Overseas, Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea.  On Sunday, Ukraine's military intelligence chief vowed "total" guerrilla warfare to prevent a carve-up of the country.

Overseas, Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea.  On Sunday, Ukraine's military intelligence chief vowed "total" guerrilla warfare to prevent a carve-up of the country.

After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and signaled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.

A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said on Sunday the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, just as happened in Crimea after Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.

Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia — a vote that much of the world refused to recognize.