Why Hong Kong’s protesters look to Ukraine

By Isabella Steger

An uprising that started off with people marching and singing in high spirits morphs into one increasingly defined by violence, police brutality, propaganda wars, and even thug attacks—that’s the trajectory of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine that Hong Kong’s protesters increasingly feel parallels their own struggle.
While the last few years have seen an explosion in popular uprisings across the world from the Middle East to Sudan to Puerto Rico, few have resonated with Hong Kongers as much as the 2014 pro-European, anti-Russian protests in Ukraine. 

The timing of the uprising in Kiev’s central Maidan square, coming just months before the outbreak of the Umbrella Movement in 2014, provided a convenient reference point for those in Hong Kong. Five years later, as a much more volatile and high-stakes resistance movement in Hong Kong emerges, Ukraine’s experience feels even more eerily familiar and instructive.
Oleksandra Ustinova, a 33-year-old politician who was recently elected to Ukraine’s parliament, said that as a student at Stanford earlier this year she gave a joint presentation with some Hong Kong student leaders and participants of the Umbrella Movement, where they tried to draw parallels between the two situations. 

“I know that a lot of (Hong Kong) were looking at Ukraine as a prototype,” said Ustinova.
The Oscar-nominated 2015 documentary Winter on Fire, which is about the Maidan protests, has been one central discussion point for many Hong Kong protesters. 

With the documentary now available on Netflix, many are sharing their thoughts on it.

Lee Ngao, the administrator of a Facebook page called Resistance Live Media that frequently shares updates related to the Hong Kong protests, recently promoted (link in Chinese) the documentary on his page. 

“Hong Kong protesters are interested in Maidan because it’s enlightening and educational for them,” said Lee.

“It’s David vs. Goliath. Hong Kong protesters really admire those in Ukraine for their strategy and unwavering spirit of resistance.”
The David vs. Goliath comparison is one that’s also been oft used to describe the conflict in Ukraine. Arthur Kharytonov, a Kiev-based lawyer who started a group in 2017 called Free Hong Kong Center that aims to bring information about Hong Kong to a Ukrainian audience, said that both Russia and China are like a “very bad child of the USSR,” and employ similarly violent tactics to intimidate protesters.
The brutal scenes from an incident earlier this month that saw armed white-clad thugs beating people in a suburban train station, for example, felt shockingly familiar to followers of eastern European affairs. 

Many compared it to the Titushki, a term used by Ukrainians to refer to athletic young men believed to have been hired by the state to assault pro-democracy protesters and journalists.


Andreas Umland@UmlandAndreas
These kind of unofficial attack squads of an authoritarian regime have been labelled "titushky" in Ukraine, after one such martial arts fighter Vadym Titushko who was filmed attacking Ukrainian TV journalists. https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1153966803477045248 …
DW News
✔@dwnews
𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀
An assault on pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong left dozens wounded. Footage showed people screaming as suspected triad gangsters beat protesters and leaving pools of blood on the floor.

2
1:15 PM - Jul 24, 2019

As questions swirled over why it was that Hong Kong police were absent for almost 45 minutes as thugs with wooden sticks and bats beat both black-clad activists returning from a protest and regular civilians in the train station, and in a carriage, many are alleging collusion between law enforcement forces and organized crime gangs known as triads. 

The government and police have strongly denied the existence of such links. 

However, in a recording obtained by Reuters, a Chinese official was heard encouraging residents of a village in the rural area near the scene of the attacks that they should drive away any protesters from the area in order to maintain peace just days before the July 21 mayhem. 

Beijing’s representative office in Hong Kong has denied allegations linking it to the mob violence.
Others see comparisons even on a granular level. 

Edison Hung, a 31-year-old music critic, said he saw similarities between how Euromaidan began as a student-led protest that was peaceful and even uplifting, with people singing songs “with a degree of innocence, just like in Hong Kong.” 

One scene in particular in Winter on Fire, where the bell ringer of a cathedral near the Maidan rang the church bells to signal to people to head to the square to defend protesters from government forces, reminded Hung of how Christians have played a central role in the current Hong Kong protests, for example by incessantly singing hymns to lend support to protesters and defuse tensions.
For now at least, one of the key things that differentiates the two protest movements is the lack of deadly violence in Hong Kong. 

The city’s police have so far responded to what they say is worsening violence on the part of the protesters with weapons including tear gas, pepper spray, batons, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds. Though it represents a significant escalation of tactics on both sides, there have been no deaths in the protests thus far. 

In the Maidan, dozens of people lost their lives, some after being shot by snipers.

 Thousands more have died in the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russia-backed separatists.
“The protests in Hong Kong are 90% similar to Ukraine’s. The only difference being that they haven’t used real bullets in Hong Kong yet,” wrote a user named Zuki Po in a Facebook post (link in Chinese) that broke down in detail the similarities between the two uprisings using timestamps from Winter on Fire as reference points.

