasonable sentence for researching the background of police officers or politicians, i.e. looking into corruption. And 10 years of prison for being at a protest is hardly extreme as well. Or prison for wearing head protection when the police is shooting at you.

> Yeah, because 2 years in prison is a completely reasonable sentence for researching the background of police officers or politicians, i.e. looking into corruption. And 10 years of prison for being at a protest is hardly extreme as well. Or prison for wearing head protection when the police is shooting at you.

You've basically proven my point.

Step 1: Read the Ukrainian laws.

Step 2: Read the laws of your own country.

Step 3: Compare.

Please stop trolling. There are always places where laws are worse than somewhere else. Just because an unjust law exists somewhere else in the world does not make it less unjust.

Again, the laws in Ukraine were no harsher than what the US or Canada has. Not like we're a terrible place to live...

Again, these laws are unjust everywhere. Also remember that Ukraine does not have "Supreme Court". If the government passes a law that is unjust (talking about the EU treating now), the people have a mandate to protest. That is the checks and balances system at play there. Making protests illegal there means that you remove one of the main checks.

> Making protests illegal there means that you remove one of the main checks.

Again, the laws didn't make protests illegal. Merely made some of the more unsavoury activities associate with riots illegal...

Read primary sources, I can't stress that enough.

So what? An unreasonable sentence is an unreasonable sentence. Your logic is, essentially, "Well everybody else is doing it, so it isn't that bad."

Do you also agree with "Well, the NSA spies on its citizens; who cares if other countries spy on their citizens?"

> Do you also agree with "Well, the NSA spies on its citizens; who cares if other countries spy on their citizens?"

Would you agree with the US engaging in regime change in say, Canada because we spy on our citizens?

Ah, the Tu quoque fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

"To clarify, although the person being attacked might indeed be acting inconsistently or hypocritically, this does not invalidate their argument."

Revolution always carries consequences. Inciting it over every 'unjust' law isn't necessarily worthwhile... It's not right to use Ukraine as a proxy battle without consisting the consequences for the Ukrainian people...

These laws are irrelevant to the situation. The protest tarted because Yanukovic refused to sign economic treaty with EU and instead accepted money from Russia. And that was not the whole reason either, it was just last drop in the glass of patience. The corruption is the core reason, and people want to join EU in hopes that EU will help reduce the corruption.

-- Yanukovic refused to sign economic treaty with EU

Wrong.

Set us straight then; expand your responses with your own knowledge of primary sources.

Enlighten us.

Janukovic asked EU first, they sent him home ("the problem with Ukrainian financing is your own, we don't care"). Then he asked Russia for a loan and they said yes.

Yanukovych had requested whopping $160 bln. And just guess where a large part of this sum would go.

So his requirement looked like extortion, moreover, after a little shock I realized that this money meant "You give me 160 billions, I sell you Ukraine and you can do anything you want there".

Now you have to admit that Janukovic asking EU first was not the most Russia-friendly thing you can imagine.

And then some people should stop from blaming Russia for Janukovic being their toy. He is his own toy.

Blaming Russia is a convenient scapegoat: "See, those evil Russians?"

Janukovic is Achmetov's toy.

-- Enlighten us.

Just like cLeEOGPw did?

Someone says "this is bad". Someone else says "this is good". As simple as that. No arguments in both cases.

But you decide to not provide additional information. You knowingly settle for not providing actual arguments to back up your claims.

Do you think that these qualities are what Ukrainian people would want their society to be based upon?

-- But you decide to not provide additional information

Yes, like the opponent did. He _decided_ to not provide additional information also, but put more words into it.

Should i have said "Wrong, wrong, wrong"?

I'm not claiming that my statement proves something. I just wanted to show the original post has zero prove also.

I wonder how many people upvoted this without reading primary sources, studying Ukrainian/Russian reports or using translation tools.

In fact, I wonder how many people commented on this without reading the laws in their own countries.

Coupled with a 15 year term?

-- Coupled with a 15 year term?

-- no one reads primary sources

29th november 2013, journalists (along with everyone else) get beaten brutally by storm troopers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE6wBzLgEH8

more recently, men in plain clothes with white armbands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrl6Uw--nYc

Would you like to know more? There's more. But I guess you could always say that there is no context, or that these are just isolated incidents not sanctioned from above, so I'm not sure if I should bother posting more. But I have been following this for like a week, reading and watching a lot, and I would say the situation is actually worse than many people in the west are aware of.

And now, for something completely different! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGaQ5BDNouM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPzWoYjAnY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl_iutoQPvY

Oh, I'm under no delusion about police brutality in the west, here in Germany as well. Doesn't make it okay though, or unworthy of resisting and trying to get things changed.

But should we incite revolution in a country, making things much worse in the process, destroying economies and the unity of a country for such a reason?

Revolution always makes things worse before they get better...

Unity could be restored by the rest of the country joining them, the revolution could be ended by the president resigning.

Revolution always makes things worse before they get better...

Yes, sadly. And the outcome of this is unclear. But I can't blame them for trying. As they say, better an end with terror than terror without end. They are risking their lives not just out of sheer boredom or greed, but because they have been pushed into a corner and saw no other way out.

All I have to say is that there's a reason Yushchenko was voted out of office so unceremoniously.... The rest of the country won't join the protests because they don't want a government consisting of Fatherland and Svoboda...

Oh yeah, the claim that it's all just a bunch of right-wing extremists, I already wondered why that hasn't been trotted out yet.

http://avtonomia.net/2014/01/23/awu-statement-current-politi...

> Over the last days not only the far right confront the government, but also people of more moderate views. And they constitute the majority of the protesters. Many of them are indifferent to nationalism or negatively predisposed to it. Many of them don’t support integration into the EU. People go into the streets to protest against police violence. And a significant part of them is unenthusiastic or even skeptical about the clashes in the Grushevskogo street. Often one can hear that right radicals are a “Trojan horse” of Yanukovych and special services, designed to discredit the protest. Certainly there would be many more Kievites participating in the protests if there was a way to take those idiots useful to the government out of the streets.

also: http://observers.france24.com/content/20140127-protests-grow...

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