The Ukrainian government has delivered a stark warning to pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk that it has a plan to take back the city.
That the issue remains, above all, political is demonstrated over the border, in the Catalan region of southern France, where bullfighting is embraced as fiercely as it is opposed in Spanish Catalonia, for exactly the same separatist reasons, in that case because it is banned in Paris.
If there were any doubts about who controls Indonesia's rebellious provinces, where demands for independence have strengthened in recent months, President Abdurrahman Wahid laid them to rest this weekend when he ordered a severe crackdown on separatists in Irian Jaya that left at least 10 people dead.
In a separate development, the political leader of the separatists in Donetsk announced that he was resigning his position on Thursday.
"Ukraine's attitude is that there are no separatists in eastern Ukraine and that in fact the problems have been started by Russian infiltrators... and that really this constitutes an attack on Ukraine from the outside," Marples, director for Ukraine studies at the University of Alberta, told AFP.
A poll by independent Russian firm the Levada Center that was released on July 30 , 2014found that only 3percentt of Russians believed that separatists in eastern Ukraine shot down the jet.
The advances are significant victories for the pro-European leadership in a military operation to crush the armed separatist rebellion that began in east Ukraine in April and hold the former Soviet republic of 45 million together.
Forces aligned with the government in Sana'a, the northern capital, decisively beat southern separatists in a civil war that broke out in 1994.
All those events occurred well before Russia's annexation of Crimea and its backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine, steps that have prompted Western sanctions.Most Russian citizens will not notice the problem since they do not own stocks individually or collectively, in the form of pension schemes and mutual funds.
That is justified: Even if investigators conclude that separatists in Donetsk are not to blame, Russia helped create a situation in which such a thing is even possible in southern and eastern Ukraine.
