Ukrainian “Right Sector” Fascists Light Transcarpathian Fuse

Right Sector ultranationalists in Lviv this week

Back in early 2014, during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, I predicted on this blog that Crimea would be the next part of the post-Soviet “near abroad” to explode in violence between pro-Russian and anti-Russian forces.  And indeed it was that republic within independent Ukraine that the Russian Federation invaded and annexed mere weeks later.  This blog has followed the ensuing Russian war on Ukraine closely, and almost exactly a year ago (in an article in this blog titled “Will Transcarpathia Be the Next Donetsk—or Crimea?”), I opined that Ukraine’s Transcarpathia was a likely place for President Vladimir Putin’s next infringement of Ukrainian sovereignty.  Well, this week the Transcarpathian domino has started to fall, but not quite in the direction I had predicted.

First, some history.  The oblast (province) of Transcarpathia is a former part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which between the world wars was attached by the League of Nations as the eastern “tail” of the new composite republic of Czecho-Slovakia.  Its inhabitants included, and continue to include, Ukrainians, Magyars (Hungarians), Russians, and a long-standing local minority called the Ruthenian, or Rusyn, people—Slavs whose communities are also found in nearby Poland and Slovakia today, where they tend to be known as Lemkos.  When Adolf Hitler moved into Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, Ruthenia and Slovakia, separately, declared independence, but Transcarpathia was annexed by the Axis government in Hungary.  After the Second World War, Transcarpathia, also called Carpathian Ruthenia or Carpatho-Ukraine, was grafted onto the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic under Josef Stalin.  In the centrally-governed Soviet empire, boundaries between constituent S.S.R.s had little meaning, but after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Ukraine became one of the places where, as Putin was later to put it, people went to bed as Soviet citizens and woke up as a Russian minority in a foreign country.  (Imperialist karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?)  Autonomy-minded residents, including some ethnic Hungarians (12% of the oblast), Russians (3%), and Ruthenians (by then less than 1%) declared an independent Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’ in 1993, but it fizzled.

The flag of Transcarpathia

In 2008, as Putin was flexing his muscles in the neighboring Republic of Georgia—formalizing, through war, two of its constituent regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as Russian puppet states—trouble was brewing in Ukraine as well.  Again, Transcarpathians rose up, this time declaring an independent Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia.  This the government in Kyiv would not indulge, claiming that it was all being staged by Moscow—which, given the events in Georgia, remains a reasonable interpretation.

In 2012, the new ethnically Russian–Polish–Belarussian pro-Kremlin president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, helped enshrine Russian, Ruthenian, Hungarian, and other minority languages as official.  But after Yanukovych fled and was impeached in the popular “Euro-Maidan” uprising in 2014, the largely progressive, democratically-minded new government included strong elements of the Ukrainian-nationalist far right, including the fringe neo-fascist group Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor), who, because of their importance in the Euro-Maidan movement, were given a small political role, including some ministries.  (I discussed Right Sector and kindred groups in an article last year; see also this article.)  These right-wing elements pushed through an erasure of minority language rights—a policy which was quickly reversed, under international pressure, but remains for many non-Ukrainian-speakers a symbol of the new regime’s disdain for them and a pretext for ethnic-Russian separatism in places like Crimea and the Donbas.  The cause of Transcarpathian autonomy has an ally (as discussed earlier in this blog) in Jobbik, the pro-Kremlin right-wing extremist nationalist group which is now Hungary’s third-largest political party.  As in Kharkiv (see article from this blog) and Odessa (see article from this blog) oblasts, a pro-Kremlin “people’s republic” has been declared in Transcarpathia, but without any actual rebel control of territory as there is in the self-declared pro-Kremlin Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in southeastern Ukraine.

Right Sector yobbos with “Wolfsangel” armbands

Observers have long wondered now which “near abroad” territories Putin would, either directly or, as he prefers, through “false flag” battalions and agents provocateurs, try to invade next: Odessa? Transnistria? Transcaspia? Transcarpathia?  But in Transcarpathia the spark that lit the fuse this week has come from the aforementioned ultranationalist Ukrainian group Right Sector, which has thousands of active, armed members throughout Ukraine and as many as 10,000 fighting Russian troops in the Donbas.  On July 11th, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, two dozen armed militants wearing Right Sector insignia exchanged gunfire with police at a café in the Transcarpathian city of Mukachevo, destroying police and civilian cars with grenade launchers and killing two officers.  Five Right Sector fighters were wounded, but most fled to a nearby rural area where police engaged them in a siege—still ongoing three days later as this is being written, with ten Right Sector militants holding out against state police (though reliable up-to-date reports are difficult to find).

