Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 1 – In response
to growing Russian pressure on Ukraine and suggestions, most recently by
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, that Moscow should annex as much as a third of Ukrainian
territory, a group of Kuban Cossacks meeting in Kyiv has called for re-uniting
the Kuban, now part of the Russian Federation, with Ukraine.
Yesterday, on the 221st
anniversary of the conquest of the Kuban by Zaporozhian Cossacks, some 50
Ukrainians assembled in Kyiv and called for the Ukrainian government devote
more attention to and ultimately secure the re-unification of the Kuban
(centered on Russia’s Krasnodar kray) with Ukraine (nr2.ru/kiev/457416.html).
Yevgeny Lupakov, president of the
Union of Officers of Ukraine, told the meeting that “we seek to declare
present-day Ukraine the legal successor of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic,” to
raise the issue of restoring the Ukrainian Kuban Republic, and ultimately to
re-unify “our two fraternal peoples into a single independent Ukrainian state.”
He said he was “convinced that with
time this will happen,” because “Ukraine is wherever there are Ukrainians,” a
line that echoes Russian nationalist arguments but that raises equally large
questions about significant portions of the Russian Federation, including not
only some North Caucasus areas but also what is usually called the Russian Far
East.
(Ukrainians call the latter “Zelenyi
klin” or the “Green Wedge” and often refer to it as a Ukrainian territory
because the tsarist authorities resettled many Ukrainians there in the decades
before World War I. Japan focused on this community in the 1920s and 1930s, and
the US broadcast to it briefly in the mid-1980s.)
Another speaker at yesterday’s
meeting, Volodmyr Man’ko, a leader of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists,
called the Kuban “a territory of geopolitical interest” to Ukraine. Kyiv, he said, needs to develop “not just
cultural but economic ties,” although he added that one couldn’t expect the
current Ukrainian government to do so.
During World War II, he continued,
Ukrainians and Kuban Cossacks cooperated with the Germans in the struggle
against communism and for a common independent Ukraine. “Unfortunately, that did
not happen,” and after 1945, both Ukraine and the Kuban “found themselves in a
single concentration camp, the Soviet Union.”
“Through the Kuban,” he said, “we
have a way out to the Caucasus and to our brothers, the Georgians. From there
to energy rich Iran and Iraq and to Turkey. Via Georgia and the Kuban, we can
built and control gas and oil pipelines and in this way resolve out economic and
geopolitical interests.” This project will be on the agenda of a future Ukrainian
nationalist government.
After the disintegration of the USSR,
Man’ko continued, “Ukrainian consciousness in the Kuban increased, but it must
be more active” and the Ukrainian state must support it.
A representative of the Kuban
Cossack community in Ukraine was somewhat less expansive. Ivan Petrenko. He
said that “the armed Kuban Cossacks defend the idea of the Russian Federation,”
but as “descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,” many of them back “establishing
spiritual, cultural, scholarly, and pubic ties with all the Ukrainians of Kuban
who are not indifferent to Ukraine and to their roots.”
In recent months, Russian nationalist
media have suggested that Ukrainians have been behind several of the protests
in the southern portions of the Russian Federation. Yesterday’s meeting will re-energize such
commentary. But it also shows that at
least some Ukrainians are interested in sending Moscow a message that when it
comes to territorial claims, more than one can play that game.
(For more details on Ukrainians in Kuban and other parts of the Russian Federation, see
add cun.org.ua/2013/kun-kuban-ye-teritoriyeyu-geopolitichnih-interesiv-ukrayini/, issuu.com/ukr,_kuban kuban.in.ua/, and www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=719336404760189&set=a.479661218727710.129417.478655878828244&type=1&theater).
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