Ukraine 2010

[minionofmidas]

Wow, Ukrainian is hilarious.  (If you're Russian, of course.)  The word for "independent [of party]" appears to mean something like "beyond parties", sort of in a spatial way, like what you see to your left when you've walked past all the parties.  And the word for "nominated by [a party]" is cognate to a Russian word meaning "stick out [e.g. your tongue]".

Guess, what čerstvý chléb means in Czech. And, for that matter, how do czechs rank the roots for Russian smells: pakhnut', voniat', smerdet'

Translayshe or must I try and understand on my own?

[minionofmidas]

The entire Ukraine is a sea of a particularly ugly shade of teal on that map. No red area is historically part of Ukraine (though they have a lot of Ukrainians living in them - even the essentially purely Russian-speaking areas at the eastern end had pluralities of Ukrainian self-identifiers since before Stalin drew the modern boundary.)

The surprising thing on that map is not that the Rusyns didn't like Tymoshenko. It's that she wins the Ukrainian part of the Bukovina.

[minionofmidas]

The entire Ukraine is a sea of a particularly ugly shade of teal on that map. No red area is historically part of Ukraine (though they have a lot of Ukrainians living in them - even the essentially purely Russian-speaking areas at the eastern end had pluralities of Ukrainian self-identifiers since before Stalin drew the modern boundary.)

The surprising thing on that map is not that the Rusyns didn't like Tymoshenko. It's that she wins the Ukrainian part of the Bukovina.

Even more ironically Yanukovych won one of the electoral regions in this area and it is the only Romanian and Moldavian majority region of the four .

So I noticed as well.

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That's the piece of info I was missing.

[minionofmidas]

Any reason Yuschenko did so well in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk?  (I typed "Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk", then considered editing to "Lwów".

How about "Lemberg"?

[minionofmidas]

The above regions maps are misleading.  Unlike the US presidential elections Ukraine's president is elected by a national vote not a regional based college distribution.

Dude, we know that. Not everybody is as dumb as the US Constitution.

Welcome!

[minionofmidas]

Although all of Ukraine is in the same time zone (EET, two hours ahead of GMT, one hour ahead of CMT. Seven hours ahead of Forum Time for you Amayricans) I can't help but wonder if the considerable difference in de facto time (you know, sun rising/setting hours) impacts that somewhat.

[minionofmidas]

Upon checking: It's not as bad as I thought it might be. Difference in sunrise times seems to be about ~65-70 minutes between the western and eastern ends of the country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tzdiff-Europe-winter.png

[minionofmidas]

It's not as if that map showed anything we yet need to know.

sort of waiting for the emergence of a political movement advocating a clean divorce, actually. Though what would the southeastern country be called? Tavriya? Novorossiya would be historically accuratish as well, but probably not go down so well...

ag, do you know how the Crimea Tatars vote?

[minionofmidas]

Actually, it's not that simple. Crimea (bar the Tatars) is outright pro-Russian, but the rest of the country has a clear Ukrainian self-identification. The mining areas - Donets'k and Luhansk, of  course, are very regionalist, but already the big cities, such as Khar'kiv and Dnipropetrovs'k are much less so. Yes, the religious and linguistic divide is strong (and, largely, runs on the border of colonization: you can read the last 350-400 years of Ukrainian history off this map), but it is far from clear that anywhere, other than in Crimea, a secession referendum would be successful. 

Which is, of course, also why secession seems a much more reasonable idea than joining Russia.

Only Crimea cannot be considered Ukrainian at any rate, other areas are Russian-speaking Ukrainian areas

Not quite. The people are Russian speaking Ukrainians (a majority of them, anyhow), but the area is not part of the historical country Ukraine. It's the old Crimea Khanate - although outside the Crimea itself (and into adjoining parts of Eastern Ukraine proper) it was almost devoid of population just 300 years ago. A majority of the settlers after that came from Ukraine.

[minionofmidas]

Yah, I guess so.

And then, of course, there is also the prospect of winning elections nationally. If that were impossible (for either side) we might see a whole different dynamic.

[minionofmidas]

What's with the Yanukovich pockets near the Belorussian border? Belorussians?