Putin's plan, and no doubt the regions 'elites', is to fold Ukraine into a Eurasian Union -some say a milder new soviet union -but western Ukranians want to join the EU and be aligned with Europe. The dictator ,Russian puppet Yanukovych, overturned the deal and the protests began.  

  After overturning the Tymosheno government in 2011 on trumped up charges - the Viktor Yanukovych government took over and you can see how he lived in the article below.  Apparently Tymosheno fell out of favor with Moscow when she tried to alter a deal concerning natural gas lines.  All about the money!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-22/ukraine-leader-s-flight-blocked-as-opponents-take-power.html

...Thousands of people visited it yesterday, (the compound) with hundreds of cars thronging the entrance and people riding bikes and carrying children around the compound. Previously closed to visitors, it boasted a man-made lake as large as several football fields with a life-sized galleon and a zoo with deer, ostriches, peacocks and other animals. Next to a towering mansion, a garage housed antique cars, motorcycles and at least seven limousines, according to images on website Censor.net.

Boats, Hovercraft

Activists prevented people from entering the mansion. They recovered reams of documents that had been thrown into the pond and dried them in a building full of boats and a small hovercraft, according to images shown on Hromadske TV. The opening of the grounds dominated news broadcasts in Ukraine, where the average nominal wage is 3,619 hryvnia ($404) a month, according to December data from the national Statistics Office...