The Great Maidan

Kyiv journalist Vitaly Portnikov again, this time on Radio Liberty, writing about the Yanukovych government's failure to understand the nature of the protest movement that is advancing against it:

The government will simply start to switch police from the east to the country's "difficult" regions, retake the objectives that were seized, continue negotiations from a position of strength ... In the end, there will be no police and Berkut left in the east of the country. And then ...  And then  the capture of administrative buildings in the east will begin. The residents of the eastern and south-eastern regions have no more "love" for the government than people in the western and central ones... 

People are afraid, but when the repressive machine with its batons is evacuated to disperse the people in the central regions, their fear will vanish - together with the Russian "horror stories" about the split of Ukraine. Because the dividing line in the country does not follow a line between east and west, but the line between Yanukovych/authoritarianism and the Ukrainian people. And this lack of understanding on the part of the government in Kiev is its biggest problem: the problem that led to Maidan and is gradually and naturally growing into into a Great Maidan - a Maidan that will soon cover the whole of Ukraine.