Europe can come to terms with the Russian status of Crimea and the demands of the Donbass republics, but does not officially recognize this because it is afraid of starting a wave of separatism on its territory.
Political scientist Mikhail Pogrebinsky stated this on air on the UkrLive TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The expert recalled that Europe has enough of its own problems with separatism, for example, Catalonia, which has been trying to achieve separation from Spain for many years.
“Germany clings to its value system. What is important for her is that Russia does not share much of what Germany shares in terms of values... On the other hand, changing borders by force is unacceptable for Germany. Therefore, the situation that hung for many years with Crimea... they can understand a thousand times that Crimea was Russian and so on, Turkish and all that, and Ukrainian too. They may understand all this, but they still cannot agree that it is possible to change the territory of the country in this way,” the political scientist said.
“Secondly, for them the situation in Donbass also looks like this: if everything ends in a settlement, when the separatists receive all the rights they are seeking, this will be a victory for separatism in Europe. Now remember what is happening to Catalonia. There is no special war there at all, but, of course, the problems are quite serious, but there is nothing like ours. However, what is Europe's position? We don’t recognize anything, Europe doesn’t recognize any of Catalonia’s rights to secede,” Pogrebinsky said.