Blue &Yellow: Politics and Economics in Ukraine: Assorted links

Observers in the press are likely to make the assumption that Yanukovych is simply driving Ukraine toward convergence with the Russia model, to the great pleasure of his benefactors in the Kremlin. I'm not so convinced....From Robert Amsterdam's blog. [RA]
The first Russian who settled in Lviv, he writes, was Ivan Fedorov, the printer who arrived in 1572, but until 1939, there were very few ethnic Russians there. They consisted mostly of anti-Bolshevik White Army soldiers and their families, and they numbered at most in “the hundreds.”...Paul Globe [Window on Eurasia]
Its members were hand-picked, its task momentous: to come up with a plan should a eurozone country enter a crisis and threaten the currency union.But it achieved, to a first approximation, exactly nothing, beyond simply keeping its own existence a secret....Felix Salmon on secret meetings. [Reuters]
Many journalists and activists believe it suits the authorities for journalists to feel afraid. At Telekritika's headquarters in Kiev, Lesja Ganzha, who belongs to an anti-censorship movement, compared the current Ukrainian policy to that pursued by Russia in the early Putin years. "It's not just a comparable policy, it's exactly the same policy," she told me....Eastern Approaches. [The Economist]

Blue &Yellow: Politics and Economics in Ukraine