Leaves out a lot of information, or summarizes it in a word.
Start with a pro-unity march with hundreds of people. 500 by some reckonings. More or fewer, depending on who's talking.
Add in ultras--not noted for being nice and kind by and large. I refer to them as "thugs", but "soccer hooligans" will do. Get up to 1500, perhaps 2000 in the march at most.
Make some of them ultranationalists.
Suddenly 1000, at least, are ultranationalists. Pretty much that means *only* ultranationalists were there, and the Borot'ba release is internally inconsistent to the point of failure.
Add that the ultranationalists were bused in for a game. And were on their way to the game. They were heading to the stadium. Until the "pacifists" showed up out of nowhere, organized and armed.
At that point it got ugly.
But the Borot'ba piece basically says that they were mostly unarmed--which is bad for a planned confrontation.
The Communists are oddly on the side of Putin in this. They don't support Putin, but they're on the same side. Their base is largely among Russian-speakers, and they like the current order more than any revision. It's one of the reasons that Ukraine is among the least reconstructed post-Soviet societies east of the Urals. Even Russia itself is more reconstructed. The call for federalization is new--the Communists have always been against it. But their revisionism is rather like Stalin's "socialism in one country" call was revisionist: When the grand vision isn't panning out, narrow the scope. If you can't control the entire country and be conservative enough to maintain what you had, try to partition the country and preserve what you can. (It pays to remember that the conservatives in Ukraine tend not to be the Euromaidan but the CP members.)
= new reply since forum marked as read