2 Ukraine Issue as of March 4th, 2014

On March 3rd I attended a presentation at the University of Texas's LBJ School.  The presenter was Tom Ricks, a prominent blogger at a well-known foreign relations website.  I didn't entirely agree with his position on the Ukraine and at his suggestion I sent him and the website my take on the issue.  I emailed him the following on March 4th.  In the end they choose not to run it but I'd like to go on record with what I said then.

My best guess is that right now all parties are trying to act responsibly.  Nobody wants this to degenerate into open, violent conflict.  I'll publish more on the subject in the next few days.

Here is what I wrote on March 4th:

Today’s NYT lead article on the Ukraine by Steve Urlanger, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/world/europe/ukraine.html?hp&_r=0 says:

“In Donetsk, however, in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Yanukovych’s native region, a large pro-Russian demonstration led to some violence... The rally seemed the latest in a series in eastern cities that Kiev says are encouraged or even organized by Russia. Most people in the region are ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian as their native language.”

The last part appears to be incorrect.  Most likely it is a slight misreading of the ,Wikipedia article on Donetsk, which cites the 2001 post-Soviet Ukrainian census which says the population of the Donetsk oblast (region) is 38.2% Russian and 56.9% Ukrainian.  But the 2007 census of Donetsk city shows 493,392 people (48.15%) claim Russian nationality while 478,041 (46.65%) claim Ukrainian nationality.

Even that may overstate the portion of the population which is ethnically Ukrainian.  The only book cited, “Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy” by Jonathan Steele (Harvard Press 1988), which is listed by Wikipedia as a “dubious” source, says that in 1989 there were no Ukrainian language schools in this city of more than one million people.  Further, the article cites Steele’s book as saying that in the 1991 census one-third of the city’s population described themselves as Russian, one-third as Ukrainian and one-third simply as “Slavs”, all-in-all a very neat trick for a 1988 book to cite a 1991 census.

Post 1; Why this blog?

This month I turned 70.  Time for a blog on the research I've done over the past few years, mostly on international affairs and military history.  This blog will also allow me to go on record with a few predictions for the near future.