Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 3 – “Ukraine is not
simply a country,” New Region news agency chief Aleksandr Shchetilin says, “it
is precisely Rus, where all Slavic and all human values have not been forgotten”
and thus a magnet for all Slavs who have been horrified by the direction that
Russia has taken both as a society and a country.
In a 4.,000-word interview with
Siberian journalist Dmitry Shipilov published in “Novy Kuzbass” and then
reposted on Shchetilin’s own NR2.com portal, Shchetilin says that the Kremlin
artificially created the Russian-Ukrainian conflict precisely because Moscow
has departed from Slavic and human values (newkuzbass.ru/articles/volos-revoljutsii
reposted at nr2.com.ua/interview/SHCHetinin-Ukraina-dlya-menya-ne-prosta-strana-eto-imenno-Rus-gde-ne-zabyty-vse-slavyanskie-vse-chelovecheskie-cennosti-75261.html).
Earlier
this year, Shchetilin was under enormous pressure from the Russian authorities
for his honest coverage of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. Ultimately, he was
forced to leave the news agency he founded, considered emigration to Lithuania,
and then gave up his Russian citizenship in favor of Ukrainian.
Shchetilin,
a native of Kemerovo oblast who worked as a journalist in Siberia at the end of
Soviet times and then in Moscow, devoted much of the interview to events there,
including the corruption of various officials and the tightening of
restrictions on journalistic and other freedoms in the Russian Federation.
Today,
Shchetilin says, “Ukraine is a free state which absolutely corresponds to [his]
ideas about a state which is looking to the future.” As such, it is the real “Rus,
a place where” unlike in Russia genuine Slavic and human value are promoted
rather than suppressed and where again unlike in Russia people won’t have to
wait for the changes they seek.
Shchetilin,
who has worked as a journalist in Kyiv and is married to a Ukrainian, says that
during the Maidan he learned to write about what was going on “in as honest a
way as possible.” That meant, among
other things, that his agency did not put anything on its site that others had
written but only that which he and his colleagues had prepared.
The
need to do that, he continues, arose from what is taking place in Russia
media. It is no longer possible to call
it journalism and it is not even propaganda of the normal kind. Instead, it is “simply
a lie,” reportage that doesn’t just distort reality but “consciously constructs”
imagery completely at odds with what is happening.
The
journalist says that he understands perfectly well why this has happened: “Putin
is afraid of a Maidan” in Moscow “under the walls of the Kremlin.” Moreover, he
can see that in Ukraine, there is a real civil society and real political
parties. In Russia, on the other hand, “civil
society doesn’t exist, political parties are a caricature created by the
Kremlin, and free media can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”
Regarding Putin whom Shchetilin has
described as his “personal enemy,” the journalist says that he feels that way because
“precisely thanks to him, Russia is now in such a terrible situation,” one in
which its people have been “zombified.” The Kremlin leader is “a war criminal,”
and he along with his entourage must be handed over to an international
tribunal.
Shchetilin said that many more
Russians are likely to follow his path to Ukraine and that Kyiv must be ready
for this. Some are already speaking
about a new Russian emigration, but this one will be different: few who leave
will ever think about going back because in fact “Russia already long ago died,”
even if few have been prepared to say so openly.
The journalist said he spoke some
Ukrainian but didn’t need to use it that much in Kyiv. People there and in most
of Ukraine speak Russian but that does not make them pro-Moscow, yet another aspect
of the situation Putin doesn’t understand and that the Russian and
international media misinterpret.
He said that the situation in
Ukraine now reminds him of a joke from the end of Soviet times. According to the story, people asked what
distinguished an internationalist from a nationalist. The answer: “a
nationalist knows at a minimum two languages, but an internationalist only one
and that badly.”
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