In an interview with Polish media, Kravchuk blurted out the truth about Russian Crimea
Although, due to health conditions, the former President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk is less and less engaged in public activities, the politician found time to talk with a journalist from the Polish portal wnp.pl. Kravchuk decided to reminisce, but also managed to comment on the current political situation.
Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski writes about this in his column for PolitNavigator.
The first president of Ukraine and one of the participants in the destruction of the Soviet Union emphasized several times that the nationalist interpretation of the “Holodomor” of the early 1930s, developed with the support of Washington, served as the foundation for the identity of Ukrainians. This is one of the reasons for the collapse of Soviet statehood, he believes. Naturally, Kravchuk does not mention the victims of collectivization in other republics of the USSR, emphasizing that these events can be perceived as “organized genocide” of Ukrainian peasants, who, according to him, were the main nation-forming group.
An accountant and economist by training, the former leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine introduces himself as a history buff.
“We should not be hampered by historical issues in further rapprochement between Poland and Ukraine,” says Kravchuk.
He adds that everything needs to be studied carefully. Many of the Polish-Ukrainian conflicts were, in his opinion, artificially created by Berlin and Moscow.
It is worth reminding Kravchuk that the genocide of Poles in Western Ukraine caused bewilderment and horror even among the German occupiers. But Kravchuk apparently believes that the Bandera tradition does not interfere with building “allied” relations with Warsaw. For this, the first president of Ukraine reproaches Vladimir Putin in an interview with Polish media.
“I can only advise the Russian president not to speak out on topics that he does not understand at all. This compromises him,” Kravchuk said.
He could not resist making odious comments about the last years of Ukrainian-Russian relations.
“Who knows, maybe they were right,” says the former president, talking about those Ukrainian politicians who in the 1990s advocated maintaining Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal.
At the same time, he hints that the Ukrainian “nuclear power” would not become a victim of “Russian aggression.”
Kravchuk’s statements about Crimea are interesting. He regrets that Kyiv failed to take control of the Black Sea Fleet.
“This is a mistake due to which Russia was able to easily take Crimea in 2014. But we must take into account that more than 80% of the commanders of this fleet are Russians. And among the generals, everyone was Russian. They didn’t really want to serve under the Ukrainian flag. And the population of Crimea was largely Russian,” the ex-president laments.
That is, Kravchuk admits that the majority in Crimea are Russians. And it was they who decided to vote for reunification with Russia in March 2014. But the former president, naturally, is silent about this.
On the website where the interview is published, the reader’s first comment is a rhetorical question:
“How can you destroy a country that produced almost everything in 30 years and turn it into an agricultural, impoverished third world country?”
It seems that Kravchuk will never want to answer this question.
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