Will Transcarpathia join the archipelago of Russian puppet regimes?

Russian news reports the same day described Right Sector attacks on a gymnasium and a police station, also in Mukachevo.  Two were killed at the gym, owned by a local legislator, Mikhail Lanyo, allied with the Yanukovych regime.

Ukrainian fascists with red-and-black flags were a minority but a high-profile presence

during the Euro-Maidan movement of 2013-14.

Some descriptions of events say the incident in the café was a meeting between rival gangs—one run by Lanyo, who controls border crossings with the European Union (E.U.) states of Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia, and rivals in league with Right Sector and a local politician named Viktor Baloha, who is reported to run Transcarpathia as his own mafia-style fief.  The summit meeting, planned to divide territories in gangland-politics fashion, got out of hand, drawing in the police.

Viktor Baloha

As this article goes to press, two Right Sector participants in the events have been taken to Kyiv for questioning, a six-year-old boy taken hostage by Right Sector has been released, and Right Sector volunteer troops, who seem extremely well organized, have established roadblocks on the main Kyiv–Zhytomyr road.  Right Sector spokespeople also say they are working with the Ukrainian secret police, the S.B.U. (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny, or Security Service of Ukraine), to restore order—which, if true, anyone should find a bit worrying.

A Right Sector roadblock in Transcarpathia this week

The same state-owned and state-controlled Russian media outlets that the Kremlin uses as a tightly scripted propaganda machine disseminating lies about the conflict in the southeast are describing what sounds like a near-takeover of Ukraine by Right Sector forces.  Ukraine’s president, the former chocolate tycoon Petro Poroshenko, on the other hand, says the events are only about smuggling and not about geopolitics.  Meanwhile, however, hundreds of Right Sector protestors in Kyiv are demanding the resignation of the minister of the interior, Arsen Avakov.  In Ukraine’s second city, Lviv (the Ruthenian capital in the days of the Habsburgs), according to Russian media, Right Sector demonstrators lowered E.U. flags at the main administrative building and replaced them with their own ultranationalist red-and-black flags.  And Right Sector demonstrations are being reported in cities as far apart as Kharkiv in the east and Ternopil in the west.

Right Sector on parade

In a reshuffle reminiscent of the decision earlier this year to install the former Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as governor of the ethnopolitically tense Odessa oblast, Poroshenko’s administration today named Hennady Moskal, the chairman of Luhansk oblast’s State Military and Civil Administration, to be Transcarpathia’s new governor.  In both cases, Poroshenko seems interested in shoring up Ukraine’s geopolitically vulnerable regions by putting them in the charge of politicians that have direct experience with surrendering to Russia.  Moskal supports Poroshenko’s position on the conflict, saying that Transcarpathia is a “green channel” through which billions of dollars’ worth of commodities, including timber but mostly Belarussian cigarettes, are smuggled into the E.U. via light planes, drones, and tunnel systems, as well as co-opted border controls.

The Euro-Maidan movement was—sometimes unfortunately so—a big tent.

One possible cause of the rise of Right Sector at this particular juncture is popular Ukrainian dissatisfaction with Poroshenko’s handling of the ongoing undeclared war with Russia.  The government has all but written off Crimea as lost and seems willing to accept Putin’s demand that Ukraine turn the 24 out of 27 oblasts it still controls from a unitary state (as the constitution designates it) into a loose confederation—which is rightly seen as a euphemism for allowing ethnic-Russian-dominated areas to be hived off as Russian puppet states.  Even the E.U. is urging Poroshenko to throw in the towel and allow “federalism.”  (Interestingly, Putin has no appetite for autonomy or federalism within the Russian Federation itself, which he rules from the center with an iron fist.)

Putin preparing to ride westward across the Steppes

As in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—and as in Odessa, where a deadly arson fire last year that killed pro-Russian demonstrators stoked anti-Kyiv feeling—one must be especially on guard when local events seem to provide a perfect pretext for Russian intervention.  As one Ukrainian political analyst, Petro Kralyuk, puts it, Russia’s Federal Security Service (F.S.B., successor to the K.G.B.) “has successfully picked up the baton.  For Russia, Transcarpathia and its surroundings remain an important region.  Taking into account the blurred identity and ethnic diversity of the local population, the field of activities for these agents is quite fertile.”  Kralyuk calls this week’s apparent rise of Right Sector violence “a wonderful gift” for Moscow.  If events follow the earlier scripts, Putin will now say that neo-Nazis (Right Sector) are taking over Ukraine and that it is time to help the poor ethnic Russians, Hungarians, and Ruthenians in Transcarpathia “liberate” themselves from Kyiv’s tyrrany, just like Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.  With Russian help, of course.  Out of the goodness of Putin’s heart.  You read it here first.

