It’s often said that what Putin is looking for in eastern Ukraine is a “frozen conflict” such as that on the borders of Moldova (Transnistria) and Georgia (Ossetia and Abkhazia), a permanently unresolved status for “Novorossiya” that will both enable it to act as Moscow’s proxy and contribute to the longer-term destabilization of Ukraine. If there’s one thing that Moscow fears it is the development of a democratic and prosperous Ukraine. Ukraine is in many, many senses (and despite all the obvious difficulties) the nation that Russians regard as being closest to their own country. To see Ukraine — a nation with millions of Russian-speakers, incidentally — succeeding in carving out a future very different from what the Kremlin has in mind either for Ukrainians or its own people would, just by the force of example, represent a profound challenge to the current regime in Moscow.

And that is the real nature of the threat that Ukraine’s reorientation towards the west: It is a threat not to Russia, but to the people who run it.

This story from RFE of the fate of an artist in Donetsk is bad enough in its own right, but its description of a city falling into a permanent twilight is also deeply disturbing.

Donetsk artist Serhiy Zakharov once preferred the bright rays of the July sun to the faint gaze of the midnight moon — at least when it came time to set up his street installations mocking pro-Russian separatists.
“It wasn’t realistic to do it at night, because there weren’t people, just armed separatists driving around,” Zakharov told RFE/RL’s Russian Service from Kyiv, where he’s moved after a month and a half as a captive of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. “I would quickly scope out a location, set up my work, have the photographer take a picture, then we’d call it a day and get out of there.”
Without the time to stencil his images into Donetsk’s many facades, he would construct painted plywood cutouts in advance. But when the artworks — which included former insurgent commander Igor Strelkov holding a gun to his head above the Nike catchphrase, “Just Do It” — went viral, the artist’s situation became more precarious. Tracked down and apprehended outside his studio in early August, Zakharov says that during two stints in captivity separatists fractured his left and right ribs and threatened him with execution three times….
When Zakharov began his guerrilla street art campaign three months ago, the separatist movement felt to him like an unpleasant, but transient, phenomenon. He says that although many supported the separatists, others felt at ease laughing at and photographing his work.
But no one dares criticize the de-facto authorities now.
“By the time I left, the situation had changed,” he says. “It seems that Donetsk has been abandoned, tossed away. People have returned and at the household level things have gotten better. There are some [artillery] volleys here and some shooting there — but for residents this is already something they’ve become accustomed to.”