COUP IN KYIV?

VYACHESLAV PONOMARYOV (translation): People who come here as observers from the European Union bring real spies with them. It doesn't look good at all.

“If the U.S. and the EU can only increase this incremental approach to sanctions in naming individuals and the occasional company or bank, this is a policy of turning the screw very, very slowly and not applying much pressure,” Schott said. “If what is on the table turns out to be more of the same, the Russians may play for more time and can continue to destabilize Ukraine and absorb the costs.”

Obama, Hufbauer said, appears to be reverting to President Woodrow Wilson’s view of sanctions. Wilson trumpeted the sanctions after World War I, saying if used properly “there will be no need for war.”

“The modern theory is that they are part of the force curve. They’re signaling that force is around the corner if sanctions don’t work,” he said. “Obama has really reverted to a Wilsonian view, that sanctions are an alternative to the use of force.”

If President Obama seems skeptical of his own plan to stop Russia’s meddling in Ukraine with just sanctions, he may have good reason. He is in uncharted waters, trying to pressure such a large country into backing down without the threat of force.

The United States has proof that the Russian government in Moscow is running a network of spies inside Eastern Ukraine because the U.S. government has recordings of their conversations, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a closed-door meeting Friday.

“Intel is producing taped conversations of intelligence operatives taking their orders from Moscow and everybody can tell the difference in the accents, in the idioms, in the language. We know exactly who’s giving those orders, we know where they are coming from,” Kerry said at a private meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington. A recording of Kerry’s remarks was obtained by The Daily Beast.



Kerry didn’t name specific Russian officials implicated in the recordings. But he claimed that the intercepts provided proof of the Russians deliberately fomenting unrest in Eastern Ukraine—and lying about it to U.S. officials and the public

Latvia's "non-citizens" are stateless Russians without passports who are not allowed to vote - despite having lived in Latvia for decades. How have they ended up in this limbo? And is it discriminatory?
[...]
There are also people like Nijonila Kuharthuk in Latvia. She, too, has lived in Riga for decades, but she was born in Ukraine.

Now, after 20 years as a non-citizen, she has decided to take the citizenship test after all. She wants to become a Latvian.

"What finally motivated me to do it was the sad events in my former homeland, Ukraine," she told DW. "What I don't want is for Putin to protect me. I don't want him to come one day to help the 300,000 non-citizens in Latvia."

And what, dear Foofie, are your anti-European theories re Georgia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan ... ? And the Union of Russia and Belarus was created because " Europe thinks only "the Jews" bemoan the Holocaust" as well?

I'm still trying to find out if the MAJORITY of Ukrainians are pro-Russian or pro-European?