Last year Latvia banned 3 Russian singers (one of them is Ukrainian: Kobzon) from attending the musical festival "New Wave" because of their standpoint on the reunification of Crimea with Russia.
This year "New Wave" will be conducted in Sochi, instead of Jurmala:
http://www.gazeta.ru/business/news/2015/01/12/n_6816269.shtmlAnd Latvia will loose €17 million because of their own foolishness.
http://www.gazeta.ru/business/news/2015/01/12/n_6816269.shtmlBy the way, when Yatsenjuk equated Nazi Ukraine to Nazi Germany, painting both as natural allies, the official German response to it: everyone has the right to their own opinion:
http://ria.ru/world/20150112/1042238993.htmlSo, yes, hypocrisy as the primary European value.
The secondary European value is Nazism, the spectre of which walks across Europe now.
Latvia asked for funds from EU to step up their anti-Russian propaganda, while a representative of "Latvian "Future Institute" called to kill all non-sitizens in Latvia (people who were born there, but are denied citizenship - there are about 300.000 of those, another Human Right "European value"):
http://lenta.ru/news/2015/01/12/latvia/
And only Nazi-Ukraine and their USA backers have not understood that sanctions are not affecting Russia.
USA's man in Kiev, Poroshenko, says that sanctions against Russia work and demands that they be prolonged. Good for Russia.
http://www.gazeta.ru/business/news/2015/01/12/n_6816561.shtmlhttp://www.gazeta.ru/business/news/2014/09/18/n_6490301.shtml
Oh, and the comedy club of the rating agencies:
Fitch downgrade will have 'limited' effect on Russiahttp://rt.com/business/221791-fitch-russia-limited-effect/Someone is desperate here to pull a rating stunt in denial of the obvious contradiction.
Notice in the following quote, how the reality is expected to follow the rating, and not the other way around, the rating being a gauge of reality:
“There’s 40-50 percent likelihood that Russia will be downgraded to ‘junk’ status. If it happens the Russian market will start falling sharply and the pressure on the ruble will increase,” Tikhomirov added.
However:
“It is obvious that a country with US$400 billion of reserves and a public debt of 12 percent of GDP cannot be considered as ‘junk’. The ratings do not reflect the reality anymore,” he said, adding that Russia received an investment grade rating in 2004 when it had $80 billion of reserves and the oil price was around $35.