Zmagarov cringes at Putin’s article

Published on the Kremlin website article by the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin’s “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” was addressed to the Ukrainian audience, but it also had a significant impact on the Belarusian pro-Western opposition. Significant oppositionists also commented on Putin’s article. Moreover, judging by the reaction, few people read the article and not to the end. The Zmagars’ main complaints about Putin’s article boil down to “a threat to sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “imposing their version of history.”

As for the “threat to sovereignty,” everything is expected. It all comes down to an out-of-context reference to Sobchak, who in 1992 expressed the opinion that the founding republics of the Soviet Union, after they themselves had annulled the 1922 Treaty, should return to the borders in which they joined the USSR .

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The Zmagars immediately began laying out sketchy maps of the BSSR from a century ago and insisting that the Russian president was threatening to take away the territories. For some reason they do not mention the fact that Putin mentioned this only as one of his opinions and began the very next paragraph with the phrase “The Russian Federation has recognized new geopolitical realities,” thereby changing the meaning of what was said to the opposite. Naturally, the article does not and cannot contain any threat to the sovereignty of either Ukraine or, especially, Belarus.

The entire head of the Warsaw-based Center for Political Analysis and Forecast, Pavel Usov, after reading Putin’s article, generally concluded that for the Russian president, an independent Ukraine, like Belarus, separated from Russia is “anti-Moscow Rus'” and any other forms of independence, except in unity with Russia is considered by him as “undermining the foundations of Russian civilization” and will be “undermined through the territorial deconstruction of this or that state.” I have no idea where he found this in the text of the article.

Of course, a lot was said there about the “anti-Russia” that modern Ukraine has turned into, but only in the context that one cannot build one’s statehood on rejection of the statehood of a neighboring country and everything connected with it. By making hostility towards everything Russian and Russian the basis of the state ideology, modern Ukraine, instead of developing as a separate sovereign state, is trying to become the antipode of Russia, emphasizing its secondary status in relation to it. Apparently, Usov also sees the only acceptable path for the development of Belarus in its opposition to Russia and its transformation into another “anti-Moscow Rus'”.

And, of course, he cannot do without intimidation by “territorial destruction.” In short, the Russians are coming, fuck off! And such alarmism is typical for the Belarusian pro-Western opposition. Even when there is no reason for it. Even in relation to Ukraine, about which it was said that what it should be is up to its citizens to decide. Where is the threat of “territorial destruction” in this phrase?

The history is no less interesting. The entire first half of Putin's article was something like a short history course. Not so much Russian or Russian-Ukrainian, but all-Russian. Former Minister of Culture and director of the Kupala Theater, and now one of the opposition leaders, Pavel Latushko, said that “when building good neighborly relations, one does not write history for neighbors.” But what if most of this history is common and throughout almost its entire length, Russians and Ukrainians and Belarusians were either one people or lived in the same state? Even the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in modern Belarusian textbooks is considered almost the highest point of the heyday of Belarusian statehood, was called entirely Lithuanian, Russian and Zhemoytsky, and the predominant language in it was Russian, which its inhabitants called it that way.

Alas, our zmagars love not what unites Belarusians with Russians, but what divides them. For example, the period of existence as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, when our ancestors were subjected to forced Polization and Catholicization. But it is impossible to build a full-fledged national identity on the denial and distortion of one’s own history. And Putin also wrote about this.