Eastern Europe: Which way to turn? - FT.com

Eastern Europe: Which way to turn? - FT.com:

"Vladimir Pirogov, 73, who for 50 years was a trainer at the city stadium in Yalta in the well-funded heyday of Soviet sport, perches these days on a stool just off the Crimean resort’s elegant promenade, selling his paintings to tourists. In what is now Ukraine, his generation still looks east to Russia, he says. “We’re not needed in Europe, not our factories, not our economic potential. We’re mostly Russian speakers here,” says Mr Pirogov. “We want to live with Russia.”
Yalta is famed as the city where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt in 1945 carved up postwar Europe, laying the foundations for what would become the Iron Curtain. Today, with western Europe and Russia again vying for influence over Ukraine and other states at the continent’s heart, many in Yalta do not share Mr Pirogov’s nostalgia for the Soviet era."

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