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

Viktor Yanukovich often boasted of how he would run barefoot through the streets of Yenakiyevo as an impoverished child.
It was here in the gritty industrial town close to the eastern border with Russia that he cut his political teeth on the way to Ukraine’s presidency, and where in an earlier guise as a teenage petty criminal he received convictions for assault and robbery.
So it is a measure of Mr Yanukovich’s fall from grace that even in this corner of the troubled country there is little sympathy for the local boy made good.

“Yanukovich betrayed us,” says Nadiezhda Petrovna, a pensioner. “He was one of us, we trusted him, but he ended up a thief like all the other politicians in Kiev.”
That sentiment may be because Mr Yanukovich did little for his home town – while he enjoyed the high-life from his main residence at Mezhyhirya, his fabled luxury dacha close to the capital.

From Putin's perspective, a coup would be payback for what he regards as the western-backed takeover of Kiev by opposition forces – or fascists, as the Kremlin media calls them. The Kremlin argument runs something like this: if armed gangs can seize power in the Ukrainian capital, storming government buildings, why can't pro-Russian forces do the same thing in Crimea? (It is another high-stakes manifestation of the Kremlin's favourite doctrine, "whataboutism". If Kosovo, then Crimea etc.)

There are, of course, signal differences. Despite the presence of radical Ukrainian nationalists, the vast majority of opposition demonstrators in Kiev were ordinary citizens. They were fed up with the corruption and misrule of President Viktor Yanukovych and his clique. It was a bottom-up revolution. The protesters were armed with little more than homemade shields, rubbish helmets and molotov cocktails.

In Crimea, by contrast, the shadowy Russian troops are equipped with the latest gear – they are professionals, not amateur homegrown revolutionaries. Ukrainian officials point to the GRU, Russian military intelligence. And the warp-speed tempo of events in Crimea is being dictated from the top, not the bottom – from Moscow, rather than the street.

The choreography has been impressive. Within hours of the airport seizure, Russian MPs proposed a bill in the state Duma simplifying procedures for getting Russian passports to Ukrainians. The goal, the MPs said, was to protect a "brotherly nation". Russia's most important opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, meanwhile, has been placed under house arrest for two months and denied access to the internet. The Kremlin, that most risk-averse of entities, has everything covered.