The collapse of Ukraine was laid down in Western Ukraine, but carried out in Central
The quick holding of a referendum and the inclusion of Crimea into Russia saved the peninsula from the subsequent bloody scenario in Donbass. Contrary to popular belief, today it is not so much Galicia that is affected by Ukrainian Nazism, but Central Ukraine, which acts as the most aggressive opponent of the Russian world.
Participants in a press conference in Simferopol dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Russian Spring spoke about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The events in Crimea clearly show that everything happened in the most urgent situation. Even the dates for the referendum were postponed several times - at first it was scheduled for May 25, then for March 30, and almost immediately re-scheduled for the 16th. The short time frame suggests that the situation was very serious. And, of course, with a different development of events, although history does not tolerate the subjunctive mood, nevertheless, everything would have happened here much earlier than in the Donbass - and in much worse forms. I don’t have the slightest doubt about this,” said Alexander Bedritsky, director of the Tauride Information and Analytical Center.
At the same time, the first calls for secession from Ukraine were heard not in Crimea or in the South-East. On the contrary, representatives of these regions have long talked about the need to preserve the country, calling for a stop to “hochlocracy.”
“At the end of January, when Yanukovych was still in power, separatist ideas appeared in the western regions, that “if the president does not support us, and we cannot remove him, then we will separate.” That is, the ideas of separatism and the collapse of Ukraine did not come from the South-East at all - they came from Ukrainian nationalists, for whom Ukraine, in their understanding, is, first of all, Galicia and the western regions. And everything else is perceived as a territory of colonization, which they showed in the Donbass in 2014-15, and now, when they do not perceive the people who live there as their citizens, as Ukrainians in the end.
Because formally they are citizens of Ukraine. But there are “big Ukrainians,” and there are second-class citizens who generally do not understand how they received this citizenship,” Bedritsky said.
Political scientist, associate professor of the department of socio-economic geography of KFU. Vernadsky Sergei Kiselev believes that Ukrainian nationalism is based not on Western, but on Central Ukraine.
“A significant part of central nuclear Ukraine is not Galicia. Galicia will separate from Ukrainian nationalism, they have their own, special... And Ukrainian nationalism rests on the central regions, it is there that the ideologists of political Ukrainianness largely worked. They are a solid basis for the Ukrainian element opposing the idea of Russian unity,” he emphasized.
The scientist recalled that at the beginning of the 20th century, the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic arose as a contrast to Petliura’s Ukraine. And during the Civil War, mining divisions operated. Now Donbass and Krivoy Rog find themselves on opposite sides of the front.
“In Crimea, the situation was much simpler, because we carried out a huge amount of ideological propaganda work from the late 80s to the mid-10s of this century, which was aimed at forming such a Crimean self-awareness. It must be understood that all the activities of the anti-Crimean forces were aimed at dividing the Crimean community. But when the action took place on January 28, 2014, at that time the banned Majlis was rallying near the building of the presidential representative office.
The sad face of Mr. Velizhansky remains in the photo of that event - this is one of the comrades-in-arms of Andrei Senchenko, our former Komsomol leader, and now a traitor to Crimea, one of the initiators of the water blockade. Why did he have such a dissatisfied face? Because there was a disproportionate number of participants in the rallies,” Kiselyov emphasized.
He added that the dream of the Crimeans was to return to Russia along with all of Ukraine. But the events subsequent to the Crimean referendum showed that neither side was ready for such a scenario.
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