As the protests in Hong Kong seem likely to drag on with no political solution in sight, however, the protests that inevitably turn into street battles against police will only intensify. 

Police have already signaled that they’re prepared to use increasingly powerful crowd-control tactics, such as water cannons, and clashes between the two sides are beginning earlier and earlier in the day. For now, there’s also no sign that Beijing is prepared to send its army to quell the unrest, despite growing fears in recent weeks of such a likelihood. 

Still, when watching scenes such as when Hong Kong protesters stormed the legislature and said that they were prepared to be arrested for it, Hung, the music critic, saw shades of the Ukraine protests.
“That made me think of the movie where people said that they were ready to die for (the cause). And they did die.”

China's Ukrainian jet engines

The Ukrainians are getting away with taking the U.S. taxpayer’s money in the one hand while stabbing the U.S. in the back with the other
By Bill Gertz
"Today we are the most powerful military in the world and find ourselves in a competition among great powers," said Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis. This week he issued a memorandum to the military that emphasized the need for discipline and lethality. "We must have better individual and unit discipline than our enemies," Mr. Mattis said.

China has deployed one aircraft carrier and has plans for at least three more of the strategic power projection platforms as part of Beijing’s large-scale military buildup.
As part of its carrier operations, state media announced on Tuesday the roll out of a new jet trainer, the JL-10, that Chinese officials say will be used by People’s Liberation Army navy pilots to train in the challenging task of aircraft carrier landings.
The official China Daily newspaper conveniently omitted in its report on the first 12 JL-10s that the trainer is powered by Ukrainian jet engines. 

The supersonic trainer is also known as the L-15.
Aircraft jet engines have been a major weakness for China’s aviation industry for at least a decade. 

To solve the problem, China has purchased both Ukrainian and Russian jet engines to power their warplanes after trying unsuccessfully to produce copies of the engines indigenously.
Critics say the Trump administration should pressure Ukraine to halt the engine sales along with other military transfers to China. 

William C. Triplett, a China expert and former counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Ukrainians are helping China solve jet engine production problems.
“We sure as hell don’t want to help Chinese pilots learn to land on aircraft carriers at an accelerated pace,” he said.
Disclosure of the new Ukrainian-powered carrier training jet comes a month after the Pentagon announced the supply of $200 million in military assistance to Ukraine’s military.
The American aid will fund command and control systems, secure communications, military mobility, night vision equipment and military medical gear. 

“Basically the Ukrainians are getting away with taking the U.S. taxpayer’s money in the one hand while stabbing the U.S. in the back with the other,” Mr. Triplett said.
A second argument for pressuring Kiev is that China for the first time in decades is now identified by the U.S. government as a strategic competitor that American forces could one day face in the shooting war. 

Thus Ukraine should be pressed to end sales of jet engines and other military gear that are bolstering China’s military.
The deal for trainer engines was concluded in 2016 with Ukraine’s Motor Sich company in Zaporizhzhya when the first 20 engines were supplied. 

The $380 million deal calls for a total of 250 engines for the trainers.
Ukraine recently delayed China’s attempt to buy Motor Sich.
Rick Fisher, a China expert at the InternationalStrategy and Assessment Center, said the United States should pressure Kiev to block the sale.
“For China, gaining control of Motor Sich will result in the accelerated arrival of the PLA’s global airmobile power projection capabilities,” Mr. Fisher said.
China remains a major arms buyer from Ukraine. 

In addition to JL-15 engines, recent Ukraine-China arms transfers have included some 50 diesel engines for tanks, and gas turbines for Luyang-2 and Luyang-3 guided missile destroyers.
In 2009, China bought two large Zubr-class hovercraft landing ships that were shipped to China shortly before Russia launched its covert military takeover of the Crimean peninsula.
Two more landing craft will be built in China under Ukrainian supervision. 

China also spent $45 million in 2016 to Ukraine’s state-owned Ukroboronprom for three Il-78M aerial refueling tankers.
The Chinese navy said in a statement last week that the JL-10s were commissioned in a ceremony at the Naval Aviation University in Shandong province.
The twin engine JL-10 is powered by two Ukraine-made Ivchenko-Progress AI-222-25F turbofan engines. 

The jet is used for training Chinese navy pilots to flight the J-15 carrier-based fighter jet.

Trump's U-turns

Trump dumps Russia, woos China instead
By Nicole Gaouette

Washington -- Donald Trump has a new best frenemy.
Once upon a time, Trump mused about how well he and Russian President Vladimir Putin would get along. 

