Ukraine

I find it very hard to understand what's going on in Kiev. Putin would clearly like the country to join his empire, and the McCain/Kerry duopoly clearly want it to join the West. The MSM say it's a quarrel about the bloc with whom the country should be aligned; the EU (West of the city) or Russia (to its East.)
 
But the longer the protest continues, the less I believe that. People don't fight and die for a rather abstract policy.
 
It's worth a couple of minutes to watch youtu.be/Hvds2AIiWLA - a young lady on the protester's front lines explains what it's about. "We want to be free from the politicians, who work only for themselves", she says. "We are normal people... civilized people; but our government are barbarians."
 
Don't know how deep that runs, or whether these folk have a serious plan to overthrow the Yanukovitch regime and replace it with nothing; but on their face, those are pretty libertarian sentiments.