First of all I know it seems pendantic, but even calling it "the" Ukraine" is loaded colonialist langauge, the name of the country is just Ukraine, "the Ukraine" is a term created under colonialist powers to discount the culture of the tribes, if you must, who lived there...
3 members of the Svoboda (neo-fascist) party are in the new cabinet so it's certainly not ALL Russian propaganda.
This is true and disgusting, just note that civic activists as well as many regular people are furious about this. The PM also condemned it, though the Verkovna Rada has yet to do anything about it. Also, while not an excuse, this fella did just spend the past few months running a televison station airing entirely pro-Yanukovich viewpoints, it's bit surprising it took someone this long to do something. And make no mistake it was just about the dumbest thing that could have been done.
Just like despite what the west is desperately trying to say the majority of Crimeans WANT to be part of Russia (regardless of whether the hasty and fairly dodgy referendum they held was 'legal' or not) which is rather clearly evidenced by what people tell the media when they're interviewed and the fact that the 'mysterious' militias that have appeared and taken control of the peninsula have been largely welcome and have done so without firing a single shot.
Any way you slice it, a referendum at the end of the barrel of a gun....Crimea's population is 58% ethnic Russians, and assuming all of them wanted to go, still in no way accounts for a 95% aye vote...We know the Tatars didn't vote for it, and there's little reason to believe all the rest of the people being ethnic Ukrainians voted aye...The vote was rigged, you get that right? I'm not saying it wouldn't have passed in its own right, with say a 60-40 split, but nowhere on earth do 95% of people agree with anything...But if it was such a sure thing, why fix it? Also note the Crimean "Prime minister" installed by the "self defence" forces got a whopping 4% in the last election, but sure now he's the most popular guy in Crimea? Oh and don't look to closely at the debts he owes to banks in Kyiv.....
Also the mysterious militas that have been welcomed, sure have in Simferopol and Sevastopol, two majority Russian cities....Whereas in other places, welcome not so much, but the people have been quiet....Being outgunned will do that to you....
And bloodless, well if you don't count the Tatars whov'e been beaten to a pulp, the journalists who've been held and beaten, nevermind the intimidations such as swastikas, painted on the synagogues which according to the Rabbai's was never a problem until these "self defence" forces arrived, or the Ukrainian soldiers families who haven't been allowed to visit their loved ones or even deliver food.
Crimea's chief Rabbi escaped from Crimea with a torrah scroll he smuggled out, he's telling pretty openly what sort of welcome has been enforced, along with half a dozen Tatar families who have found refuge in the Lviv region...The supposed hotbed of Nazism
"The Crimea was only transferred to the Ukraine SSR from the Russian Federation SSR in 1954, by Kruschev. Why he did it I don't know, possibly because it is geographically attached to mainland Ukraine, what it's certain is that at the time it was the same country anyway (and it had been since much earlier than the October revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union; Russia and the Ukraine, minus the western part of it, had been a single country since the middle ages, another fact the west conveniently chooses to ignore. The Ukraine, like some of the other former Soviet Republics had never existed as independent countries till 1992 and were hastily and artificially created by the west precisely for the reason they now don't want Russia to get them back: to weaken Russia as much as possible) so he didn't think this would one day generate a problem.
Wow....where to start...Ok so the transfer of Ukraine to Ukrainian SSR wasn't seen as a big deal at the time as you say.....However these 1992 borders were in no way shape or form drawn up by th West...These were exactly the borders that had seperated the various SSR's....They, themselevs agreed to these borders in their process of disolution....If Crimea was so vital why wasn't that bone of contention during the disolution and later formation of the CIS?
Also this 1954 date keeps being thrown around as if it's some sort of justification...OK nobodies arguing that Crimea used to be part of the Russian SSR, or even the Russian empire before that....But why is that anymore of a valid argument than the fact that is was the Crimean Khanate for 400 years before that? It belonged to the Tatars much longer, but nobody is running around pointing guns at people in the name of the Khanate's restoration....So, honestly 1954, 1984, 1785...What does any of it have to with the price of rice in China today?
The rest of the country I honestly don't know, and I don't doubt the eastern part might have been as pissed off with the old government as the western one was. What I DO know from what I've seen with my own eyes the two times I've been there though is that a) the only place of those I've been to (Lvov, Kiev, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk) where I have heard anything OTHER THAN Russian spoken is Lvov, which is very near the Polish border and was part of Poland at various times in history and b) that pretty much all the Ukrainians from east of Kiev I've come into contact with - whether in the Ukraine or over here - certainly never saw the Russians as 'enemies', more like some sort of 'cousins', kinda in the way the various Scandinavian populations see each other. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean they want to rejoin Russia, but the vast majority of the population certainly don't want to break all ties with them either and feel culturally closer to them than to us western Europeans.
Well, what I DO know from having lived there 3 years, Moscow for 2 and now Moldova for 3 years is that a lot of what you are saying is correct, but first the langauge issue....The vast majority of Ukraine's peoples speak both, more or less, some areas are more prone to use Ukrainian, some Russian, and even some Romanian, Polish, or Hungarian...The language issue is largely a giant bone of contentiononly between radicals and bored old academics, but not ordinary people...In fact Kyiv and the central part of the country speak what the locals call "sirzhik" which is a straight up mix of the two big languages peppered with a good dose of local slang....It's the same here in Moldova, more or less, you listen to two people talk and they will drift back and forth between Russian and Romanian, sometimes in mid sentence...Ukraine is largely no different, especially with the two languages being from the same "family"....My first trip to Lviv ( I call it by it's Ukrainan name, not Russian Lvov) I was warned by friends in Kyiv to be careful about speaking Russian (the only one I have any hope in), but oddly enough during my time out there people sure seemed happier once they knew we could communicate in any language and didnt get hung up on which...I've had the exact same experience in Lithuania and Estonia as well....
That said, yeah the people were amazingly close culturally and even commonly in families...Intermarriage bewteen ethnic groups was terribly commonplace in the USSR and so today you'd be hardpressed to find anyone in any of the other former republics who doesn't have family living in Russia.....There have been absolutely zero incidents of anti-Russianism in Ukraine since the start of Maidan...No single reputable source can be found for this..... These clashes in the eastern cities lately have resulted in zero pro-Russian fatalities but have resulted in a few dead pro-Ukrainian protestors....So who's doing all the stabbing? What I'm getting at is though the cultural ties are strong, Putin is doing more harm to them than help.....
Putin certainly has his own agenda about the Ukraine and uses the 'ethnic Russians' excuse to further his aims, but so do America and the west, and the latter care as much about ordinary Ukrainians as he does, ie zilch. If both superpowers fucked off and left them alone they might just have a chance of finding a way that pleases most of the people, whether it involves keeping the country with its present borders or allowing some parts of it to rejoin the Russian Federation.
Agreed about the other powers leaving them the hell alone, but there's one who just won't....The people themselves were tired of Yanuk stealing and abusing them, they rose up and said enough and Putin said oh no you don't. Left alone by Russia, there would be no big push to cozy up to the west...Most Ukrainian's in poll after poll for the past 10 years have expressed a strong desire to stay free of NATO, maintain their neutrality, and to develop strong and freindly relationships with both east and west...Putin refused to accept this and wanted to force them into his Eurasian alliance....And taht's how this current shitestorm kicked off....And in the end he has probably created his own self fulfiling prophecy of "losing" Ukraine for good....
