Poll: Most Ukrainians want a unified country

[joshcryer]

33. Fair enough.

I simply don't think Crimea was a net positive for Ukraine though, so I think losing Crimea meant the overall need for money was reduced (though probably not $3 billion). The east has most of the industry though, so obviously if you lose that, you need bigger loans.

But you can't ignore that the IMF loans were yet to be made. They may have been Putin's $15 billion without the loan guarantees. It may have only been $10 billion. It wasn't like the EU was going to go "$1 billion, have a nice day." It was, "$1 billion, IMF austerity." Whatever it was going to be, it wouldn't let the country fall into despotism. The IMF didn't let Greece fall into chaos even though Greeks (particularly rich Greeks) weren't paying their fair share. In fact, the IMF loaned over $100 billion Euros to save Greece (no doubt to save the Eurozone from catastrophe), but it came at huge debt reductions.

Putin may have made the nicer deal, but only because, and you've yet to convince me otherwise, he was leveraging Ukraine's gas and Ukraine had quite possibly the worst gas contract ever (they should've made it clear in the contract that any "losses" would be held by a Gazprom insurer, not Ukraine; I still don't think the "losses" were real; I think an oligarch decided to line his pockets, Ukrainian or Russian, who knows).