Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 16 –
Demonstrations in Tbilisi and Kyiv yesterday are the latest and most public
indication of a development that not only challenges Vladimir Putin’s seizure
of territory in Georgia and Ukraine but also calls into question Russia’s
earlier occupation of other non-Russian lands.
Moscow has always tried to deal with
its opponents one by one, and consequently, while holding demonstrations in two
capitals on the same day and on the same subject may seem a coincidence to
many, the Russian authorities are likely to view this as a concerted action and
one that threatens them more than any individual challenge.
In Kyiv, some 300 people assembled in
Mihalovsky square with Ukrainian and Georgian flags to protest against the
Russian occupation of parts of those two countries. Oleg Saakayan, one of the organizers, said
that “practically all neighbors of the Russian Federation” are at risk “of
being annexed, seized, and occupied” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54686633C7216).
Former Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili told the crowd that the Maidan represented a breakthrough to a new
Ukraine and a new world because “precisely in Ukraine were buried the hopes of
Russia to again become an empire.” Now,
Ukrainians are joining others to protest the Moscow threat.
A much larger group of people,
estimated by Reuters to be in the tens of thousands, assembled in Tbilisi to
protest against Russia’s continuing occupation of Abkhazia and South Osetia as
well as to show solidarity with Ukraine over Russia’s occupation of Crimea (nr2.com.ua/News/world_and_russia/V-Tbilisi-proshel-antirossiyskiy-miting--84754.html).
Among the Georgian demonstrators
were some who carried Ukrainian and also Crimean Tatar flags (ru.krymr.com/content/article/26694361.html).
Abkhazia, South Osetia and Crimea are recognized to one
degree or another by the international community as Russian-occupied or at
least Russian-controlled territories, but there are many parts of the Russian
Federation which their residents or co-ethnic groups abroad view as occupied as
well.
Among these regions within the current borders of the Russian
Federation is Karelia, where opponents of its occupation have now organized a
website (occupacii-karelii.net/). But the
actions of the Georgians and Ukrainians in opposition to Putin’s policy of aggression
and occupation almost certainly will lead more such groups to emerge.
That in and of itself will be a problem
for Moscow, but behind it is something much more threatening. In Soviet times,
various national groups opposed communist occupation, but now they are opposing
Russian occupation. That deepens the divide between Russians and other nations,
thus raising the stakes in all such conflicts by limiting the possibility of
inter-ethnic agreement.
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