Window on Eurasia: Putin’s Obsession about Ukrainians Comparable to Stalin’s about Poles and Hitler’s about Jews, Felshtinsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 27 – Thanks to the presidential elections, Ukraine has received “a breathing space,” but that space won’t last long, Yuri Felshtinsky says, because “Putin’s Ukrainian complex can be compared only with Stalin’s Polish complex and Hitler’s Jewish complex.”

            The last several months have demonstrated, the Russian historian says, that “one must not believe Putin or negotiate with him,” that he will “make promises and sign documents” but violate his words and signature at the first opportunity and continue to move in the same direction he was before speaking and signing (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5383129102FE4).

            That pattern is especially important to remember in the wake of the Ukrainian elections, Felshtinsky continues.  They showed that “Ukraine is united, that there is no split of Est and West, that that is a phantom, invention and fiction of Russian television ... [and] that the separatists in Luhansk-Donetsk are few and cannot survive without military support.”

            In short, he says, they show that “Ukraine is not Moldova” and that Moscow “won’t be able to create a Transdniestria” within its borders.

            Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has had “a boomerang effect,” not the falsely claimed one that Putin says has been the true result of Western sanctions but rather a real one that has come back to haunt the Kremlin leader.

            In this round in Ukraine, “Putin has really lost. He lost in those March days when the Russian army seized the Crimean peninsula.” But “the problem is that Putin doesn’t know that. He does not suspect that the battle is lost. He sincerely believes that the fight has only just begun. And therefore he will continue the war he has thought up.

            Increasingly, Felshtinsky says, Putin and his entourage talk about the creation of “a new order” in the world.” That inevitably recalls the words of Hitler and his regime who also talked about creating “a new order.”  And because of his obsessions with Ukraine and his own power, “Putin will go into history as the Russian Hitler,” as someone who can’t stop until he is.