[You can read more about Transcarpathia, Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, Transnistria, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Will Transcarpathia Be the Next Donetsk—or Crimea?

Even as the actual territory controlled by the pro-Russian puppet states of the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Lugansk in eastern Ukraine shrinks under pressure from the advancing national Ukrainian military, the fictive super-state of which these rebel provinces are a part is sounding cocky and thinking of expanding.

Pro-Kremlin separatists call the light-blue-colored oblasts in this map a federated Novorossiya.
Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) is at the far west.

The foreign ministry of the Union of People’s Republics of Novorossiya (that term meaning “New Russia”) (formerly the Federal State of Novorossiya)—the federation that includes the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts (provinces) as well as six other Ukrainian oblasts where rebel republics exist only in name or not at all—agreed in a meeting in Yalta, Crimea, on July 6th and 7th, to accept as a member the so-called Republic of Podkarpatskaya Rus’.  A new pro-Russian organization called the People’s Front for the Liberation of Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Transcarpathian Rus’ released a manifesto at that conference.

Pyotr Getsko (left), “Chairman of Government Minister” (sic) of the Podkarpatskaya Rus’
“republic,” with Vladimir Rogov, chairman of the foreign-affairs committee
in the Novorossiya “parliament.”  At left is the current Transcarpathia oblast flag, also used by
separatists and nationalists, while the flag on the right is that of the Donetsk People’s Republic,
though the center blue stripe is so washed out that I first mistook it for the black, white, and red
tricolor of the former German Reich (and, briefly, the Third one).  Thanks to a reader who pointed
this out to me on the “Flags of the World (FOTW)” Facebook group.

Transcarpathian Rus’ the Ukrainian government calls Zakarpattia oblast, in its far west.  Rus’ refers to Kievan Rus’, the Medieval state based in Kyiv (Kiev, for Russians) which both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists (and Ruthenian ones; see below) regard as their ancestral state.  The Carpathia part refers to the mountain range that separates the province from the rest of Ukraine to the east.  Variously known as Podkarpatskaya, Subcarpathia, or Transcarpathia, the territory’s Pod- (meaning below) and Sub- prefixes refer to the territory’s position on the Carpathians’ foothills (as in the name of the adjacent voivodeship (province) of Poland, Podkarpacie), while Trans- refers to its position “across” or “on the other side of” the Carpathians—a point of view that implies (as with Transnistria) the perspective of Moscow or Kyiv, rather than Vienna or Budapest.  And indeed, Transcarpathia used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Kingdom of Hungary’s administration.  Slavic-speaking locals called Ruthenians, Ruthenes, or Rusyns tried to establish their own state when the Hapsburg empire was being dismantled at the end of the First World War, but had to settle for becoming the eastern tail of the new-born oblong composite state of Czechoslovakia.  When the Czech portion of Czechoslovakia succumbed to annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, Slovakia and Ruthenia declared independence but were soon consumed by the Third Reich as well.  After the Second World War, the Yalta conference (not the one referred to above, but the other one, the big one) awarded Transcarpathia, as it was then known, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  Josef Stalin proceeded to stamp out Ruthenian cultural identity, declaring Rusyn a mere dialect of Ukrainian.  Ruthenians demanded an autonomous region like Crimea’s when Ukraine became independent in 1991 but did not get one.  A declaration of independence in 1993 as the Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’ got nowhere, nor did a similar declaration in 2008 as the Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia.  That second one was strongly suspected by the westward-leaning Ukrainian government of the time to be a result of Kremlin pot-stirring; this, of course, was around the time of Russia’s expansionist South Ossetia War in Georgia.

How today’s Ukraine was divvied up before the First World War.

Transcarpathia has not been a particular hotbed of anti-Kyiv feeling, not does it have particularly many ethnic Russians, compared to all the other oblasts Novorossiya claims.  But this blog did suggest the tiny  province, as long ago as early March, as a future point of conflict between pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow forces, a point I reiterated in another article, in early April.  (See also an article in which I report on Russian analysts’ predictions for an independent Transcarpathia by 2035.)  In particular, two factors make this enclave an inviting morsel for omnivorous Novorossiyan map-drawers, and indirectly perhaps for the Kremlin itself.  The two factors are demographics and geography.

A Transcarpathian flag (current oblast flag) at this year’s Novorossiya summit in Yalta.

