I know too many people from Russia and Ukraine, and can say that the antipathy between Western Ukrainians and everyone else is fairly high. Ukraine has been a completely non-functioning nation for the past 23 years because of corruption and terrible, terrible leaders on all sides.

After all, Ukraine has heavy industry, agriculture, tourism - it should be doing better. Yet in per capita GDP it just barely edges out Albania and is two spots below Tunisia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29_per_capita). And that's using the best showing of the four different charts at wikipedia.

Look at Ukraine's neighbors - they're all doing better, even Belarus, the country that has trade sanctions against it. Poland does much better and even Romania does better. That should say something about the sheer level of mismanagement. And now they're electing their ministers by who gets the most cheers on the Maidan, and talking about making pop singer Ruslana a minister (seriously).

As a result, regardless of what I think of Putin, Russian control has to be better than what they have. Paet even admitted that there is lawlessness and the armed far-right groups are dictating a lot to the Rada.