Posted on 02/10/2016 11:49:46 AM PST by elhombrelibre
Putin’s war cost Russia its centuries-long shared identity with its neighbour. Now, Kyiv risks betraying the spirit of the Maidan revolution.
When the Russian inquest finally comes, the answer will be clear. It was President Vladimir Putin who lost Ukraine – after a millennium of shared east Slav identity. When the Ukrainian inquest into who lost the ÂEuromaidan’s “Revolution of Dignity†finally comes, the answer, on the present evidence, will also be clear. It was an elite core of politicians and oligarchs who first worked a miracle in fighting Russia’s military Goliath to a stalemate – only to revert to kleptocratic business as usual when the acute threat eased.
Ukrainians’ consolidation of a distinct national identity after centuries of being regarded as a fuzzy subset of the dominant Russians – and after a quarter-century of independence – began in February 2014. It sounds banal to say that when one nation attacks a neighbour, especially if the two have regarded each other as brothers for a thousand years, the victims feel aggrieved and pull together against the attacker. But this is what happened when Putin launched his undeclared war on Ukraine, sent hooded “little green men†to take over Crimea’s regional parliament by intimidation, and then annexed the peninsula. The mutation of this early tactical success into strategic failure is best traced by reviewing the players and the dynamics as Ukraine held off Russia and crystallised its singular new identity.
On the Russian side only one actor matters: Putin. When the old Soviet Union split apart in 1991, its kleptocracy was replicated in its two biggest east Slav successor states. By 2015 Russia ranked a joint 119th out of 167 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Ukraine was 130th.
(Excerpt) Read more at newstatesman.com ...
"Most agonising of all, in his first term as Russia’s president in the 21st century, Putin had to listen to American triumphalism about the series of pro-democracy “colour revolutions†in the streets of ex-communist Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. For him, as a career secret policeman, these revolutions represented no broad social yearning for “dignityâ€, as the Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa first phrased it. Rather, it was an inexplicable victory by American CIA manipulations – in what was Moscow’s own sphere of influence, by right – over the manipulations of Russia’s FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB."
Lizzy Pond must not have done well in history. The Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators. One of Hitler's big mistakes was to not leverage that to its fullest. Ukrainians made up 14th Waffen SS Division (Grenadiers). They performed well late in the war.
And Stalin killed how many Ukrainians in 1932 - 33? Maybe the Ukrainians had good reason to initially (”initially” is the key word) welcome the overthrow of the Soviets. Between these to titans of terror - Hitler and Stalin, who could have known what to think?
I was not aware that Ukrainians felt a deep kinship with their Russian overlords. That’s certainly not the case with Americans of Ukrainian background. And based on the level of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis during WWII the memory of Stalin’s murdered millions, by starvation and firing squads, still burned brightly in 1941-44.
The Russians kept their warm water port in Crimea, what else would they want from the Ukraine? That and the Ukraine will go running to Russia for protection from the moslems when Europe (and possibly the US) collapses on itself and Nato dies.
The Ukrainians don’t feel an affinity, but the Russians think they’re the big brother to the Ukrainian mother country. It’s weird, as if the US still thought of the England so much as our mother country that we could invade them and boss them around.
And add in the fact that Stalin’s relocation of the borders took in a big chunk of Catholic Poland for the Ukraine. Largely these were ethnic Ukrainians who theologically were forcibly shifted from Rome to Moscow.
Thanks elhombrelibre. As a drunken pedophile, Pooty-poot has to fight reality all the time.
Khrushchev not Jughashvilli was the butcher of the Ukraine - starved 3 million or was it 6?
You are mistaken. It was in 1932 and 1933 when millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin. Khrushchev came to power 20 years later.
Khrushchev was Jughashvilli’s commissar in the Ukraine at the time - 20 years later after he poisoned or had poisoned the man of steel he came to rule.
Khrushchev was in Moscow at that time. He was sent to Ukraine in 1937.
Says ‘38 in wiki FWIW - been 50 years since I read Russian history - bit rusty.
Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a very good history book about the crimes of these two tyrants in that part of the world.
Kruschevev executed Stalin’s orders with zeal.
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