Belarus is the last confirmed dictatorship in Europe, and it's lead by a Soviet-type strong man.
He does whatever Putin likes, and the conditions for the people of Belarus are very bad.
The Baltic countries may be in trouble, though, because a considerable number of ethnic Russians live in them and do nothing but complain. Of course, they never go back to Russia.
It seems that many people here give no credit to Ukrainians themselves. They think that the only reasons that the previous president abandoned ship was because of US meddling and home-grown Nazis and has nothing to do with very bad conditions inside Ukraine and almost unbelievable levels of official corruption.
I spent most of the past year in Michigan helping my elderly mother. She doesn't have the internet, but she does have Direct TV. I spent a lot of time watching Al Jazeera and Blumberg, which were the only networks paying any attention to this situation for any length of time. They have been covering the Maidan demonstrations and the complaints of Ukrainian citizens since autumn. Al Jazeera is no tool of the right wing, and their reporting convinced me that the US and EU could not have whipped up this level of discontent out of nothing.
A lot of DUers supporting Russia seem not to have paid much attention to Ukraine until the Russians leaked Victoria Nuland's conversation. I don't like Nuland or what she was saying, but I think that she was actually well behind the opinion of the Ukrainian people at the time.
Here's a question: what were the Russian ambassador to Ukraine and the Russian foreign ministry saying to each other at the same time? Were they talking about making threats to Yanukovich and Ukraine to get Ukraine to enter an EU equivalent with the dictatorships of Belarus and Kazakhstan and Putin's version of a democratic Russia?
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