Reuters reports:
Pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine smashed their way into public buildings and burned Ukrainian-language books on Sunday ...
In Kharkiv, Reuters Television footage showed pro-Russian activists scaling an iron gate, smashing a van and breaking into the offices of a Ukrainian cultural center. Two policemen stood nearby, examining the van. The footage then showed young men seizing Ukrainian-language books, including a volume devoted to the 1932-1933 man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, which killed from 7-10 million people. "Do you see what they print here?" one activist said to another. The activists then took the books into the street and set them alight in small bonfires, along with posters from the extreme-right wing Right Sector group.
Writing in The New Republic,
Julia Ioffe argues:
Putin has also shown that he was serious about using force not just in Crimea, but in Ukraine proper. So far, he has kept it just to busing in hooligans into eastern Ukraine to act as grassroots pro-Russian protesters. But make no mistake, Putin is about to take eastern Ukraine, too.
To wit: On Saturday, the two-week anniversary of the authorization, the Russian foreign ministry was already laying the foundations for such a seizure, saying that it was being flooded with requests from citizens across eastern Ukraine, asking the Russians for protection against the western Ukrainian fascists.
The U.S. and Europe (rightly) are not going to war over Crimea. The task now is to shore up Ukraine and deter Putin so that Ukraine may hold free and fair elections on May 25.
n/t Phil Ochs