EuroMaidan Revolution
James Whitman: Yanukovych’s three-year shakedown of Ukraine
Borys was a successful entrepreneur who built up a business producing grapes and berries by visiting plantations in Italy and California and replicating their production techniques on his own sun-kissed farm above the majestic Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. He worked with small farmers and credit unions across the region, selling saplings on credit to small holders and providing them with the know-how to produce high-value products for the local market. In short, he was a driver of economic development in a rural Ukraine that, since the collapse of the Soviet system, has reverted in large part to nineteenth-century subsistence patterns.