Staunton, February 11 – Earlier this
week, a group of Ukrainians visiting the American city of Seattle tried to
present a petition to the Russian consulate there, but the official to whom
they handed it to demonstratively ripped it up in front of them and said that
that was the fate that should await all such petitions.
This action, which one can be sure
Moscow would have protested if an American consulate ever did the same with a
Russian protest, can only be described by the Russian word “khamtsvo,” which
denotatively means “caddishness, coarseness, and vulgarity” but which in fact
connotes contempt for all notions of civilized behavior.
And tragically, what the Russian “diplomat”
– and one has to put that in quotes for a Russian consulate near a center of
the American computer industry – did is not an exception but increasingly the
rule among Russian representatives, from Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov on
down.
Kseniya Kirillova, a Novy Region-2
journalist who lives near Seattle, describes what happened, and her report
should serve as a wake-up call to all those who think it is possible to do
business as usual with the Putin regime (nr2.com.ua/News/Ukraine_and_Europe/Diplomatiya-po-russki-konsulstvo-RF-razorvalo-peticiyu-v-zashchitu-Nadezhdy-Savchenko-90136.html).
On Monday, she writes, the Ukrainian diaspora in the
American state of Washington organized the latest in what has been a series of
protests at the Russian consulate general in Seattle calling for the liberation
of Ukrainian flier Nadezhda Savchenko who is being illegally held in Moscow and
whose detention has just be extended.
The latest protest was different from the earlier ones,
Kirillova says, because some of the participants included Ukrainian families
who were visiting the area, among whom were women who had lost husbands to
Russian aggression in Ukraine and one man who had served with Savchenko.
Aleksey Batshev, one of the participants, said that he
and the others “had prepared a letter about the liberation of Nadezhda addressed
to the Consul General, but the security personnel there for a long time did not
even want to allow us into the building in order to hand it over.”
When he was finally allowed in, Batshev says,
he “politely” handed the letter to Russian diplomats who he said “without even
reading it, demonstratively tore it into pieces in front of the eyes of the activist, adding a comment
to the effect that such a letter deserves precisely such a fate.”
Other
Ukrainians who took part in the demonstration said that the security officers
had told them not to try to hand over the letter physically but rather use
email or faxes to communicate with the diplomats. They told Kirillova that they
“intend to follow their advice and continue to write to the consulate letters
of protest against the arrest of Nadezhda Savchenko and the continuation of
Russian aggression in [their] country.”
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