If Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchynov had the brains God gave peeled turnips, he would build a large glass wall sealing the pro-Western west of Ukraine off from the pro-Russian east and Crimea. He would station guards to shoot any easterners trying to come over the wall. He would utterly ignore them as a territory.
Then, he would hire his citizens to park their western cars in front of the glass wall, get out, and parade back and forth wearing western clothes and shoes, munching on overstuffed western subs and playing with their latest western electronic gadgets.
It might take an entire generation (and a tiny foreign contribution of luxury goods), but sooner or later the easterners would get tired of cardboard cars, wooden underwear, and empty store shelves. The wall would fall. It happened in 1989, it can happen again.
Ellen Putman
Vancouver
