Russia Must Partition Ukraine to Ensure Its Own Security, Regnum Editor Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 10 – To ensure its own security, Russia must partition Ukraine, a “Frankenstein-like” entity created by Lenin and Stalin, because unless and until it is split up, Ukraine will remain a threat to Moscow even if there is a nominally pro-Russian government in Kyiv, according to Modest Kolerov.

 

            The outspoken Russian nationalist commentator and the editor of the Regnum news agency published an article yesterday entitled “Leninist-Stalinist Ukraine Must Be Divided” because, as the article is subtitled, “any other outcome else threatens Russia” (regnum.ru/news/polit/1903257.html).

 

            Kolerov says he is making this argument because “in Russia now, and especially among the Ukrainian political emigration, every more loudly are sounding calls” for Russia to “occupy all of Ukraine” and thus allow them to go home.  Moscow must not listen to them because if it did so, it would be setting up again “a bestial Frankenstein” that will threaten Russia’s interests.

 

            Unfortunately, he continues, their views are finding traction among some in the Russian foreign ministry who do not understand that any restoration of a single Ukraine would mean to hand it over to people like the unreliable Kuchma and Yanukovich and force Russia to subsidize them and that entity “’as a mark of historic friendship.’”

 

            They need to learn their history and, if they do, Kolerov argues, they will support the partition of Ukraine rather than the restoration of its territorial integrity, whether federalized or not.

 

            “The greatest part of the territory of contemporary Ukraine,” he says, “is the result of a communist experiment and was created by Lenin and Stalin.” Lenin drew the borders of Ukraine with “ethnographic” cleverness, combining the Russian-Ukrainian borderlands with “Russian-Jewish-Polish cities,” confident that that would keep Ukraine weak and under his control.

 

            Stalin and Kaganovich forcibly “’Ukrainianized’” these various populations, and then “at the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, he added to Ukraine Bukovina, southern Bessarabia, Galichina, and the Rusin’s Transcarpathia Rus,” all of which played a role in creating what is now called Ukraine.

 

            Hitler’s destruction of the Jews also played a role by eliminating that group from the population, Kolerov says, and “post-war exchanges of population with Romania and Poland and the administrative assimilation of the Rusins strengthened [Ukraine’s] Ukrainian nucleus by sharply reducing the share of Romanians and Poles.”

 

            Those moves must be reversed, and “Ukraine must be partitioned,” Kolerov says. “Galichina must be returned” to Poland, “the Rusin-Hungarian Transcarpathia” must be given independence, and “Odesa, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkhov must independently trade with Kiev about their fate” which must be deprived of Donetsk and Lugansk. (Kolerov’s Russian spellings are reproduced here.)

 

            That is the best way to ensure that Russia will be “maximally secure from aggressive cannon fodder, banditism, and ‘white terrorism,’ which have already been prepared against it by those who have forgiven the participation of Ukrainian Nazism in the Holocaust and ‘integral’ Ukraine its communist forefathers,” Kolerov concludes.