The one map you need to understand Ukraine’s crisis | Hacker News Reader

The one map you need to understand Ukraine’s crisis

washingtonpost.com

84 pointsMaysonL51 comments

This is map is outdated, the situation is changing rapidly. There are now more than 10 government centers occupied by protesters. Mass protests are occurring nearly in all regions of Ukraine.

BTW, good news! "Dictatorship laws" were repealed 5 minutes ago at the time of writing of this comment.

The maps were very oversimplified too. It's too bad this story is being under-reported. I think it's more than a "Red and blue states with different languages" situation. It could be a civil war, or national split, no?

No, no civil war possible. The reason is quite simple. Current government has support, but its very passive, while anti-government protestors are extremely active and self-organizing. It is really people vs. government, even if some support government.

And what was the red vs blue initially?

Imagine that the President of this divided country allocated four times as much spending per capita to his political base and his son had earned hundreds of millions during his time in office.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych#Consolidation...

Foreigners here, and Bush junior immediately came to mind. It isn't a straight parallel, but the pork was there, and the cronies were paid.

This map is confusing; it uses three shades of blue, two of which represent land and one of which represents water. I had to stare at both the key and an ordinary map of Ukraine for a minute in order to process what I was seeing.

The confusing part is the &$@!# graphic designer used blue and light blue right next to light blue water.

Genius. Simply genius.

The text of the article says he won dark blue by 70%+, but the key in the map says by a 20% margin (which would imply 60-40). Which is it?

In voting, that 20% is called a swing - it would take a swing of that much to lose the vote. The author's called it a margin here, but it's the same concept - it takes 20% of the vote to move to change the incumbent, not 40%.

Assuming, of course, a two-party system.

I have seen elsewhere (I think it was Zimbabwe) that the president has to win 50% of the votes or it triggers a second round with just the winner and the runner up.

The original author probably is talking about the president having that 50% + 20%.

This map looks old. Recent maps show much wider area of protests and takeovers.

http://cs310221.vk.me/v310221807/6c83/jB9ZgNkuxUA.jpg Can't find translated one atm.

Try Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan#Protests_across_Ukr...

Can the map tell me why this guy's wearing a pasta strainer for a hat?

http://twitter.com/JohnPugh/status/426369689216745472/photo/...

The riot gear I understand. The other, not so much.

The government banned people from wearing any form of headgear (eg masks/blalaclavas) during protests. Some protestors have been wearing silly things in their heads as a form of humorous defiance.

I just looked it up, and it's pretty much the same law all over Europe. Oddly it's much harsher in e.g. Germany (top penalty, 1 year prison) than Ukraine (15 days).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws

(Not a commentary on Ukraine; just curiosity).

The German law was introduced in 1985 by the conservative Kohl government; it was very controversial at the time but is not much discussed now, perhaps because police and courts are rather lenient in enforcing it. I've never heard of a case where it actually led to a prison sentence.

Many localities in the US have similar laws. Not really contrioversial b/c in many cases, they were specifically targeted at the Ku Klux Klan. If you see any recent (past 50 years) of Klan marches, you'll see they have to wear modified hoods which show their faces.

But not all over Europe people can get into prison for 15 years :)

And especially they wouldn't be: 1. kidnaped; 2. beaten up; 3. found dead somewhere in a forrest, miles out of the city And after that police states - death occurred due freezing, and has nothing to do with kidnaping :)

Please be respectful of religious headgear. This man is clearly a Pastafarian.

This has nothing to do with anti mask law. The guy is "pastafarian" priest, a self proclaimed religion announced by some RUSSIAN geeks recently, I have heard about it only in 2013, as a response too invasive and aggressive promotion of Ortodox Christianity by Mr.Putin&Co. google for pastafarian church. Couple of days ago read about him being beaten heavily by Ukrainian SpecOps BERKUT. Guy has got couple of broken ribs and nose. At the same time, Orthodox priests standing between rioters and Berkut, weren't harmed in any way.

> This has nothing to do with anti mask law. The guy is "pastafarian" priest, a self proclaimed religion announced by some RUSSIAN geeks recently, I have heard about it only in 2013, as a response too invasive and aggressive promotion of Ortodox Christianity by Mr.Putin&Co.

Pastafarianism (the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) was created in the US in 2005. But, yes, I can see how aggressive promotion of Orthodox Christianity in Russia could cause it to spread there as a counter-current.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

The dogma is actually quite fantastic.

As it was once summarized for me, I'll give my best tl;dr for those who might not want to read the Wikipedia article, as off-topic as it might actually be.

Heaven is a stripper factory and a beer volcano. This is well known. Gravity is not real. What keeps us here on Planet Earth is the great almighty press of His Noodly Appendages. The FSM actually loves us all, but he loves us who are diminutive in stature the most, and that's why he presses them harder, to keep them closer to the ground.

The first person created by the FSM was in fact a midget.

