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

Underlying much of the rage was a frustration with former president Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt legacy, in which some of the country’s wealthiest tycoons profited from their friendship with the longtime leader. Essentially, before January, Ukraine was a country where the 1 percent had their way.---

oligarchs have colluded with the established political order to benefit from privatization of government concessions in ways that verged on corruption. In Ukraine, much of that appears to have been enabled by Yanukovych and his political allies.---

According to Timothy Ash, head of Emerging Markets at Standard Bank in London, Ukrainian oligarchs initially preferred the European deal but became concerned in response to Russian threats including a possible cutoff of gas, which was why they had cooled off on the agreement with the EU. “They are worried about the Russian reaction,” Ash said.
A larger question is whether what is happening in Ukraine is the politics of pillaging. How the Ukrainian economy -- the 51st largest in the world with a $175 billion GDP (according to 2012 World Bank figures, two notches below Peru and just after the Czech Republic) -- with at least 15 billionaires, can be on the verge of bankruptcy?
According to Chatham House’s Lutsevych, “it is fair” to describe the Ukrainian crisis as a result of the politics of pillaging. “Yanukovych and the rich would use public office to build monopolies and benefit from them,” she said. “Corruption in the Ukraine skyrocketed and corporate raiding increased.”
According to Olena Zakharova, director of the foreign policy department at the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kiev, “The Ukrainian economy has been pillaged by the oligarchs during all the years after independence, and this process reached its highest point during Yanukovych’s presidency.” She added that “all the money flows were oriented to the ‘Family’ oligarchs, first of all Yanukovych’s son Oleksandr, young Family representative Serhiy Kurchenko, Yanukovych’s right-hand man Andriy Kliuyev, and others. The other oligarchs had to share their businesses and assets with the Family in order to survive and have the possibility to profit from the state budget, which has put the country on the edge of bankruptcy.”

This week the Supreme Soviet sent an official request to Moscow asking if - given Crimea - Trans-Dniester could be allowed to join the Russian Federation. But there's been no celebration and barely an announcement.

Trans-Dniester is home to about 300,000 people who live amid a drab and arid agricultural landscape, peppered with checkpoints run by Russian peacekeeping troops. The same soldiers also keep watch over immigration posts on the Moldovan border. More than a thousand are based here.

One of the few tourist attractions is a museum in the old headquarters of a swashbuckling Red Army General Grigory Kotovsky, who held sway over Tiraspol in the 1920s.

"He is magnificent like the Soviet Union," says the curator Nadejda Kostiurina, holding up a Soviet flag underneath his portrait. "That was much, much better than we have now."