What is going on? A dictator is trying to stay in power. I mean, Yanukovychis the same guy that poisoned Yushchenko with Agent Orange back during the Orange Revolution in 2004-5, disfiguring his face. Should we be surprised that he kills a few protestors in a attempt to restore order?
The irony is that this will likely only enrage the protesters further and lead to full on rebellion.
I’m not siding with shooting people, but the situation is probably not black and white from the police perspective. If you’re the boss police and you have 100 of your guys facing 50,000 angry protesters, what do you do when the crowd turns violent? Do you act with deadly force or do you risk injury and death to your own people? I’m sure the police would argue this way, and I doubt that it is easy to order your subordinates to shoot protesters in the street.
I for one never understood the psychological build up of mind of the protestors.Protests are common in almost every major city of South Asian countries.I never took part in any of the protests nor i ever will.
One of the few reasons for protests may be increasing unemployment rate in a country.Thus the unemployed would walk down the street to create a chaos and disturb the governance of the city.In the process the unemployed would create problem for the employed as city is mostly at halt and no one can go for work.When the protestors get violent,the police will attack them with laughing gas,crying gas etc etc etc or at worst even shoot bullets at the protestors.The political parties would try to take advantage of the chaos to increase their vote banks.
What is the need of protest if you are unemployed in the 1st place???You can always upgrade your skills to get employment or look for self employment rather than wasting your time in useless protests.
Venezuela is in our corner of the globe, the 9th largest oil producer in the world, and student protesters being murdered in the streets isn’t business as usual there. Shutting down access to Facebook and Twitter isn’t exactly normal either. And let’s not forget that a Venezuelan wins Miss Universe at least every 3 years.
Ukraine at least maintained disguised civility so when their people started asking for more liberal reforms the speed at which gloves were removed and the fact that a middle income country actually had the stomach for a fight makes it more newsworthy i guess
I"m not suggesting that the situation in Ukraine is not newsworthy, but it seems odd that you likely wouldn’t even know there are deadly protests in Venezuela if you didn’t regularly watch Spanish language TV in the US.
The EU has no balls, nor does the US to actually stop violence. We’ve kind of proven this over the last few years as thousands are slaughtered in Syria. Ukraine will be firmly in Putin’s sphere of influence. The Germans or the French or the Americans are becoming increasingly irrelevant as they’re unwilling to counter Putin’s influence.
Honestly, I can see this becoming a bigger and bigger issue over the next decade. Is Ukraine just an an Anschluss situation? Perhaps with less willing citizenry… Putin is demonstrating he can do frankly whatever he pleases without any intervention from the West.