Ukraine, Real and Imagined

What sort of a country was it in which elections were rigged, journalists murdered, and a presidential candidate poisoned during the election campaign?

How was it possible for millions of citizens to bring about a peaceful change of power after weeks of mass protests? What has to happen for a democratic, constitutional Ukraine to emerge as a new, gentle power in the east of Europe? Mykola Riabtschuk describes how, following formal independence in 1991, the emancipation process in the largest, economically most important former Soviet republic was more laborious than in other eastern European countries undergoing transformation. And he reveals how the regional and mental differences in the country between Lviv and Kharkov, Kiev and Sebastopol, Czernowitz and Donetsk have proved to be a stroke of good fortune in the modernization of the European east.