The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine printed an article from Svetlana Alexievich, a noted belorussian author with partial Ukrainian roots. A good deal of her work was on aspects of WWII and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. I think the article does a fine job at painting the various different moods in this conflict.
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What is at stake in Crimea? is a mostly political piece on this site usually devoted to economic research. Earlier they wrote about the emergency economic measures for Ukraine, which I missed.
Their call for a debt restructuring caught my eye:
One step is to bring in the IMF as well as other donors (EU, USA, etc.) to bridge the short-term gap in foreign currency reserves.
These funds are essential to avoid a drastic immediate fiscal contraction in the immediate future. They are necessary to enable authorities to inject capital into Ukrainian banks. The amount of required support is likely to be in tens of billions of dollars. Moreover, a restructuring of some of Ukrainian debt is necessary to avoid outright default.
1) Most of Ukraine’s external debt was accumulated under the previous corrupt regime.
2) The new leaders have little moral obligation to commit to reimburse that debt, and creditors have little moral standing to demand repayment: they knew who they lent to.
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