Back in U.S. President Obama’s approval rating is set to soar after the announcement that “Osama bin Laden, the terror mastermind killed by Navy SEALs in an intense firefight, was hunted down based on information first gleaned years ago from detainees at secret CIA prison sites in Eastern Europe.”

Here, President Yanukovych is also enjoying a bump in his rating after vowing to sign a law that allows flying the red Soviet Flag along side the Ukrainian flag on government buildings as a symbol of victory over Nazism (nevermind the years of cooperation from 1939 to 1941).

Both have been criticized as distractions from economic problems.

I attended a press conference yesterday about a provocation planned for May 9th. A Soviet flag waving procession is planning to walk through L’viv, the heart of Western Ukraine where insurgent forces, without help and without hope, resisted the Soviet Union into the mid fifties.

The press conference briefly discussed the political goals of the move, and even invoked a written plan by Aleksandr Dugin to split up Ukraine and absorb it into Russia.

I personally think this is unlikely. The incompetence of governments will prevail.

Most of press conference discussed provocateurs. They took for granted that people would be bussed into L’viv whose job it will be to physically fight the protesters with the goal of portraying Western Ukraine as radical and intolerant, and speculated about how to deal with this, and talked about the marginalization of Western Ukraine.

We’ll see what happens.