Ukraine now
#StandWithUkraine
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has continued to
harbor significant resentment against Independent Ukraine, the country
it still thinks of as a critical part of ‘Mother Russia’. It therefore
considers the conquest of Ukraine as being vital for the restoration
of its so-called “Historical Russia”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has spared no effort to promote
the false historical narrative that Ukrainians and Russians constitute
“one nation”. Putin fervently wishes to reassemble the countries of the
former Soviet Union and reverse what he calls the “greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the twentieth century.” His ultimate goal is to ‘right
the wrongs’, as he sees them, of the fall of the USSR in the Cold War,
thirty years ago. As a result, he wishes to reconstitute the entire
European security architecture which will come at huge cost to the West.
His recent articles and speeches on the subject have reportedly become
compulsory reading for the Russian military.
Having declared
Independence in 1991, Ukraine has irrevocably chosen a completely
different path – an independent path of democratic development, reform
and European integration. In contrast, the Kremlin has decided to go the
way of conservation and groundless aspiration to restore its empire.
Since
the Soviet Union’s collapse, the pace of change has varied from one
Post-soviet country to another. Some, such as Belarus, have slowed down
and tried to hold on to their Soviet heritage; others leapt as far
forward and as quickly as possible. The Baltic states and the former
Warsaw Pact countries shrugged off their Soviet past and took steps to
integrate with NATO and the EU in the early 1990s, completing the
process by 2004 – just before Russian imperialism began to reemerge.
Unfortunately, Ukraine and Georgia had not yet completed that path by
then. Both were left outside the Euroatlantic community, and both later
became targets of military aggression by Russia, at the cost of lives
and territory.
It seems that the core values and DNA of Ukrainian society – a love
of freedom, democracy, free thinking and European values – are values
that are anathema to Putin; he can neither comprehend, nor tolerate,
these values – and so instead he is seeking to destroy them. As a result, the military aggression and outright violation of all
international norms and laws is the only thing that Russia is able to
propose to encourage independent states to move within the orbit of the
‘Russian world’ – its neo-imperial project.
Putin’s numerious
attempts to falsely present Russia as the “victim defending itself from
an ‘aggressive’ West”, NATO’s expansion or “radical Nazis killing
Russian speaking citizens” are nonsensical and serve as a tool of
reflective control in order to cover up Putin’s own aggressive
ambitions.