Putin prefers having client neighbour states run by thieves: Lukashenka in Belarus, Yanukovych in Ukraine, and now in Crimea’s case a member of the vicious Crimean underworld - Sergey Aksyonov. Out of all the provinces in Ukraine, the two with the highest crime rate and corruption are ex-Pres. Yanukovych’s Donetsk oblast, and Crimea - the two areas Putin is using to stir trouble instead of stability and peace. Putin can deal with criminal underworld thugs. They speak the same language.
From the Toronto Star:
Meet ‘Goblin’ — Moscow’s man in Crimea
*SIMFEROPOL, UKRAINE—Strip away the propaganda from the chaos in Crimea, and this much is certain: last Thursday morning a political farce played out here in the regional capital.
It started with anonymous gunmen storming parliament house in a bloodless pre-dawn raid. By sunrise, the Russian flag was flying high above an occupied government house.
Lawmakers were summoned, stripped of their cellphones as they entered the chamber. The Crimean media was banished. Then, behind closed doors, Crimea’s government was dismissed and a new one formed, with Sergey Aksyonov, head of the Russian Unity party, installed as Crimea’s new premier.
If it was a crime, it was just the beginning. Aksyonov’s ascent to power at the point of a gun presaged all that has happened since — the announcement of a referendum on Crimean independence and the slow, methodical fanning out of Russian forces throughout the peninsula, ostensibly to protect Russians here from a threat no one can seem to find.
But here’s the most interesting bit: Aksyonov’s sudden rise as Moscow’s crucial point man in Crimea has revived simmering allegations of an underworld past going back to the lawless 1990s, when Aksyonov is said to have gone by the street name “Goblin,” a lieutenant in the Crimean crime syndicate Salem.
Details of “Goblin” spilled out this week in a broadcast interview with Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Senchenko, a Crimean who has known Aksyonov’s political sponsor, Crimean Parliamentary Speaker Vladimir Konstantinov, for 25 years.
Both Aksyonov and Konstantinov, according to Senchenko, sought political clout as a means of laundering their shady pasts, insulating themselves from potential prosecution. Upon taking power, the two fell under the sway of Moscow, he told Svoboda Radio.
“Mr. Aksyonov in the mid ’90s was a foreman in an organized criminal gang, known in Crimea in criminal and police circles under the pseudonym Goblin,” said Senchenko. But multiple changes of power and chronic corruption in the territory enabled the shredding and burning of much evidence, he added.
“If we have the will and the law . . . I think the place for Aksyonov is in prison,” he said.*
*The whistle was blown then by Mikhail Bakharev, first deputy chairman of the Russian Society of Crimea, who presented as evidence 1990s Crimean police files naming “Sergey V. Aksyonov as an active member of organized crime group Salem, with the nickname ‘Goblin.’ ”
“The prolonged fight between [crime group] competitors led to 30 persons being killed in just one month of 1991,” Shirokov wrote. Explosions later rocked Simferopol as the gang battles intensified.
By the mid-1990s, Salem’s membership had soared to 1,200 fighters. Eventually, many of the gangsters, tired of the fighting, decided instead to shift their gaze toward political office. More than 40 were elected as local deputies in 1995. “They wanted to get deputy inviolability,” Shirokov wrote.
Fast forward to the present, and there is little question Aksyonov, 42, has ascended with a strongman’s momentum that would do Tony Soprano proud. Though he was first elected to the Crimean parliament in 2010 with less than 4 per cent of the vote, he now projects 100 per cent control.*"
thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/04/meet_goblin_moscows_man_in_crimea.html
So Putin was perfectly happy having an immoral criminal underworld goon who stole billions from the people run Ukraine and bemoans now that Yanukovych didn’t use more force to kill the protest at Maidan. Now he wants another criminal underworld goon to run Crimea - Sergei Aksyonov, a.k.a the ‘Goblin’.
And in Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has supported Russian neo-Nazis like Pavel Gubarev to head the pro-Russian separatist movement and who is praised in the Kremlin media:
Putin’s Neo-Nazi Helpers
khpg.org/index.php?id=1394442656
