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

One of the key people behind the revolution in Ukraine says the U.S. should use "all instruments" to respond to Russia's military presence in his country. Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire and the former Ukrainian foreign minister appears in an interview with Clarissa Ward. Ward's story about the people behind the revolution that resulted in the parliamentary ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych and the subsequent Russian takeover of Crimea, will be broadcast on 60 Minutes.

Marc Weller, Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, examines the legal issues raised by Russia's intervention in Crimea. The territory became part of Soviet Ukraine in 1954 and remained Ukrainian after the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Russia has clearly and unambiguously recognised Ukraine and its present borders. This was confirmed in:

The Alma Ata Declaration of December 1991, which consigned the Soviet Union to history,
The Budapest memorandum of 1994, offering security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for removing nuclear weapons from its territory

The 1997 agreement on the stationing of the Black Sea fleet in Crimean ports.

The 1997 agreement, extended for an additional 25 years in 2010, authorises the presence of Russian ships in Crimean harbours, along with the presence of a large military infrastructure, including training grounds, artillery ranges and other installations. However, major movements of Russian forces require consultation with the Ukrainian authorities and the agreed force levels cannot be increased unilaterally.

Contrary to these obligations, Russia has augmented its forces in Crimea without the consent the Ukraine. It has deployed them outside of the agreed bases, taking control over key installations, such as airports, and encircling Ukrainian units.

Russia's actions have created space for the pro-Russian local authorities in Crimea to displace the lawful public authorities of Ukraine. Legally, this clearly amounts to a significant act of intervention - indeed, as Russian military units are involved, it is a case of armed intervention.

This revolution may yet be eaten by its own incompetence or by infighting. A presidential election is scheduled for May, and the race, negative campaigning and all, has quietly begun. The oligarchs, some of whom have cannily been appointed governors of the potentially restive eastern regions, are jockeying for power. But for now, Ukrainians, who were brought together by shared hatred of the former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, are being brought closer still by the Kremlin-backed invasion.

“Yanukovych freed Ukraine and Putin is uniting it,” said Iegor Soboliev, a 37-year-old ethnic Russian who heads a government commission to vet officials of the former regime. “Ukraine is functioning not through its government but through the self-organization of its people and their sense of human decency.”

Mr. Soboliev is a former investigative journalist who grew frustrated that carefully documented revelations of government misbehavior — which he says “wasn’t merely corruption, it was marauding” — were having no impact. He and a few friends formed Volya, a movement dedicated to creating a country of “responsible citizens” and a “state worthy of their trust.”

“People in Odessa, Mykolaiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk are coming out to defend their country,” Mr. Soboliev said. “They have never liked the western Ukrainian, Galician point of view. But they are showing themselves to be equally patriotic. They are defending their country from foreign aggression. Fantastical things are happening.”---

For Ukraine, as well as for Russia and much of the former U.S.S.R., the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was only a partial revolution. The U.S.S.R. vanished, but the old nomenklatura, and its venal, authoritarian style of governance remained. Mr. Putin is explicitly drawing on that heritage and fitfully trying to reshape it into a new state capitalist system that can compete and flourish globally. An alliance with Mr. Yanukovych’s Ukraine was an essential part of that plan.

That effort has now failed. Whatever Mr. Putin achieves in Ukraine, it will not be partnership with a Slavic younger brother enthusiastically joining in his neo-imperialist, neo-Soviet project.

The unanswered question is whether Ukraine can be a practical success. The economy needs a total structural overhaul — and that huge shift needs to be accomplished while either radically transforming, or creating from scratch, effective government institutions.

While Ukraine still mourns the victims of EuroMaidan anti-government protests in Kyiv, four Moscow-based designers and web programmers launched Remember Maidan, a website that commemorates the activists killed in the clashes between police and protesters. The team members are Russians and had nothing to do with Ukrainian protests, but thought "it was important to show the real death toll."


"We aimed to show the size of the tragedy and our own views have nothing to do with it," the lead designer Boris Morozov (mostly known as Boris Verks) told Kyiv Post.

The designer said he and his friends were shocked to find out that even the people who didn't participate in the protest were getting involved in rough disputes about interpreting the events.

"But human death is a general tragedy, nor matter what the political preferences are," designer explained.

The day after he returned from the Winter Olympics, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia gathered the 12 members of his national security council for a crisis meeting to manage a political implosion in Ukraine that, by all accounts, had surprised Russia’s political and military elite and, above all, infuriated Mr. Putin himself.

One prominent member of the council, Valentina I. Matviyenko, chairwoman of the upper house of Parliament, emerged from the meeting declaring that it was impossible that Russia would invade Crimea, yet a couple of days later Russian troops were streaming into the peninsula.

When Mr. Putin made his first public remarks on the crisis on Tuesday, he said that Russia would not support Crimea’s efforts to secede. On Friday, the Kremlin allowed a mass pro-secession rally in Red Square while senior lawmakers loyal to Mr. Putin welcomed a delegation from Crimea and pledged support to make it a new province of the Russian Federation.

An examination of the seismic events that set off the most threatening East-West confrontation since the Cold War era, based on Mr. Putin’s public remarks and interviews with officials, diplomats and analysts here, suggests that the Kremlin’s strategy emerged haphazardly, even misleadingly, over a tense and momentous week, as an emotional Mr. Putin acted out of what the officials described as a deep sense of betrayal and grievance, especially toward the United States and Europe.

Meanwhile in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Ukrainian government was taking orders from extremists and denied Moscow had any direct role in the crisis in Crimea.
“The interim government... is not independent. It depends, unfortunately, on radical nationalists who carried out an armed coup,” he told reporters.

AP report that pro-Russian soldiers tried to take over a Ukrainian base on Friday night.

“Lt. Col. Vitaly Onishchenko, deputy commander of the base, said three dozen men wearing unmarked camouflage uniforms arrived late Friday. While one group climbed over a wall on one side of the base, another crashed a heavy military truck through the gates, Onishchenko said.
He said Saturday that they turned off power and cut telephone lines and demanded that about 100 Ukrainian troops, who barricaded themselves into one of the base buildings, surrender their weapons and swear allegiance to Russia. The invaders left around midnight.”

Although AP described the troops as pro-Russian, the Ukrainian commander was clear that the soldiers were Russian

Onishchenko said the troops who assailed his base were clearly Russian.
“These were Russian servicemen specially ordered,” he said. “Their watches were set to Moscow time. They spoke with Russian accents and they didn’t hide their allegiance to the Russian Federation. But they didn’t have any distinguishing marks (on their uniforms). Without doubt, this was a Russian action.”