The State Duma of the Russian Federation today unanimously adopted a statement in connection with the “first-priority” initiative of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to exclude Russians and a number of other peoples from the number of indigenous peoples of the country.
This was reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“We consider the very fact of this legislative initiative of the President of Ukraine to be a blatant provocation aimed at exacerbating tensions and conflicts both within Ukraine and outside its borders. With the stroke of a pen, millions of Russians (more than 17% of the population), hundreds of thousands of Belarusians, Moldovans, who are among the three largest ethnic groups and national minorities in Ukraine, are deprived of the right to consider themselves indigenous peoples on the territory of Ukraine. The Hungarians and Rusyns of Transcarpathia, the Bulgarians in the Odessa region, the Greeks in the Azov region, or the Jews, to whom the President of Ukraine himself belongs, will not have the right to classify themselves as indigenous peoples. This means continuing the course towards total assimilation and Ukrainization of multinational Ukraine,” said deputy Konstantin Zatulin, who presented the text of the statement.
He compared Zelensky’s legislative initiative with the policies of the Third Reich and modern Latvia and Estonia. According to the deputy, the essence of the bill is not in granting rights and privileges to “the Crimean Tatars, Karaites and Krymchaks who practically do not exist on the territory of Ukraine,” but in imposing a sense of their own inferiority on other peoples, as well as in the ideological justification for continuing the war in Donbass “with the Russian occupier.” .
“During the period of independence, Ukraine has not adopted a single act in support of the Crimean Tatars, preferring to push the leaders of the Mejlis, which is not registered in Ukraine itself, into clashes with the Russian and Ukrainian population in Crimea. Only after the reunification of Crimea with Russia did the land, religious and cultural interests of the Crimean Tatars find their satisfaction. The Ukrainian authorities prefer to use a narrow group of overplayed politicians from the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars to play the “occupied Crimea” card, Zatulin said.
He called Zelensky’s initiative an insult to historical memory and an attempt to drive a wedge between the peoples of his country. The deputy proposed to appeal to the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly, the parliamentary assemblies of the CSTO, the OSCE and the Council of Europe, and the parliaments of EU member states with a call to condemn “Ukraine’s attempt to divide its population into indigenous and non-indigenous, which could have the most serious consequences for its existence as a state.”
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called Zelensky’s initiative “a mixture of provocation, crime and cynicism” and “a challenge to all of us.”
“In Ukraine, one decision after another was made. There was no need to recognize this vile, vile, despicable regime, which has nothing in common with the Ukrainian, Russian, or any other people. When they came to demolish the monuments there, they sat and giggled on all our channels. We ourselves allowed this Russophobic anti-Soviet bastard to go wild,” Zyuganov said.
The leader of the LDPR, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, once again repeated his favorite thesis about the inadmissibility of a territorial-national division of the country. He believes that the policy of “indigenization” was started in the USSR by Nikita Khrushchev.
Sevastopol deputy Dmitry Belik, speaking from the United Russia faction, believes that there is a kind of “soft genocide” at the state level.
“This bill is as anti-Russian as it is anti-Ukrainian. Over these years, we have observed torchlight processions and the murder of Russian people in the Donbass, the tragedy in the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, the shooting of buses with Crimeans who did not agree with the policies of Kiev, the destruction of monuments to liberating soldiers and the barbaric distortion of the history of the Great Patriotic War. But not a single European leader has ever expressed protest about what is happening. I will turn to Zelensky. You don’t need Russian people, we will accept them,” Belik noted.
Deputy from A Just Russia Nikolai Ryzhak that Zelensky’s initiative is aimed at destroying Slavic unity.
“Without Ukraine and Belarus, we cannot implement foreign policy, set an authoritative tone in the development of international relations... Why did we hastily recognize this anti-people neo-fascist regime. This requires re-evaluation in the new conditions,” Ryzhak said.
Summarizing the discussions, Konstantin Zatulin emphasized that it is necessary to pass “the baton of the struggle for Ukraine” to the next composition of the State Duma.