By Vestnik Kavkaza
Yesterday events in Ukraine developed rapidly. Participants in the Maidan proposed that the parliament of Ukraine approve the leader of Batkivshchina Arseny Yatsenyuk, as the new prime minister. Earlier, Yatsenyuk rejected the proposal by Victor Yanukovich. NATO expressed its devotedness to the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine. The Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs criticized the situation in the neighboring country.
However, the hot news was a statement on the developments in Ukraine by the leader of one of the Russian regions. “Ukraine must not be given to criminals and terrorists. We should protect our people. There are many Chechens, Russians, Tatars, Cossacks there and we have to protect them wherever they live,” Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, said.
He noted that in Ukraine various nationalist groups are trying not only to capture businesses, but the property of people. This also concerns the property of Chechens who are citizens of Ukraine. “It is unacceptable. The Chechens never claim another person’s belongings, but they never give something which belongs to them. In Ukraine, people who live according to the laws of the country shouldn’t be abused. Today there is chaos; people take part in riots and murder state workers,” Kadyrov said.
“If it is necessary, we are ready to help and protect Russians, Cossacks, Chechens. Our duty is to protect our people. We are ready to be observers, peacemakers, soldiers, and protect our people,” Kadyrov stressed.
Kadyrov thinks that the guilty party is Victor Yanukovych: “He didn’t take responsibility for the nation’s fate. Those who did their job honestly, the Berkut officers were made to kneel and apologize to terrorists and extremists. I felt their pain, my eyes were full of tears.”
Tamara Guzenkova, Deputy Director of the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, thinks that the Ukrainians are able to settle the situation with their own forces. She calls the leaders of the Maidan “characters that have appeared from the abyss, on the form of the events that took place in Kiev, reminiscent of some operetta heroes or Gogol's characters.” Guzenkova explained that the politicians are engaged in political revenge, they are returning to the starting point of a decade ago. “But the country is now different. So now, however difficult and tragic the situation in Ukraine is, it opens up new opportunities for those politicians who still have not realized themselves, for those who have projects, but could not make them public, for the people from the East who maybe are not yet politicians, but they can become ones, which may require constitutional changes in the country.”
Guzenkova hinted at the necessity of leaders of the South-East joining the political struggle: “Federalization is not an empty word, it's a very serious matter which should be worked on and which has been all the time trampled underfoot, threatened with criminal charges of separatism. So, of course, the South-East, no matter how apolitical is it, no matter how concerned it is with its vegetable gardens and with its tenants for the holiday seasons, can still mobilize and think about how it can defend its interests, including representation of these interests in the central government. It is inadmissible that only Kiev and the western forces supporting it dictate their will on the Crimea, Odessa and many other cities.”
