On the other hand Russia CANNOT send whoever it wants to another country whenever it deems appropriate.

Get back to us when you finally squeeze into your head that UKRAINE IS AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY. It does have a legitimate, democratically elected president and a temporary Parliament with full support of that (again: legitimate) president.

Now: GTFO Russians from Crimea and Eastern Ukraine unless Ukraine gives you permission to get in on the Ukrainian terms, not Russian.

And the two uprisings are just the same valid-wise. Maidan square was supported by a big amount of society, mostly from western parts of the country, while on the east there was a huge movement against it. The Crimea/Donetsk/Luhansk (Crimea is a bit different, since the armed men there were just Russian soldiers in disguise…) uprisings are supported by a huge majority of population of eastern parts of Ukraine. One has to remember that cca 70%+ of those regions are russian-speaking or simply Russian people. Ukraine itself is a very young country, with a history not longer than 400 (?) years. Sure, there were cossacks there before, but the cossack and ukrainian culture are fairly different and I wouldn’t consider Ukrainians to be direct descendants of cossacks. Therefore it is unsurprising that the western (formerly Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian and Romanian territory, as well as Austro-Hungarian occupation) and eastern (Russian territory) parts are populated by people of different beliefs and attitudes.

As much as it is obvious Putin was backing Crimean and eastern UA uprisings from the start, I suppose he now doesn’t want to make things in eastern Ukraine even worse. As I wrote above, there was a perfect moment for russian army to enter Ukraine and noone would be able to stop them. It didn’t happen and I doubt it will soon. Putin is actually under a heavy internal pressure from his own society to stand up and help the separatists. You see, most Russians have good feelings towards USSR and Stalin himself, and they consider Stalin as good leader cause he made Russia a strong country. It is something about the minds of Russians, they just need to feel that Russia is powerful and feared across the world, even if it backfires at them at everyday life.

I see it as a great showcase of a working, export aimed product, in combat – awesome publicity

Like others have said, respect to you for staying as objective as possible. Greetings from USA.

Honestly, I am also too uninformed and can’t be bothered to read up all the facts now.

It is just a feeling in my gut that Putin is fuelling this fire and is using this issue to raise nationalist sentiments in his own country to strengthen his position at the cost of international relationships.

As a German (with our own strong anti US tendencies) I truly regarded Russia as a partner on the international scene to counter-balance US interests, but recently the Russian government is acting so irrationally and against so many values that I stand for, that it becomes very hard to be sympathetic towards them.

It also seems that many Russians lap up this machismo rethoric of “Russia Strong”, which worries me a lot, because this pride is grown from hate and intolerance towards other ways of living and thinking, and hate can only lead to suffering.

I witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall as a 6 year old child and for me this resurgence of “block thinking” is horrible. Can’t we all get along? Seriously?
I thought we were way past that … :(