First, demography.  Transcarpathia is more than 80% ethnically Ukrainian and less than 3% ethnically Russian, with Rusyns (Ruthenians) making up less than 1%—only about 10,000 people.  But this belies a possibly larger number of families of Rusyn descent who assimilated to Ukrainian and Russian culture and language in the Stalin era and may only now be dusting off their old ethnic identities.  Russia may be intending to use supposed oppression of Rusyns as a pretext for intervention, much as it did to “protect” Abkhaz and Ossete “victims” in Georgia in 2008 and ethnic-Russians in Crimea earlier this year.  (Compare also the Russian-speaking political forces in Latvia which have piggybacked their cause onto the question of autonomy for the traditional Latgalian people who live in the ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Latvia.)

Are Transcarpathian Ruthenians ready for their ethnic revitalization?
Or does Moscow just wish they were?

More to the point, 12% of Transcarpathia’s 1.25 million or so people are ethnic Magyars (Hungarians), making them the largest non-Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine in any single oblast.  (Ukraine has more ethnic Belarussians and Moldovans (Romanians) than Magyars when taken as a whole nationally—but these other groups are more dispersed (though 20% of the less populous and smaller Chernivtsy oblast nearby call themselves Moldovan or Romanian).)  Concern for the Transcarpathian Magyars’ “plight” has become an obsession of Jobbik, the militant far-right party of xenophobes and anti-Semites that took more than a fifth of the vote in Hungary’s elections this April, making it the second most powerful party in that country.  Jobbik bloviators have been pushing Budapest to annex Transcarpathia if necessary to “protect” ethnic kindred there.  A lot of the rhetoric focuses on the Ukrainian government’s revocation of minority languages’ official status after Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, was impeached in April.  Even though the successor government quickly reinstated those rights, the original revocation is still Exhibit A of those, like the Donetsk and Lugansk rebels, who claim the current Ukrainian government oppresses minorities.  The fact that the armband-wearing, goose-stepping thugs of Jobbik and the southeastern “people’s republics” are working from the same playbook helps put the lie to Moscow’s lunatic assertion that it is the “junta” in Kyiv who are the right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis.

The far-right group Jobbik is the second-largest political party in Hungary.

Now to the geographic factor, which concerns central and western Europe’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas (hence the European Union’s toothless and half-hearted sanctions against Russia since the Ukrainian troubles began).  Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, would like to keep the gas flowing to Europe, but he would also like to be able to cut off the supply to Ukraine if necessary to bring it into line.  The trouble is the oil pipelines to western Europe for the most part run straight through Ukraine, and most of these go through tiny Transcarpathia in particular.  And Transcarpathia’s border with the Slovak Republic—an E.U. member-state friendly to Kyiv—is one of the few places where the pipelines could be used to send gas back into Ukraine as a way of making an end run around any plans by Putin to choke off Ukraine’s supply.

Could Putin or the Russian-speaking thugs in Ukraine make an actual grab for Transcarpathia?  Not likely.  They weren’t even able to turn independence declarations into “facts on the ground” in two other oblasts—Kharkiv and Odessa—where the demographics tilt toward Russians.  (The so-called Odessa Republic of Novorossiya declared with little effect in late April granted diplomatic recognition not only to the Kharkov, Lugansk, and Donetsk people’s republics but, a little mysteriously, to what its “foreign ministry” called the Carpathian Ruthenian People’s Republic—as reported at the time in this blog.)  Those areas are firmly under Kyiv’s administration.  But many observers feel that Putin may not really want to annex any other chunks of Ukraine, that he would be happy to destabilize it and weaken its central government through agitation for federalism.  And an invasion and annexation of Transcarpathia is not entirely impossible either.  After all, a mere year ago anyone who predicting a Russian invasion of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk would have been laughed out of the room.  Ukraine’s war with Russia has not yet been won.  Not by a long shot.

The scene in Donetsk.  Could conflict spread to Transcarpathia as well?

[You can read more about these and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Russian Ultranationalists in Odessa Go for Whole Enchilada, Declare “Republic of Novorossiya”

It is in eastern Ukraine where the Russian ultranationalist separatists—organized and staffed, beyond doubt, by Kremlin-commanded forces—have grabbed the most headlines: seizing government buildings in more than a score of cities, resulting in lethal standoffs with the Ukrainian military.

But it is in western Ukraine that the pro-Russia secessionists have become most ambitious.  Last week in this blog I discussed the declaration on April 16th of a “People’s Republic of Odessa” in Ukraine’s southwest, bordering Transnistria and Moldova, though at the time it seemed to be mostly an online phenomenon, not yet a street-politics movement, though it was calling for one.  Now Russian media are reporting a rally in Odessa’s Kulikovo Field where crowds are declaring an “Odessa Republic of Novorossiya.”  “New Russia,” or Novorossiya, is the name given in Czarist times to much of what is now Ukraine, but especially the flatlands just north of Crimea, including Odessa and spilling into the areas in today’s southeastern Ukraine that have been declared the independent “People’s Republics” of Lugansk (Luhansk), Kharkov (Kharkiv), and, most dramatically, Donetsk.

