Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

Ukraine’s new prime minister Arseniy Yatseniuk claims $70bn have been stolen from state coffers over the past three years. He is quoted by Interfax Ukraine as saying:

About $70bn has been withdrawn from Ukraine’s financial system to offshore accounts over the last three years. Now it’s clear that they withdrew the funds that were raised as loans under state guarantees and [they were] stolen by representatives of the previous government.

The newly approved Cabinet has 21 members, and is heavy on members of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party.

Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform is not represented after turning down offers. Their exclusion highlights the growing rift between UDAR and Batkivshchyna, whose leaders will most likely compete in the early presidential election on May 15.

Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist party, received several key positions in the government on top of the general prosecutor’s office, which it already oversees.

A Ukrainian investigative reporter says that if Yulia Tymoshenko is elected president, he will unleash his sleuthing skills against her. In a blog post, Sergei Leschenko says that Tymoshenko has a tainted past and should stand aside for new blood to lead Ukraine after last week’s ouster of president Viktor Yanukovych.

The knives are out for Tymoshenko, who twice has been prime minister of Ukraine. Tymoshenko has been released after serving two years of a seven-year prison term on charges (slapped by Yanukovych, her political arch-enemy) of cutting a bad natural gas deal with Russia. Writers and analysts are trotting out unflattering old profiles of her. She is authoritarian, corrupt and a kook, they assert, a woman who believes she is a reincarnation of Eva Peron.

The 47-nation Council of Europe, which includes Ukraine and Russia among its members, has stressed its commitment to “full respect of the territorial integrity, unity and independence of Ukraine”.

Breaking his silence for the first time since fleeing the capital Kiev, the 63-year-old fugitive, who is wanted in Ukraine on charges of mass murder after police opened fire on demonstrators, insists he is still president.

But at home he and his government are facing charges of stripping the country's coffers bare.

Shortly before being appointed as head of the crisis-hit country's national unity government, Arseny Yatseniuk said $37bn (£22bn) had disappeared "in an unknown direction", while $70bn (£42bn) had been siphoned out of the economy into offshore accounts.

Jan. 27 -Feb. 20: coexistence of organized and unorganized civic engagement: Unhappy with what protesters described as the “opposition leaders’ inability and ineffectiveness to achieve the EuroMaidan’s aims,” the official opposition protest events were combined with autonomous citizen initiatives (see below for a list of Kiev-based Self-Defense Patrol Groups). Throughout the country (mostly in the center-west), citizens coordinated their own peaceful and direct-action protest events (such as defending medical clinics and donating items). Activists complained in interviews that they or the opposition could not control the protest movement. Hard-core protesters explained that they had “nothing left to lose,” and members of the Pravyi Sektor stated that they were “prepared to die as heroes for their country.” The baseline claim uniting all protesters was the removal of Yanukovych from power. When on Feb. 18 Berkut and special operations Alpha militia started another raid on protesters, this time using live ammunition, grenades and snipers, the worst-case scenario of a large-scale “civil war” (pitting the regime against the protesters) seemed inevitable to the activists and protest participants interviewed. The protesters felt that now they were “fighting for the fate [dolya] of their country.”