Crimean Secession: Hastening Ukraine’s Political Divide?

“Democracy Now!” hosts a round-table discussion Friday on the crisis in Ukraine with Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian citizen and researcher at the University College London specializing in far-right movements; Jonathan Steele, former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian and author of “Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy”; and Keith Gessen, an editor at n+1 magazine who covered the 2010 Ukraine elections for The New Yorker.

The program reports:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is rebuffing warnings from the U.S. and European Union as the crisis in Ukraine threatens one of the worst east-west standoffs since the Cold War. The pro-Russian Crimean Parliament has voted to hold a referendum on splitting off from Ukraine and joining Russia. But the vote’s legitimacy has been called into question after the installation of a pro-Russian government in Crimea just last week.

‘Democracy Now!’:— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.