Quotes from Tim Judah

For this reason much of Ukraine's threadbare army was positioned in ways which reflected its old Cold War Soviet background, i.e., prepared, albeit barely, to fight a war on its western flanks—not its eastern ones.

The Nemtsov report claimed that to that date some 170 Russian regular soldiers, as opposed to volunteers, had died, and a large proportion of them died in and around Ilovaysk.

At first graves were dug for the dead, but then they were just left where they had died. Eventually those who worked for the local administration were taken to the nearby town.

The rebels, however, wanted them out of two places in particular—Donetsk airport and the town of Debaltseve, through which local roads and railways run. The airport, named for the famous composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), who was born nearby, was gleaming and new, having been among those rebuilt for the 2012 Euro soccer championships.

Debaltseve were certainly defeats for the Ukrainians, but the fact that it took the rebels and the Russians months to achieve these victories demonstrated two things: first, that the Ukrainians were no longer disorganized and that their military was getting stronger by the day; and secondly, that the rebels and the Russians were reaching the limits of what they could do unless there was a lot more help from Russia.

He also spoke of his admiration for Alain de Benoist, the French far-right philosopher, whom I was beginning to realize had fans on both sides of the line.

the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all.

People said, 'When the Russians come, they will give us gas, double our pensions and make our life better.

What was also clear, if you look at the past, is that people here, as in the rest of Ukraine, are always "for" something, because they want their future to be better than their past. In recent history too, supporters of one side or another always point to a referendum in which people have voted for something they approved of, and then ignore the ones where they have voted for something they do not want.

Still, 71.48 percent of those who voted in Ukraine did so for a renewed USSR and, although this was the lowest "yes" figure in the Soviet Union among all those who voted, it was still overwhelming. However, in Ukraine, people were asked some separate questions as well.

For as long as anyone can remember, the history of Kosovo has been a battlefield pitting Serbs against Albanians. Each believes different things because each has been taught different things, and as they reach further back into time it becomes easier to argue whatever they want in order to find support for their view of the present.

Novorossiya or the New Russia of Catherine the Great and some of the Donetsk Republic of 1918. Hardly anyone in the Donbass noticed these people or what they were doing on the far fringes of political life.

For too long Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, was one of the continent's most under-reported places. For most of the last century, what little reporting in the foreign press there was, was done in the main by foreign correspondents living in Moscow, who inevitably absorbed some of the imperial and then former imperial capital's patronizing attitudes.

Freedom House is a human rights NGO that has long worked closely with USAID, which distributes U.S. government money for human rights promotion as well as regular aid and which has been condemned as Russophobic by Russian officials. As far back as 2004—before the founding of Donetsk Republic—it was also accused in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. of indirectly supporting organizations working to promote the election of Viktor Yushchenko.

Far away, in Ukraine's east, tourists once came to the monument of Savur-Mogila, an hour and a half's drive from Donetsk. This was also the site of an annual pilgrimage to commemorate the crucial battle fought here in 1943 in which thousands of Red Army soldiers died. Now the ruins of this vast Soviet memorial are a tragic sight.

It is a monument erected in 1887 by the Austro-Hungarian Military Geographical Institute, which the locals claim marks their discovery of the center of Europe.

In a country rich enough to provide its inhabitants with very decent lives, the EU deals were seen as some sort of lifebuoy to grab on to. By linking their fate to the West, many thought that the gradual implementation of the agreements would create the thing that had been missing in their lives—a state of law.

Putin underlined that one of the most disastrous consequences of the collapse of the USSR was that "for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory." And it is precisely this that Putin has begun to correct.

If the opportunistic seizure of Crimea had rather been characterized as revenge for NATO's seventy-eight-day bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999, which the then enfeebled Russia had been unable to prevent, that might have been closer to the mark.

Ukrainians should be grateful to Stalin, she declared, because he had fashioned the Ukrainian Soviet republic out of diverse bits of territory and this was now the state they had.

for Britain and the U.S. They expected them to give weapons to the Ukrainian army so it can better fight the Russians, because until now all they had given the country, said Nadya, was the equivalent of feeding "a fly to a dog"—in other words, nothing

Lenin had given it to Soviet Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war when the region, or rather communists here, had declared this to be the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.

short-lived German-supported Ukrainian state, which the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic had resisted. Now, she said, it was a ridiculous irony that Ukrainians were destroying statues of Lenin when they should be grateful to him.

The legend of the Holodomor," she said, using the name given to it by Ukrainians and which means "hunger-extermination," was created in Canada by fascist Ukrainian exiles.