Word: commonwealther
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GWAR sounded liked the perfect answer. Their promotional literature touted them as a group of art students from Virginia Commonwealth University who perform outrageously raunchy heavy-metal music while dressed in gargantuan papier-mache costumes that make them resemble dinosaurs from outer space. They sport Iudicrously enlarged phalluses as well as leather, spikes, whips and chains. The band puts on an elaborate stage show, complete with ritual tortures, eviscerations and decaptitations, and squirts gallons of phony blood and semen into the audience. Responding to charges that they are sexist they retorted, "We're also racist...
Under pressure, Crimean leaders backed down and rescinded the resolution, & but not before Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, the Kremlin's standard-bearer for increasingly influential Russian nationalists, blasted Ukrainian politicians for portraying Russia as "an insidious empire" and trying to break up the Commonwealth. "The referendum in Crimea must be held, and no one can ban it with force or with threats," Rutskoi insisted in a newspaper article. Two days later, in a closed-door session, the Russian parliament upped the ante by voting to annul the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine as "an illegal...
...pressuring both sides to come to terms peacefully. Russian President Boris Yeltsin recently took a step in that direction, announcing that Moscow had dropped its insistence that the 380-ship Black Sea Fleet, based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, was a "strategic force" that should fall under joint Commonwealth command...
...July 1, Kiev plans to replace the ruble completely with a new national currency, a move certain to disrupt already weakened trade links between Ukraine and the rest of the Commonwealth. Critics argue that by insulating Ukraine from Russia, Kravchuk is trying to avoid the kind of radical market reforms demanded by international lending organizations. Kiev counters by arguing that economic subordination to Russia is a drag on Ukraine's development as a sovereign state...
Kravchuk and Yeltsin are scheduled to meet in the near future to try to put aside the acrimony and mistrust of recent months. It was Russia and Ukraine, together with Belarus, that united last December to forge the Commonwealth and bury the Soviet Union. Without the cooperation of Kiev and Moscow, the C.I.S. will surely fail. It may fail anyway. But more troubling is the prospect of new violence in Europe, this time between two of the largest, and best armed, nations on the continent...