The crisis in Ukraine is still unfolding, and there is the growing possibility of a civil war, as the desire of some eastern provinces for autonomy and independence is impossible to reconcile with Kiev's determination to safeguard national integrity, and Kiev's authority in the eastern region is seriously lacking and it is incapable of controlling the situation.

A civil war will be a calamity not only for Ukraine, but also the whole world, as it would bring the United States and Russia to an extremely dangerous confrontation. Therefore, the international community should strive to tame the fast-fermenting crisis, says an opinion piece in Beijing Youth Daily.

The root cause of the crisis can be traced back to the international financial crisis in 2008. The financial crisis suggested the decline of the West-centered global economic order. Western countries developed a sense of crisis, knowing that if they could not reverse this tendency, they would also lose their leadership in the political and security fields.

The US is loath to see a Ukraine whose economic and political process is at the mercy of Russia, a scenario that also might bring Russia closer to Europe economically and exclude the US' influence in Eurasia. Therefore, Washington is trying intentionally to make trouble on the two wings of Asia and their adjacent areas to keep a fragmented economic and political landscape in Eurasia, so as to guarantee the long-term existence of the dollar hegemony and its global hegemony.

With strong external forces getting involved, Kiev is no more than a pawn in their game and it has lost the ability to decide its own destiny.

The EU, the US, Russia and Ukraine jointly issued the Geneva statement on April 17 in a bid to end violence in Ukraine. But it was too optimistic to expect that the statement would turn the situation around.

With Washington and Moscow still busy accusing each other and public demonstrations and protests in the eastern region of Ukraine becoming increasingly radical, the Geneva statement looks like becoming a dead letter.

It is clear the rifts between the US, the EU and Russia are continuing to deepen and it is Ukraine that is paying the price.

(China Daily 04/25/2014 page8)