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[Helgoland]

Could you post a summary? The video is kinda long...

[olemars]

He makes good points in the first five minutes. Beyond that the good points get heavily diluted in misconceptions and a few outright falsehoods. But I don't doubt it's a fair reflection on how many russians view what's going on.

edit: OK, hadn't watched all of it yet, multiply the falsehood factor by about five.

[Sergarr]

That video conveys my feeling better than I would have ever did with words.

[XXSockXX]

It is basically the story of the recent events and the earlier revolutions in Ukraine. It's the Russian point of view we already know, though the guy is pretty articulate and witty.
He makes some good points in the first half, how all the politicians are oligarchs or paid by oligarchs who bleed their country dry. That seems pretty true, the current government consists mostly of wealthy people like the old one. It's basically true for all Eastern European presidential systems, including Russia. You guys need to do something about your campaign financing system over there (you too, US). One factual error, it was widely reported in the West that Yanukovych and others did bring millions out of the country.
He lost me of course in the second half, where it's the usual Nazi stuff again. Government is now controlled by Nazis, Nazis orchestrated shootings on Maidan, Russians are threatened and need to be protected, that kind of stuff.
So it starts off pretty well, but then becomes more and more distorted. It's all stuff we have heard already, just articulated more coherently and funnier.

[Guardian G.I.]

Dmitri Puchkov makes a very good point when he talks about organizing and maintaining a Maidan tent camp - keeping ~10000 people in a tent camp for several weeks and supplying them with basic necessities is very difficult and expensive. People running the show behind the scenes are very skilful specialists in logistics. Unpaid activists from Western Ukraine alone can't do it.

[Helgoland]

GI, so Occupy was organized by the West as well? Sometimes I admire your ability to maintain cognitive dissonance...

[Guardian G.I.]

GI, so Occupy was organized by the West as well? Sometimes I admire your ability to maintain cognitive dissonance...

Occupy movement's camps are small family picnics compared to Maidan camps in 2004 and 2013. Occupy camps had about a hundred Americans at most, if I recall correctly, maybe several hundreds if I am mistaken. The population of Maidan is several thousands of people, if not tens of thousands.

[XXSockXX]

You mean in the Orange revolution? I don't know enough about that to comment.
Now the Maidan camp seemed definitely like something that could be sustained by people alone, we have seen similar things. While I guess it is possible that they had some people organizing and paying for stuff in the background, you wouldn't need logistics experts to pull that off. I've been on festivals with that many people and that works too, despite massive logistics failure. If enough people volunteer, you don't actually need that much per individual.

[olemars]

They've had prominent opposition politicians supporting the protests and a number of them are not at all short of cash, so I don't doubt there is a certain element of organization behind it. The bit he lost me on in that regard is implying that western military is running the logistics (presumably pulling at the same threads as Putin's Lithuanian terrorist training camps).

[XXSockXX]

Yeah, that's it. They seemed well-organized, but that doesn't imply any kind of military logistics expertise.

[FearfulJesuit]

IIRC, China's starting to run out of homegrown fossil fuels, fast. The Russians could probably make up for European consumption by selling to the Chinese.

[burningpet]

Just as olemars said, while that kind of protesting does require funds and organizations, they could have easily been handled by the opposition parties.

Also, regarding organization and such, they probably have all sort of ex-military/executives/producers that organize it.
I seem to recall a story about a guy nicknamed "Delta" who is actually an ex israeli soldier that served in the time in samson foxes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson's_Foxes - he served in the reestablished unit) that is behind one of the protesting groups. the logistics behind those groups are really no that hard or complicated and anyone who have served as a sergeant in the army should easily tackle this job.

[olemars]

In other news, NATO deploys the Luxembourg air force to monitor the Ukraine border.

[Darvi]

According to my memory that's like a handful of small planes and a couple of sergeants. What are they hoping to accomplish?

[Zangi]

According to my memory that's like a handful of small planes and a couple of sergeants. What are they hoping to accomplish?

Its a message.  "We ain't got much, but we got your back."  and another interpretation which is hilarious:    "We are serious guys, back off."