The Ukraine is in a very delicate situation now. Almost anything can happen.
If Putin doesn’t start destabilizing the situation, things won’t be so bad. I don’t know what he is up to, though he recalled the Russian ambassador to Ukraine.
The thing is there are many FSB agents (Russian secret police) in Ukraine and some of the Maidan protestors who were injured and kidnapped from hospitals (literally) and taken blindfolded to the woods outside Kyiv swear to the fact that in their opinion these were FSB men, by accent, by the similar questioning (who in the West is paying you?), and some other things. I don’t know but I do know last summer a Russian pro-democracy activist was kidnapped from Kyiv, Ukraine, by the FSB and ended up in Russia. There is also the suspicion that some Ukrainian politicians, like Viktor Medvedchuk who made Putin godfather to his kid, is FSB. Medvedchuk worked with the KGB in Soviet times and runs an unpopular movement for Ukraine to join Russia in federation, paid for by?
Putin has already began giving out Russian passports to people in Crimea, which could trigger an excuse to protect Russians. Crimea and Donetsk (where Yanukovych hails from) have the highest proportion of Ukrainian citizens who identify themselves culturally as “Russian” or “Soviet”. They also are two areas of Ukraine with the highest crime rate, according to political scientist Taras Kuzio.
The thing is with Crimea, it is not just Ukrainians and Russians, but Crimean Tatars who reside there. The Tatars were forcibly deported from their homeland in Crimea by Stalin after WW2, but many have returned, those who survived. The Tatars will not willingly submit to rule by Russia, and will stay in Ukraine at all costs.
Russia, the US, and Ukraine signed a Budapest Agreement guaranteeing the signatories to the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders. Putin hopefully will stick to this agreement.
There are areas of Ukraine with ethnic Russians, just as there are areas in Russia which were ethnically Ukrainian in the 20th century (the Kuban, not too far from Sochi) and still are (areas in Siberia to which Stalin deported them). The thing is things like Ukrainian cultural centers in Russia get shut down, but in Ukraine, the Russian language and culture survive and even thrive. A funny saying in Ukraine’s capital is that 10 Ukrainians will get together and start a conversation in Ukrainian but as soon as one conversant doesn’t understand and starts speaking Russian, they all switch to Russian.
The Ukrainian language and culture were decimated under Tsarist Russia and under the Soviet Union. There were many Tsarist Ukazes banning the publication of works in Ukrainian and each time Ukrainians would start writing in their native tongue, a new Tsarist decreed would come out making it illegal. A visitor from the West, an older cousin, could show up in the capital city of Kyiv in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and ask for something in Ukrainian and be told to speak “human”. A prominent Ukrainian-Canadian communist John Kolasky, upon visiting the communist paradise in Kyiv in the 1960s, was so repulsed by the bigotry shown towards the Ukrainian language and culture by Russian speakers that he actually became an anti-communist. Knowing Ukraine, the Russian language and culture is not under threat; ironically, it is the Ukrainian language and culture which could vanish, but this honestly would take up 3 pages to explain.
My main worry? Some provocation, it could be big, an explosion, killings, done by paid provocateurs to tarnish the entire opposition to Yanukovych. This is a real possibility. It could be done by pro-Yanukovych gangs (though these are shrinking) or by FSB fronts. Again, this is
not fact, this is just my subjective worry. Or maybe increased finances for anti-Ukrainian organizations.
I do hope however that Vladimir Putin does play a constructive role and not get off to an antagonistic imperialistic start. The fear is that since Putin is no historian and he does not believe Ukraine to be a real country but a colony of Russia. He said Ukraine was not a real country to George Bush. This is a complete misreading of Ukraine’s thousand long year history, much of it spent in separation from what is now Russia. But it was the history taught in Soviet textbooks about Russia, which Putin read. In fact, certain parts of Ukraine didn’t come into the Kremlin’s subjugation until after Word War Two. I think if Putin actually accepted that Ukraine is truly a sovereign country with its own culture and history would be a massive step in the right direction, and it could save lives, many lives.
