• In Ukraine War, Kremlin Leaves No Fingerprints - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/world/europe/in-ukraine-war-kremlin-leaves-no-fingerprints.html

    Mr. Putin may not be directing these events, but he is certainly their principal beneficiary. (…)

    They are creating facts on the ground,” said Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The goal is clear: build structural guarantees against Ukraine’s potential NATO accession. #Plausible_deniability is key.

    Le contenu est moins affirmatif que le titre.

    That leaves Mr. Borodai [prime minister of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic] as a central figure in Ukraine’s immediate future. He may seem to have come out of nowhere, but in Russia he is a known quantity. He comes from a group of ultranationalists who were part of the far-right Zavtra newspaper in the 1990s. Their Pan-Slavic ideas, aiming for the unity of Slavic peoples, were considered marginal at the time. But they have now moved into the mainstream, helping formulate the worldview of today’s Kremlin, said Oleg Kashin, a Russian investigative journalist who has written extensively about Mr. Borodai.

    He’s the Karl Rove of Russian imperialism,” said Irena Chalupa, a fellow at the Atlantic Council.

    (…)
    In an interview, Mr. Borodai said that he and Mr. Strelkov, the Russian rebel commander in Slovyansk, had both gone to Transnistria, a breakaway area in Moldova, to defend the rights of Russians in the 1990s. He named the cities in Russia that volunteers have come from, including Novosibirsk, Vladivostok and Chita.