Please, arrange for the feathers and wet lettuce leaves right now ...

Julie Bishop boldly joins in the worldwide stand against Vlad the impaler by imposing sanctions against twelve Russians and Ukrainians held as being instrumental in recent events in the Crimea (Crimea crisis Australia declares sanctions)

Who are these twelve? Will Vlad the Impaler be allowed to turn up to the G20?

Sorry, there are "privacy" issues.

Will the next person with a wet lettuce leaf stand up and join the queue? Anyone feeling even more strongly and armed with a feather for a good wrist slapping will be fast tracked by the door bitch and ushered into the dance party ...

Meanwhile, the pond has been imbibing a series of articles by Timothy Snyder on the situation in the Ukraine for The New York Review of Books - in no particular order, Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda (outside the paywall at the moment), Crimea: Putin vs. Reality (outside the paywall), and perhaps most interesting Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine (also outside the paywall at the moment).

The pond had been puzzled by talk that the Ukrainian protestors were Nazis. Sure the Ukraine has had a difficult past - as much due to Stalin as to Hitler - but Snyder deals with that, and ups the ante by looking at the sort of hate being cultivated in Russia at the moment, and the plan to construct a Eurasian union in opposition to the European one:

The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

And then there's the far right party, Rodina, or Motherland, and Sergei Glazyev:

In 2005 some of its deputies signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. 
Later that year Motherland was banned from taking part in further elections after complaints that its advertisements incited racial hatred. The most notorious showed dark-skinned people eating watermelon and throwing the rinds to the ground, then called for Russians to clean up their cities. Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the 1990s to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.” This book was published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence Review with a preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review echoes Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian protesters have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war.

And then there's this:

The populist media campaign for the Eurasian Union is now in the hands of Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the most important talk show in Russia, and since December also the director of the state-run Russian media conglomerate designed to form national public opinion. Best known for saying that gays who die in car accidents should have their hearts cut from their bodies and incinerated, Kiselyov has taken Putin’s campaign against gay rights and transformed it into a weapon against European integration. Thus when the then German foreign minister, who is gay, visited Kiev in December and met with Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight champion and opposition politician, Kiselyov dismissed Klitschko as a gay icon. According to the Russian foreign minister, the exploitation of sexual politics is now to be an open weapon in the struggle against the “decadence” of the European Union. 
 Following the same strategy, Yanukovych’s government claimed, entirely falsely, that the price of closer relations with the European Union was the recognition of gay marriage in Ukraine. Kiselyov is quite open about the Russian media strategy toward the Maidan: to “apply the correct political technology,” then “bring it to the point of overheating” and bring to bear “the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet.” 
Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously?

Well who knows the answer to that question.

But the pond is standing by. Why just today we'll make sure we go out and pluck a chook, and buy a large iceberg lettuce, and stand alongside bold and brave Julie Bishop and teach those Ruskis a lesson.

Allowing for privacy of course. All savage beatings with said feathers and wet lettuce leaves will of course be conducted in strictest privacy. Wouldn't want to embarrass anyone ...

What if Vlad the impaler is a bit of a Percy Grainger in private?

Oh and we'll be waving a Russian flag when Vlad the impaler turns up for the G20 ...