What started the Ukraine crisis ?

http://www.3news.co.nz/What-started-the-Ukraine-crisis/tabid/417/articleID/330053/Default.aspx

Nov. 21, 2013: President Viktor Yanukovych's government announces it is abandoning an agreement to strengthen ties with the European Union and is instead seeking closer cooperation with Moscow. Protesters take to the streets.

No mention is made of the back ground to those talks breaking down. The fact is that the EU offered $1 billion at that meeting to help tide them over during the transition in trade Yanukovych having already made clear Ukraine would need c. $8 billion to get them through to the autumn.

Now .......the EU have upped their loan / aid level to £15 billion of which c. $2 billion will be a gift and the IMF are arranging a similar amount too by way of loans. If that had happened in November the subsequent course of events wouldn't necessarily have occurred.

from Ukraine in December with the caveat that Ukraine keep its debt to GDP ratio to under 60%. Now if Ukraine goes into deep debt with the EU offer, Russia could call the bonds due! The EU offerred no immediate help which Ukraine needed but Russia did. Theoretically, any aid/loan pkg. the EU/IMF offers now could have three billion scraped right off the top as payment to Russia.

The oligarchs have control in Ukraine and their minions control the government....these oligarchs have hollowed out Ukraine and are seeking along with Western oligarchs to do more damage. I feel Ukraine is doomed.

I like the way the timeline summarized the shooting of 82 "protesters"....well, 12 of them were police. Lots of holes in the timeline I'm afraid.

although it seems unlikely they wouldn't have been aware of that situation. There are other debt payments repayments due elsewhere before the autumn too.

Nothing theoretical about it - immediate trans of funds. You will find elsewhere that no Greek loans made subject to English law have been either written down or are in default. Not only must Russia have had some expert advice on the subject its likely that others did too from prior experience in Greece..

Timeline I used was just a convenient summary of events .

What has completely mystified me over the past day or so was reference out of the blue to a $100 discount per unit volume, usually / 1000 cu. meters , as being part of the lease deal on the Crimea naval base. That's aside from the $1 billion a year lease payment which presumably , until renegotiated , will go direct to Crimea : not Kiev. That wasn't a discount which cost Gazrom anything - it was internal accounting by Russia by way of a tax offset to Gazprom and that will now end.

I'm sure the EU knew...schnookered wasn't quite the right word but....what could they do? Nothing and Ukraine was desperate so........

Because that's how it often goes.

When I started grad school I had the offer of a $12k loan. That was it.

Minimal living expenses and school-related fees amounted to something like $11900 for the first year. Normative time to degree was 6 years.

But I knew that my dept. would eventually negotiate for an offer, and that I could re-open negotiations annually for a renewal of the loan offer. Moreover, the university had an emergency loan pool for unexpected circumstances. Nothing was guaranteed. Nothing was set in stone. These weren't prescribed norms; these were statistical norms based on past non-prescribed behavior.

Making the entire situation dicey was the budget crunch in the state at the time. Coupled with the expectation that I become an in-state resident for tuition purposes, even as the university, because of the budget crunch, was reformulating its requirements for declaring a student "in-state."

I trusted the university. My ability to meet the requirements for dept. aid. My ability to make my way through the morass of requirements for being declared in-state.

The following fall less than a week before the start of classes I had my new student loan amount set, my dept. gave me some funding, and the total was less than the amount I'd need for the year. I deposited my "request for reclassification as an in-state student" in the proper box with documentation. Then, to minimize the student loan debt I deposited my application for a job in the right places, fairly sure I'd be getting at least one of those. And I did this because I had enough trust in the people I had been dealing with--in my department, in the finance office, in the registrar's office, in the various other offices seeking part-time help. By the first day of school I had a part-time job that let me decline the student loans and come out ahead, my tuition was in-state, and instead of barely meeting my needs with loans and dept. funding I would have a little breathing room through having a part-time job and dept. funding. Trust can be a good thing.

Ukraine negotiated a $1 billion stipend, so to speak. The assumption by many was that was it. Past norms didn't apply. That was all there'd be. More was needed, but nobody on that side of the wall could be trusted. They were the enemy from days of yore. They were Those Who Could Not Be Trusted, in league with Lord Wally-Mort and the Western oilgarchs.

The distrust of "fascists," esp. those common European fascists like the people in Britain and esp. Germany, and of Westerners in general isn't a new trait in the East and its one of the biggest problems in Ukraine. Some of the stereotyping is rooted in fact; some is rooted in archetypes that surpass any reasoned factual basis. That kind of thinking is subject to a lot of manipulation because it is only barely rooted in fact. It's mostly rooted in distrust.

There was some recent research showing that higher education levels correlate to higher levels of social trust. Close interactions contribute to higher social trust, as well--this is very old research. And post-Soviet research showed that in the breakup of the USSR the single most important factor in interethnic tolerance and cooperation wasn't social interaction or education, but shared interpretation of historical events: If one side was oppressor and the other side oppressed, as long as they agreed on the interpretation of history it was copacetic. This had to be reciprocated, however. If it was agreed that the Astrakhan khanate had been a bad thing for Russians and Russians insisted that Terrible Ivan and Stalin had been good, with no repression of Muslims, then the entire endeavor would crash with tensions higher afterwards than before. Both had to share the interpretation of historical events, whether large scale or smaller scale, how apts. were allotted by the gorkom. (Gotta love those clip-blends. They're the bane of my Ukrainian-for-reading. Got used to "obkom", now "oblrada".)

Yanukovich was all about money, it would appear; appearances can be deceiving unless you think everything in life is just about money. The bigger Nukky's stipend the more he could pocket and share with his son and fellow pols. Like any mobster--take Goblin, for instance, down in Sevastopol'--he trusted some implicitly and viewed others as inherently untrustworthy. Anything that looks promising must be a trap. Any money not sitting on the table you can be sure won't ever be on the table. The basis of his trust was partly ethnicity--you have a greater basis for trust, education and interactions aside, because he shared common interpretations of history with Putin.

sort of arrangement if I understand correctly but, BUT,some of it from those who have lots to gain in destabilizing the government....I saw a video of Victoria Nuland handing out food along with out ambassador to Ukraine...Pyatt(?). What did you find particularly shady?

I know this is a late rec, but I do have to work.

I wish people on here cared.