Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 30 – In Paris,
Vladimir Putin said that “the enlightened French public knows about the Russian
Anna, queen of France, the younger daughter of our Grand Prince Yaroslav the
Wise who was the wife of Henry I and who made a significant contribution to the
development of France being one of the founders of a minimum of two European
dynasties.”
Dmitry
Shimkiv, the deputy head of the Ukrainian Presidential Administration,
responded on Facebook by pointing out the “my dear French friends, the Russian president
has tried to confuse you: Anna of Kyiv, the queen of France, was from Kyiv and
not from Moscow.” Indeed, “at that time, Moscow didn’t even exist” (gordonua.com/news/politics/anna-koroleva-francii-iz-kieva-a-ne-iz-moskvy-v-to-vremya-moskvy-dazhe-ne-sushchestvovalo-shimkiv-190608.html).
A Ukrainian writer, Oksana Zabuzhko,
went further and explained what Putin was about. He “knows his intended
audience perfectly well,” she wrote. The French don’t connect Anna with ancient
Kyiv or Rus: they connect her with Russia, the result of long efforts by Moscow
to “appropriate” someone who doesn’t belong to it (segodnya.ua/politics/pnews/ukrainskaya-pisatelnica-obyasnila-zachem-putin-pytaetsya-prisvoit-annu-kievskuyu-1025472.html).
Now is the time, she continued, for
the Ukrainian government and its foreign ministry to call Putin on this, to
point out to the French and everyone else that Putin is prepared to lie and to “cynically”
seize a historical personage just as he seized Crimea. “I hope that our diplomats will find an
elegant way to do this, she concluded.
But a Russian commentator, Dmitry
Shagiakhmetov, may have come closest to explaining why Putin said what he did.
Putin, the Moscow writer said, “feels himself up to now to be the Communist
Party general secretary and the leader of the USSR.” For him, everything that
was part of that empire is part of his (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=592D10EFD0A4E).
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