It is hardly surprising, given the drastically divided nation, that when Vitali Klitschko's pro-European political party ventured to Kerch - a city of the eastern edge of Ukraine in the Crimea region - things did not go entirely according to plan... This is the region that Russia has stated it is willing to go to war over and is deep in the pro-Russia territory [4]... headlines galore are coming out of Ukraine but all that matters now is the Russian response...
Especially after Tymoshenko's earlier comments:
- *TYMOSHENKO URGES PROTESTERS TO STAY IN INDEPENDENCE SQUARE
- *UKRAINIANS OBLIGED TO BRING YANUKOVYCH BACK TO KIEV: TYMOSHENKO
- *TYMOSHENKO: UKRAINE MAY BRING CHANGES IN OTHER EX-SOVIET STATES
- *TYMOSHENKO: UKRAINE WILL HELP OTHER COUNTRIES UNDER `DICTATORS'
A EuroMaidan meeting does not go quite as planned in the east/west of Ukraine...
As is clear from this map - the nation is desparately divided (Kerch is on the eastern corner of the Crimea peninsula at the bottom on the map)...
[5]
As Russia warned before...
"If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war,” the official said. “They will lose Crimea first [because] we will go in and protect [it], just as we did in Georgia.” In August 2008, Russian troops invaded Georgia after the Georgian military launched a surprise attack on the separatist region of South Ossetia in an effort to establish its dominance over the republic.
...
The brief conflict with Georgia pitted Russia indirectly against the US and Nato, which had earlier tried to put Georgia on a path to Nato membership. The Kremlin regards the Georgian conflict as the biggest stand-off between Russia and the west since the end of the Cold War and it has fed determination in Moscow to push back against what it believes to be western attempts to contain Russia.
...
The warning of a similar scenario comes because Ukraine’s civil conflict has fanned tension in Crimea. On the peninsula, located on the northern coast of the Black Sea where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is stationed, ethnic Russians make up almost 60 per cent of the population, with Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars accounting for the rest.
...
Volodymyr Konstantinov, speaker of Crimea’s parliament, said on Thursday that the region might try to secede from Ukraine if the country split. “It is possible, if the country breaks apart,” he told the Russian news agency Interfax. “And everything is moving towards that.” Russian media also quoted him as saying Crimeans might turn to Russia for protection.
Some humor might help...
[6]
But it's pretty clear who they blame...
[7]