From the dingy basement of a decaying apartment block on the outskirts of Simferopol, Crimean parliament deputy Sergei Shuvainikov is leading the fight to defend the ethnic Russians of this strategic Black Sea peninsula. In an office festooned with banners showing a map of Crimea overlaid with a World War II medal featuring the communist hammer and sickle and the slogan "In union with Russia," the voluble Shuvainikov spills out a litany of alleged assaults on the Russian language and Russian culture in Ukraine.

Ukraine's new interim President Oleksandr Turchynov has said the country will focus on closer integration with the EU. Mr Turchynov was appointed following the dismissal of President Viktor Yanukovych by MPs on Saturday. Mr Yanukovych's rejection of an EU-Ukraine trade pact triggered the protests that toppled him. The interim president also said he was "ready for dialogue" with Russia, which has backed Mr Yanukovych.

Journalist Simon Shuster said it was “straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.” Writer Philip Gourevitch thought it was more like Bruegel. But the main word to describe the violent clashes in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv was “apocalyptic.”

Romania has announced its doors are wide open to the Chinese after Canada tightened its immigration policy. Chinese looking to migrate to the southeast European country would be warmly welcomed, former Romanian prime minister Petre Roman said on a trip to Beijing.

Civil strife often follows a grimly predictable pattern. What at first seems a soluble dispute hardens into conflict, as goals become more radical, bitterness accumulates and the chance to broker a compromise is lost. Such has been the awful trajectory of Ukraine, where protests that began peacefully in November have combusted in grotesque violence.

Three months after the first anti-government protests in Ukraine, the country has experienced its deadliest day of political violence, with nine people dying in clashes between demonstrators and police. The beating heart of the pro-Europe, anti-Russia 'Euromaidan' movement is in Kiev's Independence Square (in Ukrainian, Maidan Nezalezhnosti), and the square is currently in flames after a day of police firing rubber bullets at protesters wielding molotov cocktails and fireworks.

Wales doesn’t get more Welsh than this northern market town. Business and conversations between friends here are conducted not in English but in Welsh, the language spoken by some 80 percent of the local population. For the past 40 years, the town has been a stronghold of Plaid Cymru, the nationalist party whose stated goal is eventual independence.

French president François Hollande's recent two-day state visit to Washington was intended as a "shot in the arm" for the beleaguered French leader as well as an acknowledgment of strengthening ties, says CFR's Europe expert Charles A. Kupchan. Kupchan says that France has emerged as the United States' strongest European security partner, supporting U.S. policy toward Syria and Iran and taking firm military action on its own against militants in Mali.