Valery Kaurov in 2008, during an anti-NATO uprising around Odessa

One Valery Kaurov has been named the “people’s president” of the Odessa Republic of Novorossiya.  He is currently the head of the Union of Orthodox Citizens of Ukraine.  (Nearly all of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority are Eastern Orthodox Christians, while most of the country’s Catholics live in the Ukrainian-speaking west.)  Kaurov addressed the rally via Skype, since, apparently, he had fled the city fearing arrest.  More information on the rally, including its size and who organized it, has so far been difficult to find.

Pro-Russian activists in Odessa recently

The new republic also apparently recognizes the “independence” of the Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkov republics as well as a new entity called the Carpathian Ruthenian People’s Republic.  Carpathian Ruthenia, now called Ukraine’s Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) oblast, which formed the eastern part of Czechoslovakia between the world wars, is home to a minority of Rusyns (Ruthenians) and was the site of an aborted declaration of independence in 2008 that was presumed by Ukrainian authorities to be the work of Russian provocateurs.

One version of the Odessa “national” flag as it appeared online recently

But why Odessa in particular (a question posed not so long ago in this blog)?  Founded by Catherine the Great in 1794 on land just conquered from the Ottoman Empire, Odessa has long been considered a Russian, rather than Ukrainian, city.  And, as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, told the world at his recent press event, “Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in Czarist times, they were transferred in 1920.  Why?  God knows.  Then for various reasons these areas were gone, and the people stayed there—we need to encourage them to find a solution.  We must do everything to help these people to protect their rights and independently determine their own destiny.”  (He has also taken lately to using the term Novorossiya.)  Putin also allegedly mentioned Odessa as a possible site of Russian military intervention as long ago as his early-February phone call with the United States president, Barack Obama.

What’s old is new again: borders in Ukraine in 1918,
during the chaos of the Bolshevik–Menshevik civil war

Moreover, as the Economist recently summed up Putin’s possible next geostrategic moves: “ One possibility is opening up a land corridor to Crimea through Donetsk and Mariupol.  Another is a corridor extending from Crimea to Transdniestria, a pro-Russian breakaway territory in Moldova which is home to a Russian army, by way of Odessa.  A third, extreme, option might be splitting the country along the Dnieper.”  It is of course option no. 2, plowing a corridor to Transnistria (a.k.a. Transdniestria, a.k.a. Pridnestrovia), that would make Odessa key.  Transnistria, which is ethnically about a third Russian, a third Ukrainian, and a third Moldovan (i.e. Romanian), is a sliver of land occupied by Russian troops which declared independence from Moldova in 1991.  Unlike Abkhazia and South Ossetia, within Georgia’s internationally recognized boundaries, it has not become a formal puppet state diplomatically recognized by Moscow.  Unlike Crimea, it has not been annexed.  But it craves either option.  Transnistria’s foreign minister has now repeatedly asked for some version of a Crimea-style path to annexation, starting with formal recognition.  But the Kremlin has been coy on the issue so far, though it has raised alarms about the Ukrainian military’s sealing of the border between Transnistria and Odessa Oblast in order to prevent the further westward flow of Russian matériel or even personnel.

Nina Shtanski, Transnistria’s minister for foreign affairs, has set fashion trends
worldwide on the question of where to position buttons on a power suit.

And, of course, calling everything in between Novorossiya would have the argument of efficiency—eliminating, in terms of symbolism and in terms of groping for and waiting for provocations, the painfully slow process of “retaking” Ukraine oblast by oblast, as was begun in Crimea.  Putin wants the whole enchilada.  And the whole enchilada is called Novorossiya.  Watch this space.

Another view: this image, circulating on the Internet, is said to be of a map produced by the Communist Party of Ukraine.  It shows modern Ukraine divided into (clockwise from upper left: Ukraine, the Dneprovsko-Slobozhanskaia Republic (including Kharkiv and half of Kyiv), the Donbas Republic (Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Luhansk), the Republic of Crimea, and the Republic of Novorossiya (including Odessa and Kherson oblasts).

Two alternate flags of an independent “Novorossiya”
declared very briefly, and without effect, in 1992

[You can read more about these and other separatist movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Thanks to Olga Buchel for directing me to some of the information used in this article.