The Wikipedia article touches on the correlation between pirates and global warming, but does not appear to mention this Scientific™ explanation of Gravity. There's also no mention of Last Thursdayism, an orthodox division of the Church of FSM, which preaches that the world was created last Thursday, as evidenced most obviously by the fact that when I ask, you can't remember what you did last Wednesday.

I am not making this up. There is a lot of information missing from the Wikipedia page.

Thank you, always good to learn something new.

This article helped me understand the conflict in ways I hadn't before.

My constructive critique: The analogy of red states and blue states to Ukrainian language and Russian language regions doesn't fit entirely.

A state is red or blue with 51% of the vote. these regions have a much larger gap between majority and minority opinion by region.

The dividing line roughly corresponds to the spread of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at its peak in the 1600s: http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/deut/EU1559.jpg

In other words, one could argue that the root of the conflict is a cultural clash between Polonized Ukrainians vs Russified Ukrainians.

Correct, during USSR era it was calm, but now started to burn again.

A little wrong to look that way though since (a) it was under USSR that the country got its current borders and shape on the map, and (b) the actual issue over which the conflict is going on is due to USSR-like foreign policy doctrine of Putin's Russia.

Yeah, as a Canadian, once you get a linguistic gap it really changes the political nature of a country. I mean, English Canada has the typical left-right tug-of-war, with the right going to the prairie provinces and the big cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver swinging left (the suburbs are the battleground)... but then you've got Quebec that's a completely separate game. They have their own political party that doesn't run candidates outside of Quebec.

When Canada was formed, there were four political parties - the English left/right and the French left/right.

A linguistic gap completely changes the political landscape, at a level that doesn't exist in purely-Anglophonic USA.

Meh, the writer's trying weakly to draw a meaningful comparison between Ukranian politics and American politics ... and as you note, it doesn't work all that well anyway.

This difference between west and east Ukraine is well-known and has been in the news in Europe a lot already in previous years.

Can the "One map to ..." thing please end?

It feels one step away fro "One weird to trick to ..."

It'll end when it stops getting more clicks than other types of titles. If anything, it'll probably become more common before that happens. You see it all over blogs like this one, but a lot of the traditional mainstream media hasn't caught on to this type of optimization. Just wait until every headline on the front page of the NY Times starts like this...

OT: Hating on this website that hijacks my browser's "Back" keyboard binding to take me to an endless succession of articles of absolutely no interest to me.

If my history included the Holodomor, I'd be shy of associating with Russia too.

Actually regions harmed by mass famine in 32 and 33 are mostly pro-Russia, and most against-Russia regions weren't part of USSR at that time.

I did not know that. Could it be that is because they were depopulated of Ukranians and enthic Russians were moved in to replace them?

Check that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine Basically South and East of Ukraine were not inhabited by Ukrainians, but colonized by Russian Empire - Odessa, Nikolayev, Crimea. And by the way, Holodomor advocates usually forget to mention that many more Russian and Kazakh people died during that famine and it was not specifically 'targeting' Ukrainians - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%931...

I guess this is the reason they use a Ukrainian word 'Holodomor' for it?

Soviet Union =! Russia.

I have always wondered if Ukraine is really two countries. For instance, in the West (west of Kyiv), Ukrainian is spoken, people there can certainly speak Russian but they don't like to and they proudly refer to themselves as Ukrainians--land of Gogol, Shevchenko, and the Cossacks. Ukrainian is the only "official" language of Ukraine, though a couple of years ago, The eastern Ukrainian city, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine's 4th largest city and it's industrial heart, declared Russian as its official language. Similarly.

By contrast, in the East, many can't speak Ukrainian at all. Most refer to themselves as Russian. The West is agriculture; the East has mining and heavy industry and the Naval Base.

It's not that simple, guys. A more detailed map updated few hours ago https://pp.vk.me/c424218/v424218475/a161/yp73T93Y_l0.jpg

One quick fact: the root of the word Ukraine is a word meaning "border".

The parts where the heaviest protests take place correlate with the pre-WW II Polish borders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curzon_Line

Being from Poland I wish our politicians tried to use this situation as an opportunity to re-annex western part of Ukraine. Maybe not entire half of it, but f.eg. Lvov used to be a beautiful Polish city before the war.

Sigh... that's a really stupid idea. And what else would you want to revert to what time exactly? Give Wrocław away? Maybe also the tri-city? And get some of the Turkey instead? Isn't the worst part of Polish history about other countries annexing parts of it when there's noone to protect it? Yet you propose to do exactly the same thing here.

... and an Austrian city long before that

... and Ukrainian (technically Ruthenian) city long before that. [1]

So, xiadzpl, don't hold your breath. [2]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lviv#History

2. http://http2.github.io/http2-spec/#GTFO

You cannot turn back the wheel of time.

Just like your country annexed part of Czechoslovakia at the beginning of WW2. Some people never learn.

Rather one word - "pipelines".

"The one X you need to understand Y", written by Z.

The one thing you actually need to understand is: How much do you trust Z?

Who are they, what do they represent, what are their interests, what are their motives, ..? Generally, follow the money.

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