The allegedly “game-changing” recent session of the Russian Security Council would not have been memorable at all, had secretary Nikolai Patrushev not mentioned that in Russia “the threat of separatism existed in Northern Caucasus, which could have led to loss of territorial integrity, but we dealt with them in our time.”
Yes, we still remember how they “deal with them in their time.” Especially in Samashki and Noviye Aldy.
It is very convenient to compare the photos of Grozniy after the “re-establishment of the constitutional order” (which earned comrade Patrushev, who was director of the FSB at the time, the title of “Hero”) and Sloviansk after the “punishing operation of the Ukrainian fascists” to understand how the Russian government deals with its separatists that infringe on our territorial integrity.
Th Russian government is much more human in its regard to the Ukrainian separatists – they call them not mercenaries or terrorists, but “rebels,” the “militia” and “desperate people of the southeast” whose voices “have to be heard.” Meanwhile practically only these voices can be heard lately on Russian TV – Strelkov, Boroday, Gubarev, Pushilin, Ponomarev, Bolotov, Purgin, Tsariov, Babay, Motorola are everywhere, as well as other combinations of nationalists, PR people, “reconstructors,” merited “Cossacks” and “Afghan” and “Chechen” veterans with obvious head injuries imported from Russia, that touchingly united with the Donetsk and Luhansk freaks.
It is with those well-armed people that the Kremlin proposes that the government of Ukraine “has talks” as “representatives of the southeast.” However, were they elected “chairs of High councils,” “members of the councils,” “Prime Ministers?” Did anyone vote for them at elections (and have there been any elections)? So how is it that they have the right to “represent the southeast?”
We note: neither Putin nor Lavrov ever demanded that the separatists hand in their weapons and suspend military action – instead they demanded that the government of Ukraine stop defending the territorial integrity of its army.
Now the Russian President reluctantly admits something the entire world had no doubt about: well, we have influence on the separatists, however “insufficient.” It is quite sufficient – we have to stop supplying weapons and mercenaries, and both the “people’s republics” that exist as the mythical “Novorossiya” only in the virtual Russian propaganda world will vanish without a trace. However then the question will arise: “what did we fight for?”
On one hand, in the recent months, it has predictably not become known what the (using Kremlin terminology) “rebels” governed from the Kremlin are trying to achieve.
Accession to Russia? “The Crimean option” will not do: in this case a horrifying level of international isolation and murderous sanctions await Russia.
Independence from Ukraine? They will not last a month of “independence”: both Donetsk and Luhansk are deeply subsidized regions.
Decisive influence on Ukrainian politics? This will not happen – after the fiasco of the attempts to spread the “Donetsk-Luhansk syndrome” to other regions of Ukraine.
By the way, today more and more people in Donetsk and Luhansk cannot help but ask themselves a natural question: when did they live better – in January or July? When was life better in Sloviansk – during the rule of the half-witted “people’s mayor” Ponomariov or after the “occupation by the killers” that vehemently delivered four tons of sausages to the city?
And on the other hand, it is time to pose a similar question in Russia: what was all of this done for? For the growth of Putin’s rating? Which cost us new multibillion expenditures from the budget, worsening of international reputation and loss of hope for serious western investments?
Someone will have to answer for all of this – and it is not by accident that at the aforementioned Security Council session Putin once more burst into a tirade of how he will not allow “colored revolutions,” which, of course, are nothing but “government coups, provoked and financed from the outside.”
This is not just a typical instance of paranoia, in which all bad things can only be planned by his enemies. It is also fear in the face of his own people – an attempt to assure himself and others that the anti criminal revolution, which is inevitable in Russia (just like in Ukraine) can only be “provoked” and “financed from the outside.”
The revolution will come not from the outside, but from the inside. When Putin’s regime, just like the Soviet one back in the day, finally gets tangled up in lies and hypocrisy. And then the majority of citizens will see that this infamous “third way” is a path to the third world.
Those who are flattered by the current government ratings and think that this is forever, should be reminded what ratings Ceausescu and Kadhafi once had.
[hr] Boris Vishnevskiy, member of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg (party faction “Yabloko”)
Echo Moskvi
