Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 6 – In the face of continuing Russian aggression, Ukraine has taken two pages out of the American Cold War playbook: its parliament has called for international recognition of the right of the peoples of the Russian Federation for self-determination and its president has referred to Putin’s Russia as an updated version of the evil empire.
The first of these echoes the 1959 US Congress Captive Nations Week resolution but goes even further by denouncing Moscow of carrying out acts of genocide against the non-Russians within the current borders of the Russian Federation including through the use of selective mobilization (https://itd.rada.gov.ua/billInfo/Bills/Card/40605).
The second of these, by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, echoes the words of US President Ronald Reagan who in 1983 described the Soviet Union as an evil empire. (For a discussion of Zelensky’s remarks, see this author’s article at jamestown.org/program/zelenskyy-defines-putins-russia-as-an-evil-empire/).
The Idel-Ural portal quite properly describes these actions as “a raising of the stakes” by Ukraine (idel-ural.org/archives/ukraina-povyshaet-stavki-verhovnaya-rada-oficzialno-zavila-o-prave-poraboshhennyh-moskvoj-narodov-na-samoopredelenie/). What remains to be seen is how Moscow will react.
On the one hand, Putin’s propagandists are likely to be tempted to talk about this as a sign that Ukraine is simply copying what the Americans did during the Cold War. But on the other, they or at least their bosses may feel constrained about talking about two actions that at a minimum accelerated the disintegration of the USSR.
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