Who were the Maidan snipers?

In the propaganda war surrounding the Ukraine conflict it is hard to find any reliable information. However, when sources as little suspect of belonging to Putin's propaganda machine as Estonian minister Urmas Paet or the German ARD television allude to the presence of snipers different than the officially accused Berkut policemen, this becomes alarming. Paet and Catherine Ashton "discussed a conspiracy theory that blamed the killing of civilian protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on the opposition rather than the ousted government" earlier this month. On April 10, the German news show Monitor reported that shots had been fired not only by policemen loyal to Yanukovich, who claimed to have fired only at armed protesters, but also from the Ukraine hotel and other locations behind the protesters. From these positions, both policemen and protesters were targeted. Despite the indications for the involvement of an unidentified and professional sniper-unit, State Prosecutor and Svoboda militant Oleg Machnizki has closed the investigation (full transcript, in German, after the break).

Why did we go to war?

One hundred years later, we are still discussing what caused the First World War, and who is to blame. What we should have learned is that while isolated incidents and the reaction to these in itself may have seemed rational and understandable, the sum of these incidents became a catastrophic leap into death and destruction. With this hindsight we could have avoided a similar chain of events one century later.

In the escalation of tensions in Ukraine, we have seen the following critical incidents:

1. Interference in domestic affairs
If Ukraine was a sovereign state, an intervention in its internal affairs could only have been justified in the case of severe violations of human rights. But what was under discussion were the country's international relations. The EU support for protests against an elected president was a casus belli - not for Russia but for Ukraine.