(Reuters) - When Ukrainians toppled a pro-Russian president last year, nowhere was the euphoria greater than in Lviv, a short drive from the EU border, where people have dreamt for generations of escaping Moscow's orbit to join the West.
More than a year of war and economic collapse later, nowhere else has the disillusionment been felt more harshly.
"Everyone thought Ukraine would suddenly turn into Poland," said mechanic Taras Yakubovsky, sitting by a cast-iron woodburner in his small garage, where work has dried up because customers can no longer afford car repairs. "But we've become more like Europe's Somalia."
WNU Editor: The city of Lviv is as European as you can get .... this region is also ground zero for nationalist sentiment in Ukraine. This growing sense of "disillusionment" is also not a surprise ....times are tough throughout Ukraine, and the promises that were made when the revolution occurred have not been delivered .... and cannot be delivered as long as the conflict continues in the eastern part of the country.
3 comments:
Esperanto is looking really good right now.
You could change borders over night and not worry about language difficulties.
Is Lviv Ukrainians, Polish, or a mix?
If borders could be easily changed based on who provided good governance and not for irredentist reasons or similar reasons, politicians at all levels would be more like competent city mangers. They would be boring but good chaps.
In other news,
"When Melnychuk’s body was found on 22 March, police initially told local journalists he had committed suicide. But it soon emerged that alarmed neighbours had called police on hearing of a late-night struggle. Pathologists found he had been badly beaten before the fall. Later the same day, Odessa prosecutors registered Melnychuk’s “suicide” as a murder, and arrested a former police officer they describe only as “citizen K”.
In reply to a legal request by Newsweek for information on investigations into the deaths of seven other former officials, all tied to Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the General Prosecutor’s Office responded that all the information about all the deaths was a state secret – a staggering claim to make about a series of apparently unrelated civilian deaths they told the press were suicides."
And,
"Both the Ukrainian Armed Forces representative and the Russian Federation representative to the Joint Centre for Control and Co-ordination (JCCC) told the SMM that the Ukrainian side (assessed to be the Right Sector volunteer battalion) earlier had made an offensive push through the line of contact towards Zhabunki (“DPR”-controlled, 14km west-north-west of Donetsk), ..."
And it was only yesterday that I was wondering on what had happened to Jay.
As we both know Jay, the murder of Sergei Melnychuk is one of many that has occurred in Ukraine in the past few months. All of them opponents to the government, and all of them explained away as suicide or `something else`.
For readers who may wish to get more information, the Newsweek article that Jay is referring to is at the following link .... http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/17/ukraine-plagued-succession-unlikely-suicides-former-ruling-party-320584.html
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