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Ukraine War Buries Russian Dream of Pan-Slavic Unification (Polityka, Poland)

 

"The Ukraine war has buried the myth of a Slavic community of nations, a political dream concocted by Tsarist Russia in order to consolidate its influence abroad. The Russians cannot imagine Ukrainians going their own way - behaving like free people guided by their own dreams and interests rather than Russian conceptions of Ukraine."

 

By Adam Szostkiewicz

                                      http://worldmeets.us/images/Adam-Szostkiewicz_mug.jpg

 

Translated By Halszka Czarnocka

 

February 16, 2015

 

Poland - Polityka - Original Article (Polish)

A plan designed to eventually end the Ukraine-Russian war has just been signed. It is a war that has buried the myth of a Slavic community of nations, a political dream concocted by Tsarist Russia in order to consolidate its influence abroad. [Essentially, this involves peoples who inhabit central, eastern and southeast Europe]. Now it is the 21st century and Russians are killing Ukrainians, supposedly its most fraternal "brotherly nation."

 

Other Slavic peoples - Serbs, Czechs, Bulgarians (as well as non-Slavic Hungarians and Romanians) - cannot fail to avoid drawing political conclusions from what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.

 

Russia's attitude toward Ukrainians is imperialist and colonialist. For centuries, we, too, had a similar attitude, but since the establishment of the Third Republic [end of communist period in 1989] we've altered the way we think about our eastern neighbors. [Ukraine was part of the Kingdom of Poland starting in the 1600s].

 

The Russians cannot imagine Ukrainians going their own way - behaving like free people guided by their own dreams and interests rather than Russian conceptions of Ukraine.

 

When the Maidan protests reinforced the Ukrainian body politic, Russians in Ukraine and Russia itself declared a war against it. They killed, humiliated and prided themselves on their crimes, calling them patriotic. Russian propaganda drilled into Russian minds the notion that "Bandera's followers" in east Ukraine were killing local Russians, so it was no wonder that they rebelled.

 

[Editor's Note: Stepan Bandera was a Ukrainian politician who took the opportunity of Germany's 1941 invasion of the USSR to push Ukrainians to declare independence. Needless to say, the effort failed, but Bandera continues to be a rallying personality for Ukrainian nationalists. To this day, Russia regards him and his followers to be fascists, since they preferred the Nazis to the Soviets].

 

In similar style, Putin and his henchmen are trying shift the blame for the murder of Ukrainians to NATO. Putin has declared that in east Ukraine it is not only "Ukrainian fascists" doing the killing, but NATO's "foreign legion."

 

Can agreements be made with someone like that? Can one have confidence in his declarations about peace?

 

The West did not install a missile shield in Poland, did not create a local NATO command in Poland and did not direct the rearmament of the Ukrainian army. It is the escalation of Russian aggression that in the end will force these measures on NATO. Putin is playing on divisions between the U.S. and E.U. and within the E.U. itself – so far without much success. The West understands that the war Russia triggered in Ukraine is a problem not only of Ukraine but of Europe and the West.

 

There is a related discussion about whether Poland has been marginalized politically by the European powers on the Ukrainian question. It hasn't been. Leading Polish politicians have been consulted before the present and perhaps last attempt to avoid an even larger-scale confrontation. First and foremost, we refer to the current head of the European Council [and former Polish President] Donald Tusk, who is thoroughly familiar with our region of Europe.

Posted by Worldmeets.US

 

 

The formula for the talks - Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France - is open to question, but it is now a diplomatic fact beyond discussion. Other formulas haven't worked. Will this one? I rather doubt it, but politics is about the constant testing of different options.

 

 

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[Posted by Worldmeets.US February 16, 5:39pm]

 

 

 

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