From "Putin's Big Mistake" by Marc Champion on BloombergView:
Is Russian President Vladimir Putin losing Ukraine by stoking a war to keep it?
As a new military campaign appears to be getting under way in eastern Ukraine, that’s an important question. To answer it, Putin could do worse than to stop by for tea at the Makarov household in Mariupol, the region’s main port and industrial center -- now threatened with attack.
Alexander Makarov is an ethnic Russian, proud that he can trace his family’s roots to 16th century Russian chronicles. At the start of the crisis in Ukraine, he, like many people in this city, was hostile to the revolution in Kiev. He argued repeatedly about it with his daughter, Katerina, with whom he shares an apartment. He hung a Russian flag on his bedroom wall and she put a Ukrainian one on hers. (Katrina's confused seven-year old daughter asked what kind should go on her wall.)
It used to irritate Makarov, a 62-year-old radio engineer, that whenever he needed to write officially to his boss in Donetsk -- also a native Russian speaker -- he had to do so in Ukrainian. And even though 80 percent of the team he worked with at Mariupol Airport’s control tower were Russian speakers, all technical documents, including those with safety implications, had to be written in Ukrainian, too.
It angered Makarov still more when the so-called Maidan protesters in Kiev seemed willing to risk Ukraine’s ties with Russia over a trade deal with the European Union. Most of his friends and family live across the Russian border, just 30 miles away. He even accepted Russia’s decision to take Crimea, because “it was never truly Ukrainian.”
But Makarov's view changed when Putin started sending troops into eastern Ukraine. The death toll quickly doubled and today stands above 4,000. In August, Russian units crossed the border to march on Mariupol, stopping only when Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a cease-fire agreement. The city staged its first pro-Ukraine rallies. Most of Makarov’s team at work changed their minds too, he says.
Makarov trusts Ukrainian TV news reports no more than Russia’s, but he can see that Mariupol faces no risk of being ethnically cleansed by fascists, as Putin claimed this week. What's threatening are the Russian-provided artillery and tanks that last summer shredded the air-traffic control tower at Donetsk’s new airport. Just a year ago Makarov proudly helped install state-of-the-art equipment in that tower, part of a multi-million-dollar effort to bring Ukraine’s air-traffic system into the 21st century.
Read the full story here.
From RFE/RL's News Desk:
Ukraine says it will not tolerate pressure from any other country over whether or not it seeks to join NATO.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevhen Perebyynis made the remark to reporters in Kyiv on November 19, after the BBC quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying in an interview that Moscow wants "a 100 percent guarantee that no one would think about Ukraine joining NATO."
Hitting back with a reference to Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Perebyynis said Kyiv would like guarantees that Moscow will not interfere in Ukraine's internal affairs, send in troops, or annex Ukrainian territories.
The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, told journalists on November 19 that any decision on seeking to join NATO could be made only by the Ukrainian people, not by Russia, Europe, or the United States.
The Canadian ambassador to Ukraine, Roman Waschuk, made a similar statement on November 19.
Here is today's situation map of eastern Ukraine by the National Security and Defense Council:
A wonderful video from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service:
It’s been a tumultuous year for Halyna Trofanyuk. At the beginning of the year she traveled from her small village in western Ukraine to brave freezing conditions and brutal security forces at the protests in Kyiv. It was a decision that brought her to the very center of Ukraine’s political drama, but which also had far-reaching consequences for her personal life: a relationship won and lost, a grandson conceived on the Maidan. But what future will the baby have? Halyna is not optimistic -- and now says she’s sometimes ashamed to have joined the protests.
From RFE/RL's News Desk:
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow will not pressure its "allies" to recognize Crimea as a part of Russia or to join it in recognizing Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions as independent states.
In a question-and-answer session following an address to Russia's lower parliament house on November 19, Lavrov said the security and economic groupings that Russia is currently building with other former Soviet republics are aimed to "protect the legitimate interests of our countries' security."
He said that "on some issues, including the status of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, or Crimean history, we are not making our partners share our assessments 100 percent, as we do not want to put them into an awkward position if for some reason it is uncomfortable for them."
The remarks appeared aimed to assuage concerns among ex-Soviet republics that Russia, which annexed Crimea in March in a move that Kyiv and the West say was illegal, wants to diminish their sovereignty or control their foreign policy.