Публікація на EUobserver

Even as Russia’s covert war against Ukraine claims new victims each day, European and US leaders keep pushing back red lines on economic sanctions.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Bolshevik Russia in 1917 to 1920 also fought a covert war against an independent Ukraine.

It used the same tactics as today: denying legitimacy to the central government in Kiev; military incursion in support of marginal local elements; the formation of a puppet government in eastern Ukraine; instigating a civil war to cover up its engagement.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is undergoing a re-Sovietisation: parades with red flags, portraits of Stalin.

The terms ‘Russia’ plus ‘fascism’ have been added together to create a new word in Ukraine to describe this phenomenon: ‘Ruscism’.

It was only a matter of time until the KGB/FSB-ruled country attacked Ukraine’s sovereignty. Russia’s chauvinistic elite never came to terms with the idea of Ukraine going its own way.

The Ukrainian nation has survived more than 300 years of Russian occupation, genocide, linguicide, cultural assimilation, Stalinist purges, Stalinist forced migration.

We should have known that history will not end with Putin.

Публікація на EUobserver

The annexation of Crimea was a fait accompli in late February when Russian forces seized control of the peninsula, before anybody in Crimea cast a vote in the “referendum,” before Russian leader Vladimir Putin signed anything in Moscow.

Putin’s big speech: Russian nationalism has its limits (Photo: kremlin.ru)
By sending troops on 15 March to seize a gas distribution plant on the Ukrainian mainland, he showed he is prepared to escalate.

By letting his men shoot dead a Ukrainian officer in Simferopol on 18 March, he showed he is ready for the escalation to involve bloodshed.

When EU countries and the US imposed sanctions on some of his inner circle, it changed nothing.