Ticking Timebomb: Moscow Moves to Destabilize Eastern Ukraine

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/how-moscow-is-moving-to-destablize-eastern-ukraine-a-959224.html



It's not only in Crimea where Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing with fire, but also in eastern Ukraine. The majority of the people in the economically powerful region speak Russian and reject the new government in Kiev.

Ticking Timebomb: Moscow Moves to Destabilize Eastern Ukraine
By Uwe Klussmann and Matthias Schepp
March 18, 2014 – 06:02 PM

The pensioner Oxana Kremenyuk limps as she passes by the House of Culture in a small village in eastern Ukraine. As a young woman, she used to dance here. Today the stucco is crumbling and the windows are broken. "The people in Kiev are driving our country into civil war," she says. "These good-for-nothings should be slaving away the way we do here." Kremenyuk receives a pension of about €90 ($125) a month. In order to ensure there is food on the table, she keeps 10 chickens and a pig.

Kremenyuk's village of Maidan, with its three dozen homes, is a peaceful place in a gentle, hilly landscape. The village is 378 kilometers (235 miles) -- but also worlds apart -- from the Maidan in the capital city of Kiev, the Independence Square that has become known around the world since the start of the revolution. Most of the village's homes have fallen into a state of disrepair and young families moved away long ago. The people living here don't think much of the revolution taking place in the western part of the country.

Three-Quarters in East Reject Popular Revolt

In the eastern part of Ukraine, with several large cities including Donetsk, Kharkiv and Dnepropetrovsk, polls show three-quarters of those surveyed rejecting the popular revolt in Kiev. Between 70 and as many as 90 percent of the residents in this region say that Russian, and not Ukrainian, is their primary language. In Kharkiv, locals threw eggs at Vitali Klitchko, one of the protest leaders.

After the Crimean peninsula, eastern Ukraine has become the second powder keg in the conflict with Russia -- only it is a much larger one than the former. At the end of last week, the government in Moscow put the fuse on display.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. "the new government in Kiev" overthrew the elected government

and has put ultra-nationalist fascist Ukrainian political parties into power. That does not justify Russian aggression, but if the people of eastern Ukraine reject this "new government" in Kiev, perhaps they have valid reasons for doing so?