UKRAINE’S SUCCESS AFTER 25 YEARS

NED - National Endowment For Democracy ^ | 14 Sept 2016 | Carl Gershman

[ptsal]

Nadia has asked me to reflect on Ukraine’s experience – and its success – after 25 years. NED was there from the beginning, nurturing the active roots of civil society in the 1980’s. Ukraine is different from Russia, where (as NED’s Nadia Diuk has pointed out) the state has been the concept around which all ideology and values have revolved, whereas in Ukraine, society or “hromada” has been at the center, and NGOs have been called “hromads’ki orhannizatsii” or civic organizations. In 1988-89 NED supported work on the Ukrainian Catholic Church through Keston College, among others; Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine that supported the Helsinki group underground publications; Kyiv Memorial, that did work on collecting documents on the Holodomor; and a separate grant for the Crimean Tatars; in addition to many other groups, especially after Ukraine became independent in 1991, including the Rukh, the Student Brotherhood, and the Lion Society, in addition to think tanks like the Europe XXI Foundation and the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, which pioneered the use of the exit poll to counter the falsification of elections, and internet sites like Ukrainska Pravda.

[comment] Clear back in Sept 2016, the situation has been discussed by the DC insiders.

[ptsal]

Ukraine has always been a place where diverse confessions and ethnic groups co-existed, which created the foundation for a functioning pluralism. The cultural and political diversity in Ukraine has prevented the consolidation of authoritarianism for any length of time, but this diversity has, in the past, also prevented the emergence of a nation with a consolidated national identity. Ukraine has been through a long, difficult and violent struggle over the past 25 years. There has been much suffering, many people have died, there have been revolutions and counter-revolutions. But through it all, the struggle and suffering have contributed to the growing unity of the country and have created a wave of civic activism not seen anywhere in this region.

I visited Ukraine in May of 2014, right after the EuroMaidan, for the “Thinking Together” conference organized by Tim Snyder and Leon Wieseltier. I saw for myself the extraordinary progress that has been made building an ecumenical spirit of religious tolerance and fraternity, which included the Jewish minority, and also building Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation. When I visited the following year to attend a meeting of the World Movement for Democracy and to speak at a civil society conference, I saw something else that reminded me of something that the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was born in Kyiv in 1898, said in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Our secret weapon, she said is ain breira – we have no alternative.

[ptsal]

A related story....

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/trap-of-countering-russia/

For its part, Moscow perceives the west as having broken its alleged promise of not enlarging NATO and pursuing a policy of encircling Russia. The Kremlin has repeated claims of humiliation caused by the west’s unilateralism in the former Yugoslavia. The Kremlin sees the US, in particular, as having sponsored various “colour revolutions” in the former Soviet space. This perception ultimately informed the Kremlin’s reaction to Euromaidan, and Russia’s ensuing occupation and annexation of Crimea, as well as its overt and covert backing of the Donbas insurgency, has discredited it as a “partner” for the west.

This new “east-west rivalry” in eastern Europe, however, does not bode well for grassroots activists and emerging social movements that are battling corrupt and authoritarian politicians in the region.

[Wuli]

Contrary to the myths spewed by Putin that Ukraine was always part of Russia:

Putin’s claims about Ukraine are a little like Hitler’s claims over parts of Europe; yes, it was the Germanic Angles and Saxons on which England grew up, and it was the Germanic Franks (from around Frankfurt) that moved into Gaul and eventually gave the the land their name - France; so on that kind of analysis Hitler could say the Germanic tribes had a right to gain the lands Germanic ancestors created.

And yes, many of the people of Ukraine and the Russian speaking people of Russia have a common historical root in the Kievan Rus (supposed Scandanavians who moved down into Ukraine and Russia). But that background does not make today’s Ukraine part of Russia.

The current borders of Ukraine will set in 1918 at the conclusion of WWI, in which old empires like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire lost.

For 150 years or so before 1918 much what is today western Ukraine was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And before that from the 1300s until then end of the 18th century (1790s) most of Ukraine, all of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and most of modern Poland were together in the Grand Duchy of Lituania - a mutli-ethnic, multi-national, multiconfessional grouping. It is that 400 years, and the 150 years in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which the multi-ethnic multi-confessional population of Ukraine gets its identity today. The Ukrainians are not Russian by nationality.

Putin is just trying to rebuild the Russian/Soviet empire.

[piasa]

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