Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 12 – Vladimir
Putin is organizing a “separatist international” against European countries,
thus combining two of his more widely recognized policies: promoting separatism
in the former Soviet republics around Russia’s periphery and reaching out to
nationalist extremists in Europe.
According to the Severodonetsk
portal, Russia is now attacking Europe using the old principle of “’divide and
conquer.’” Its backing of separatist enclaves and ultra-right groups there is
already bringing Putin dividends, but such actions could backfire (sevdon.net/novosti-sayta/4405-separatistskiy-internacional-rossiya-pytaetsya-razdelit-evropu.html).
Ever more European Union countries
are confronted with separatist challenges from Spain to Finland and from Great
Britain to Romania, and one must ask, the portal says, “whom does this separatist
‘international’ benefit?” The answer, it suggests, is obvious: Moscow and
especially Putin. And it provides a map of “active separatist movements” on the
continent.
Not long ago, the site of the
self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic featured greetings from the Venetian
Republic, something that does currently exists only in the virtual world after
it launched an attempt to seize Piazza San Marco in Venice “synchronously” with
Moscow’s moves in eastern Ukraine.
The Italian police were able to
round up without difficulty several dozen participants in this action, a group
who planned to use weapons purchased from the Albanian mafia and an excavator
converted into a tank. Now the group exists
only as a “semi-legal” Internet project.
But it has proven useful to Moscow,
the portal continues. Its leader has
given interviews to the Russian media praising Putin’s actions in Ukraine and
denouncing Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US President Barack Obama
as “war criminals” for opposing Putin’s operation (svpressa.ru/politic/article/98205/)
And it like other separatist organizations in Europe, even though they
represent “non-existing republics,” regularly send messages of support to the
Moscow-backed insurgents in southeastern Ukraine and even send “observers” to
the stage-managed elections that the Russian forces have conducted.
For
the time being, Sevdon.net says, groups like these are being held “in reserve.” But Moscow is moving to promote separatist
groups beyond Ukraine but closer to home, most recently and prominently in
Latvia where the Riga newspaper “Diena” reports that activists are trying to
stimulate the secession of Latgale in the southeastern part of that country.
According
to local officials, the residents of Latgale are not all that interested, but
some who are poor may be being bribed to follow the Russian line, thinking in
the words of Gunars Upennieks, the head of a local government body in that
region, that their “big neighbor could be salvation” for them.
As
the Russian advance into Crimea and other parts of Ukraine shows, it does not
take the recruitment of very many such people to provide the kind of cover that
muddies the waters, opening the way for
covert and then overt Russian intervention while keeping Western media and Western government off balance.
That
Moscow is likely to try to use the same strategy that has worked so far in
Ukraine elsewhere should not surprise anyone: Russians historically have
followed the same script again and again in their intelligence and subversive
activities. But there may be one reason
why they may be held back in Latvia or elsewhere in Europe.
And
that is, the portal concludes, that unleashing the separatist genie in Europe
could ultimately mean that it will arise in Russia itself, a country that not
only is more multi-national than most of the European states against which
Moscow is pursuing this strategy but also is filled with peoples mistreated in
the past who are increasingly angry at Putin’s “Russian world.”
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