One of the best blogs on current Ukrainian affairs (despite its home page) is Current Politics in Ukraine, run out of the University of Alberta’s Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine. (You can always get to it from the link in the right-hand sidebar of this blog’s homepage.)
One of its recent articles, by Stasiuk Center director David Marples, analyzes the five major grievances of the pro-Russia separatists and assesses them for their credibility and actuality.
Profiles of the pro-Russian separatists are appearing in the western press. Here are a few of them, along with some related reports.
In a piece written for the anti-racist/anti-fascist Searchlight magazine, Bremen University researcher Nikolay Mitrokhin provides at least a partial answer to the question: who are the leaders of the pro-Russian separatist movement in Ukraine?
His analysis broadly concurs with other researchers’ (notably Anton Shekhovtsov’s and Andreas Umland’s) linking of the pro-Russians with the Eurasian Youth Movement and other far-right and (sometimes) neo-fascist groups.
See “Ukraine’s Separatists and Their Dubious Leaders.”