Then-candidate Trump said Putin had declared him a "genius," criticized the Obama administration's tensions with Moscow and said it would be better "if we got along."
China, on the other hand, was a currency manipulator, a thief of US jobs that should no longer be allowed to "rape our country." 

If elected, Trump promised to impose heavy tariffs on Beijing and take it to court for shady trade practices.
It turns out that wielding power -- as opposed to criticizing it -- can change your outlook.
This month, during which his administration has stepped up US military action in Syria and Afghanistan as he looks to reassert US power, Trump said that "we're not getting along with Russia at all, we may be at an all-time low." 

He and Xi Jinping, on the other hand, have "a very good chemistry," Trump declared.
The President's reversal on Russia and China is part of a series of policy flip-flops that have seen Trump abandon campaign positions on NATO, Israel, the Iran nuclear agreement and US alliances in Asia.
The shifts, which bring Trump's White House in line with many Obama and George W. Bush administration policies, may not last under this mercurial president, but they reflect some hard facts about America's interests.
"Whatever the aspirations on the campaign trail, they have given way to the realities of what it takes to conduct American foreign policy in a cruel and unforgiving world," said Aaron David Miller, vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
"The way this administration does business is highly unorthodox in so many respects," Miller said, "but the ultimate outcome on so many issues seems now to come around to a pretty conventional approach."
And so it is -- these days -- with Russia and China.
Trump had been eager to improve relations with Moscow and often expressed confidence that his ability to bond with Putin would ease friction between Washington and Moscow over Russia's role in Syria and its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's alleged April 4 chemical weapons attack on his own civilians triggered Trump's outrage, leading him to strike a Syrian airfield with Tomahawk missiles and seeming to mark a change in Trump's outlook on Russia -- which has supported Assad throughout Syria's bloody civil war.
Trump's administration, shadowed by Russia's alleged interference in the US election, had already been shifting its views on Moscow as the former real estate mogul brought more figures into the White House who backed traditional foreign policy positions.
Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had his own foreign policy research and risk analysis staff as CEO of ExxonMobil, along with UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, all sounded a tougher note on Russia than the President did, pointing out the ways that Moscow works to counter US interests around the world.
"They were all sounding much tougher on Russia, much more like the Obama administration, and the outlier was the White House," said Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University.
The US missile strike was an exclamation mark establishing that Trump, for the time being at least, has come to see Russia in more conventional US foreign policy terms. 

"You have a much more consolidated policy toward Russia now," Stent said.
Putin told Russian TV in an interview Wednesday that under Trump, the relationship between Washington and Moscow had "worsened."
Even as he took a harsher tone on the longtime US adversary, Trump still seemed to offer some reassurance in a Wednesday appearance with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, saying that, "It would be wonderful ... if NATO and our country could get along with Russia." 

On Thursday, Trump tweeted that, "things will work out fine between the U.S.A. and Russia. At the right time everyone will come to their senses & there will be lasting peace!"
But Stent said that actually there is likely to be continued US-Russia tension. 

"All the problems the previous administration had still remain," she said.
"You had these role reversals," according to Miller, a former State Department official, "with China as a bad guy and Putin being courted. But in the face of realities, there's been a switch. Russia basically now occupies the role that China was supposed to occupy in the Trump administration."

The "realities" that Trump faces include North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's accelerating pursuit of nuclear and missile technology. 

Trump sent tweets this week praising Xi for committing to help restrain North Korea, which may be on the verge of a sixth nuclear test. 

Beijing is Pyongyang's closest ally.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that he'd told Xi a trade deal with the US would be "far better for them if they solve the North Korea problem." 

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that he and Xi had had "a very good call" about Pyongyang. 

And Thursday, the president tweeted that he had "great confidence that China will properly deal with North Korea. If they are unable to do so, the U.S., with its allies, will! U.S.A."

Sandy Pho, a senior program associate for the Kissinger Institute on China at the Wilson Center, said that Trump, like many new presidents, has been facing a learning curve on the ways of Beijing.
"You cannot not talk to China. I think that's what he realized. It's too important," said Pho, but she warned Trump is underestimating China's influence over North Korea and its interest in an outcome the US would be happy with.
What Beijing wants in North Korea is stability, not potentially disruptive change. 

"The last thing they want is a flood of North Korean refugees coming over their border," Pho said.
And the only thing Beijing might think was worse, she said, would be a unified and US-allied Korean Peninsula on the border.
If Trump thinks his new posture towards the geopolitical rivals will help him play them off against each other, Stent suggested he think again.
"I think he fundamentally doesn't understand the nature of the Russia-China relationship," she said, describing it as pragmatic. 

The two authoritarian governments support each other on major foreign policy problems, dislike domestic protest and see the US in a similar way.
"Both agree that we need a new world order that takes their interests into account more than it does right now, and both agree it's time to move away from a US-dominated global order," Stent said.