By Vestnik Kavkaza
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a law which forbade communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes and their symbols in the country. The Russian Foreign Ministry called the law an attempt to rewrite history according to political goals. Maria Zakharova, the deputy head of the Department of Information and Press of the Russian Foreign Ministry, told ‘Ekho Moskvy’ that “a quick rewriting of history in favor of political goals, which is aimed at formation of a new ideology, is taking place in the midst of the civil war, when huge efforts were taken to develop and present a plan of saving the state to Kiev, which requires political consolidation of the society.”
The chairman of the board of the public organization 'Federal National-Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians of Russia', a member of the Presidential Council on Ethnic Relations, Bogdan Bezpalko, also thinks that a civil war is taking place in Ukraine: “That civil conflict, which is now called the fight against terrorism, or the so-called anti-terrorist operation, I personally perceive it as a civil war. Ukraine has always been a highly complex conglomerate, which represents different people in their origins, in their cultures, mentalities, religions, even civilizational codes, areas. Regions which in many ways have rarely crossed between each other, but which nevertheless tried to squeeze together into the framework of one quite large, but unitary state.”
According to the constitution, Ukraine is a unitary state. Bezpalko says that “the presence of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea is a contradiction that for a long time could not be resolved, but which resulted in the fact that Crimea, respectively, as a part of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, it may sound a bit ridiculous, went to Russia. This incident ended with the Republic of Crimea leaving unitary Ukraine. Donbas and the regions related to the territory of south-eastern Ukraine have always been distinguished by their aspiration to approximately the same.”
The expert reminds that the threat to use force began a year ago, and the tragedy in Odessa followed on May 2, which resulted in 48 people being burnt alive. This was followed by the tragedy in Mariupol and actual military actions. As a result of the civil war, the economy of Donbas was destroyed, infrastructure was destroyed. According to various experts, losses amount to from 20 to 40 billion dollars. They include everything: destroyed businesses, destroyed infrastructure, bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, destroyed homes in which people lived. This is inability to work, the inability to get paid, the inability to obtain any social pensions and have a normal life.
As a result of the civil war, according to the German BND services, around 50 thousand people were killed: “The Kiev government is not going to hold peace negotiations with the representatives of Donbas. It is not going to carry out a constitutional reform aimed at the federalization of the country. Even though some figures from Ukrainian history like Mykhail Hrushevskyi talked about it, saying that Ukraine should be a federation of communities, and Vyacheslav Chernovol, who also advocated a federal Ukraine, and who believed that all people who live on this territory should have rights, equal rights in a democratic state. Nevertheless, Poroshenko confirmed the unitary status of the Ukrainian state, and the impossibility of federalization,” Bezpalko says.
He states that the residents of Donbas do not want to live in a unitary Ukraine, the rulers of the unitary Ukraine do not want to change the character of the state. “Now Ukraine and Donbas are experiencing tremendous tension, experiencing a degradation of the economy, and only military events allow the Kiev government to avoid large-scale socio-economic protests against the background of falling living standards of its own population. On April 1 the price of gas, hot water, heating, electricity increased substantially. A number of important companies in Ukraine closed. For example, Yuzhmash stopped its work. