LONDON — The brawl in the Ukrainian Parliament on Nov. 11 was an undignified ending to the country's two-month political crisis, but something important has changed. In the immediate aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004, the more extreme Ukrainian nationalists fantasized that the country could break all its links with Russia and become an entirely Western state, but realism is starting to prevail.
To the extent that ideas play a role in Ukrainian politics, they are mainly ideas about Russia. Is it a friendly neighbor, close to Ukrainians in language, culture and history, or is it a perpetual threat to Ukraine's independence? The answer people give is mainly dependent on whether they speak Ukrainian or Russian at home — and about half of Ukraine's citizens do speak Russian at home.
The more extreme nationalists would deny that, insisting that the great majority of the country's citizens speak Ukrainian, but that is a wish rather than a fact, as a walk down the streets of any big Ukrainian city except Lviv in the far west of the country will quickly reveal. Centuries of Russian political domination mean that Russian is the dominant language of urban culture almost everywhere in Ukraine, and in the heavily industrialized east of the country even the ethnic Ukrainians mostly speak Russian.
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