Putin's Big Mistake
Putin's Big Mistake
Nov 19, 2014 5:11 AM EST
By Marc Champion
Is Russian President Vladimir Putin losing Ukraine by stoking a war to keep it?
As a new military campaign appears to be getting under way in eastern Ukraine, that’s an important question. To answer it, Putin could do worse than to stop by for tea at the Makarov household in Mariupol, the region’s main port and industrial center -- now threatened with attack.
Alexander Makarov is an ethnic Russian, proud that he can trace his family’s roots to 16th century Russian chronicles. At the start of the crisis in Ukraine, he, like many people in this city, was hostile to the revolution in Kiev. He argued repeatedly about it with his daughter, Katerina, with whom he shares an apartment. He hung a Russian flag on his bedroom wall and she put a Ukrainian one on hers. (Katrina's confused seven-year old daughter asked what kind should go on her wall.)
It used to irritate Makarov, a 62-year-old radio engineer, that whenever he needed to write officially to his boss in Donetsk -- also a native Russian speaker -- he had to do so in Ukrainian. And even though 80 percent of the team he worked with at Mariupol Airport’s control tower were Russian speakers, all technical documents, including those with safety implications, had to be written in Ukrainian, too....
More: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-19/putins-big-mistake?cmpid=yhoo
