Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Monday that he wouldn’t stand in the way of a referendum that could give more autonomy to the eastern regions engulfed in more than a year of warfare. That’s a reversal of his government’s earlier position. But the Russian-backed separatists dismissed Poroshenko’s gesture as meaningless.
The conflict has claimed more than six thousand lives. A cease fire in the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk regions was negotiated in February. The eastern regions of Ukraine are a part of a historic area north of the Black Sea known as Novorossiya, or New Russia. Augustana College professor of government and international affairs Joe Dondelinger gives a talk at 5:30 pm today at Callaway’s in Sioux Falls on “Novorossiya: Putin’s Politics of Power, Identity, Nostalgia and Humiliation.”
Joe Dondelinger joined Dakota Midday and discussed what Novorossiya means for the future of Russia as Vladimir Putin seeks to change the post-Cold War order.