Russia's Crimea takeover breeding anarchy and fear throughout East

[unhappycamper]

http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-ukraine-russia-crimea-blueprint-20140407,0,4849650.story



Pro-Russia militants seized the regional administration building in Donetsk, Ukraine, over the weekend and unfurled a banner Monday proclaiming the independent "Donetsk Republic" in a move mimicking the Russian takeover of Ukraine's Crimea region five weeks ago.

Russia's Crimea takeover breeding anarchy and fear throughout East
By Carol J. Williams
April 7, 2014, 4:11 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's unimpeded success in annexing Crimea has inspired Russian nationalists in eastern Ukraine to seize territory and sown fear region-wide that such provocations will spur Moscow to intervene on behalf of ethnic Russians.

The occupation of government buildings in the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv on Sunday mirrors what happened in Crimea, where Russian forces barricaded themselves in local authorities' offices and demanded a referendum on whether to the peninsula should secede and join Russia.

But the architects of the latest secessionist moves won't find such an easy path out of Ukraine as did their Crimean counterparts, analysts note.

Ethnic Russians and Russian speakers are a majority in Crimea, a strategic Black Sea peninsula that hosts Russian naval forces and was part of Russia for centuries before 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev transferred the territory to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russians constitute a minority and may face more resistance from their Ukrainian neighbors.