Exile.ru - consistently ex-cellent

Not precisely a blog, but bloody good anyway. And unlike most of my postings here it's in English. They're reporting on Ukraine's presidential election and the only (relatively) clean candidate, who has some interesting views on international security issues:

"In his most radical proposal, Rzhavsky said that, in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the US, he'd do away with the entire army......However, Rzhavsky's not content leaving well enough alone. "I would turn Ukraine into an international peace center, an eastern Switzerland," he said on the stump. One time, during a particularly passionate rant, he told me, "If I'd been in office, there'd have been no war in Iraq. I'd've told Saddam, 'You can have whatever you want -- palaces, gold, girls -- just so long as there's no war.'" Apparently, Rzhavsky thinks the diplomatic failure was just a question of using the wrong carrot in the carrot-and-stick game. A couple of long-legged Ukrainian girls and a Crimean dacha would have done the trick!"

Eccentric, certainly, although Saddam has a reputation for a taste for blondes. And clearly an improvement on the competition:

"So, the Yanukovich team has adopted several strategies. The most effective is the most simple: they'll probably just stuff the ballot boxes. Lest anyone doubt his democratic credentials, at the end of August Yanukovich was quoted saying, "I do not believe in exit polls. These are new technologies that will be tested in Ukraine for the first time. We do not know how to manipulate them."

You could hardly disagree with their conclusion, though:

"There's even something at stake in the elections beyond ownership of the country's choicest industrial morsels -- Ukraine's oligarchs are clearly worried that Yushchenko will end their free ride and try to drag the country westward. But a healthy opposition doesn't mean that there's a healthy democracy. That's why these elections should be so easy to steal. Without political parties that represent members with a stake in their functionality, politics remains easy to manipulate. And in Ukraine, from the technological candidates to aferisty like Rzhavsky all the way up to Yushchenko, there are no real parties. So if and when Yanukovich steals the elections, the opposition won't be able to do a thing. Unless, of course, someone's financing them."