Word: kiev
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Every morning Alexander Vesna, 63, makes the same journey to his bank in the center of Kiev. He stands in line for five or six hours before he is allowed to take out a maximum of 300 hryvnia ($35). "It's my money," he says. "But they won't let me have...
...alone in his frustration. In the past two weeks tens of thousands of Ukrainians have descended upon banks across Kiev, anxious to get hold of their cash. With a number of banks already under the administration of the National Bank, worried citizens have drained over 20% of hryvnia deposits since November. As banks struggle to come up with enough cash to meet demand, one has even proposed a scheme of exchanging deposits for homes that have been repossessed. "I have to come here every day to stand in line in the cold, with no food or toilet," Vesna says...
...Ukraine has been hit harder than most by the financial crisis. The metal and chemical industries that drive the country's economy have slashed production, unemployment is on the rise - according to the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), over 10% of Ukrainians have lost their jobs since the start of the crisis - and the hryvnia has plummeted, shedding over a third of its value against the dollar since last summer...
...recent weeks, a variety of groups have come out in protest, from truckers to small business owners. The largest was a crowd of 10,000 demonstrating against the Kiev city council's handling of the financial crisis, which has pushed the mayor to propose novel ways of filling the city's coffers, such as charging entrance fees to cemeteries. And this is only the beginning: A recent KIIS survey revealed that 41% of Ukrainians are ready to hit the streets. "There is a crisis of trust in the authorities," says Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Center for Applied Political...
...sides are still unhappy. Putin has portrayed Ukraine as a flaky transit country, while Ukrainians say Russia is simply a bully. Over the next few weeks, Moscow and Kiev still have to agree on a price for Russian gas deliveries, subsidized since Soviet times. And even if that happens, there's no guarantee this same dispute will not flare up again in the coming months, as it regularly has over the past few years...