It looks like Yanukovych has resigned and him and his staff have fled the presidential palace to his local power centre of Kharkiv, by the Russian border. Rumours are that his family have taken suitcases of cash out of the country in the last few days. Yesterday, the Ukraine Rada (Parliament) voted to release the jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, which was a condition of the signing of the EU free trade agreement.
Democracy belongs to the people and not the politicians as has been demonstrated all to clearly in the last week week in the Ukraine, where abuses of office and the breaking of manifesto commitments have not been tolerated by the people. It is a lesson the politicians in the UK and other EU countries and the unelected politicians with the real power in Brussels should remember and take on board. The irony of an undemocratic organisation, the EU, brokering this settlement in the Ukraine is not lost on me.
For the last two weeks my wife has been at Cherkasy University where she is doing a part time degree course in English. On Thursday there were demonstrations, bordering on riots in Cherkasy like in most cities and towns in Western Ukraine in support of those in Freedom Square. Yesterday afternoon my wife returned home and the bus was stopped at many road blocks where the police were checking IDs and trying to stop more people from going to Kiev. Of course, there are also criminal elements and anarchists who want to overthrow democracy trying to take advantage of the situation, so there is an element of danger in much of Western Ukraine at the moment.
It now looks after last weeks tragic and sad bloodshed on both sides that there will be a peaceful transition and elections for a new president and also hopefully deputies (MP's), which is free and fair, unlike the last one.
Western Ukraine is the centre of the famous Cossacks. All I can say is the softest thing about the average Cossack is his teeth and bite! Fear and hardship don't seem to exist in their vocabulary, which is why they were and still are a source of recruitment for the Russian army and special forces (a bit like the Scots in the UK). During the demonstrations, people were manning the barricades and sleeping in tents in temperatures as low as -27degC!
It needs to be remembered that a nation's Sovereignty is like virginity something you either have or you don't. The Ukrainians are determined to hold on to theirs in the light of Russian bullying. Our politicians have ceded ours to the EU, where EU law and their court rulings take precedence over domestic laws. Parliament is little more than super council these days, where they only have limited powers to make laws for the Province of England and to an even lesser extent for the provinces of NI, Scotland and Wales where they have their own super councils.
This is going to a battle ground in the UK in the next few years, between those that want parliament to be our sovereign authority again and those that want us ruled from and by the EU. If the Conservatives form the next Government any negotiations to return powers to Westminster so we have an agreement similar to that of Norway and Switzerland is going to be interesting. This of course is what we originally signed up to and had a referendum on when it was the EEC.
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Topic: The power of the people (Read 727 times)