Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 14 – One of the most important sources of Vladimir Putin’s obsession about and aggression against Ukraine is his recognition that “the key to the disintegration of the empire is in the hands of the Ukrainian people” and that that nation is playing the role again that it played earlier, Pyotr Kralyuk says.
The professor at Ukraine’s Ostrog Academy says Ukraine played a key role in the escape of some nations from Russian rule after 1917 and in forcing the Bolsheviks to offer a kind of federalism to some non-Russians, in the promotion of nationalism in many peoples under Soviet power, and in the demise of the USSR (ru.krymr.com/a/forum-svobodnykh-narodov-rossii/31986559.html).
Now, it is again promoting national and regional movements in the Russian Federation both by example and more directly, and that is why, Kralyuk continues, Putin is trying so hard to destroy Ukraine lest its influence inside the Russian Federation grow to the point that that country will fall apart.
To be sure, he says, “the process of the disintegration of Russia will not begin tomorrow. The Moscow leadership still has reserves with which to destroy Ukraine and its allies, and the lever of the national consciousness of the peoples Russia has enslaved must not be overrated. They have been subject too long and too much to denationalization and Russification.”
But at the same time, it would be a mistake to “underrate the importance” of steps they have taken such as the creation of the Forum of Peoples of Russia. At a minimum, the events of the 1990s showed that ‘the national potential’ of the nations oppressed by Russia still exists and that a time will come when it will show itself.”
“It is the fate of Ukraine to become the promoter of the liberation of the peoples oppressed by Russia” and to bring the time of their liberation closer, Kralyuk concludes.
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