I'm kindda baffled by some of the comments here. The same place where NSA spying is readily condemned, people seem to be oblivious to all the ways in which manipulation works. Generations of exercising democracy tend to make young people blind to all the ways in which it can be detoured, it seems.

There's no question that this video is propagandistic in nature. Both sides release propaganda materials. The only reason you don't see the other ones is that they're in Russian and therefore of little interest in the Western media. We should definitely think the video as little more than another attempt at manipulation, but a lot of skepticism of another kind is unwarranted.

> Do you want to spread this message in your countries? This summer when there is an Occupy or 99% demonstration in your country, do you want young men in helmets and mass carrying baseball bats and molotov cocktails to take charge of it? Will you carry a pistol with you at the demonstration to shoot police officers?

It's easy to describe the occupants of the Maidan in these terms:

> They sit there at the Maidan with a 24 hour diet of patriotic songs and exhortations to valor and courage. If you wanted to set up a camp to train suicide bombers, this is exactly the kind of propaganda barrage that you would use. These people are brainwashed zombies and they are trying to use YOU to infect everyone else in preparation for the REAL zombie apocalypse.

On the other hand, quickly conducting a poll among them would probably let you find quite a few who are equally disgusted by how the "Occupy" movement turned out. Ukraine isn't exactly a democratic country; people get arrested and beaten just for standing in the wrong place, and they are genuinely outraged that peaceful protest has led them to nothing but leg pain.

I wouldn't want yong men in helmets carrying baseball bats and Molotov cocktails down my street, either. That being said, if you stroll around at an Occupy demonstration, you're probably bound to find more people frustrated that they're living in their cars than car owners in Ukraine. It's a place where, if you get pepper-sprayed by the police, you don't end up giving horrible testimonies in the media while the policeman gets a modest disciplinary sanction. You get beaten and tortured, Western media gives you a pat on the back, the policeman gets a promotion. How exactly do you expect people to deal with this non-violently?

> "THE POLICE IS READY TO SHOOT". But she won't say that it's with rubber slugs or that the protesters are throwing molotovs and shooting fireworks (which can deal nasty damage). Rocks are implied, I think.

You also fail to mention the tear gas and the grenades. More than half of last night's dead are civilians. Unless they're really fucking confused and throwing rocks at each other (which, given their steady resistance, they probably aren't), the police is dealing some fairly nasty damage, too.

> But how did this president became elected? The girl in the video speaks about dictatorship. But is it one? It bugs me, that we do not hear the voices of those in support of the current government. We always get to see the Maidan and maybe some other confined protests in other cities. In the media, it looks like the whole country is uprising. But that can't be the whole truth. If the government has no support at all, it would not still be in power.

This is simply not the way it works. Yes, it's the way it works in the US, in Germany, in UK, in Iceland -- countries that have a democratic tradition of hundreds of years or even more.

Given enough interest and control, people win elections by rigging and stay in power by tight group binding. If the Prime Minister, the President, and the Ministers of Internal Affair and Defense are on good terms, how exactly do you think relinquishing power happens? People sit around in a circle and think hm, maybe we should step down?