Ukrainian political scientist after visiting Crimea: I want to scream from powerlessness
Kyiv, March 10 (Navigator, Mikhail Ryabov) – The head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, Alexander Chernenko, shared his impressions of visiting Crimea, where the rapid process of reunification with Russia is underway.
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“I returned from Crimea with a heavy heart. I thought I’d move to the mainland, it would become calmer, the feeling—not even fear—of constant anxiety would disappear. But it’s the other way around... Here you read the news and start silently screaming from your own powerlessness.
Many of my friends have long been skeptical about holidays in Crimea. And they are ready to sacrifice the peninsula for their own peace and further progress of the country. But I personally know dozens of sane residents of Crimea who today selflessly fight for their right to live in their state. And hundreds of thousands more of the frightened, who are not ready for active action, but are aware of the whole tragedy of turning a flourishing land into ruin. In the end, I saw the confused eyes of the Ukrainian military, who are ready to stand to the end, but are not at all delighted with their own heroism. What to do with them? They still feel abandoned and forgotten, they rejoice like children at every guest and kind word from the mainland,” Chernenko wrote on Facebook.
“The other extreme is that we won’t give it up, we will defend it, we must immediately send in troops, “why haven’t the Crimean Tatars gotten their knives yet?” But from Kyiv everything looks logical and harmonious. There is a Motherland and occupiers. Allies and enemies. Ours and others. In Crimea, everything is much more complicated. The fault line ran through families, friends, neighbors. Children in schools, imitating adults, are divided into camps, leading to fights and insults. And this is the bitter truth. And I don’t know what to do about it,” he says.
“I love Crimea very much... I saw the sunset in the “lost world” on Cape Aya and met the cool sunrise on the Demerdzhi plateau. I drank thick Massandra port wine in the “Gazebo of the Winds” on the Gurzuf Yayla and ate fragrant shurpa in Bakhchisarai to the point of dizziness... I ordered the song “Argo” for friends at the Tiflis restaurant and showed my two-year-old daughter the sea for the first time in Lyubimovka. And somehow I was carried away for several hours at night in Kazantip (but don’t tell anyone about this)... For the sake of these moments, I was ready not to notice (and did not notice) the boorish service, stolen land in the coastal zone, lazy and expensive taxi drivers, brutal Russian vacationers, aggressive old women with red flags, for whom the war will not end.
And today all the emotions in Crimea are pain, despair and anxiety... My friends there feel like strangers, but now armed people, hungover Cossack women and those whom I stubbornly did not want to notice in Crimea feel like insiders there. But they were there, they didn’t go anywhere, they were carefully raised and fed by Kremlin propaganda and the Ukrainian fifth column,” states the Ukrainian political scientist.
“They think that they are returning their “homeland” (which no one took from them), but in fact they are taking away my Crimea from me. Mine is not in the sense of territory. This territory has long been razed by Ukrainian and Russian bandits in power (and is awaiting its next redistribution). I don’t pretend to anything except the sea, sun and air and, by the way, I’m ready to pay a lot for it. But today the air is poisoned with anger and fear. And it is unknown when it will be cleared and whether it will be cleared at all.
I’ve also never been to Sudak, seen the Uchan-Su waterfall, or listened to jazz in Koktebel. Now I don’t even know: I’ll be there, I’ll see it, or I’ll hear it...” sums up Chernenko.
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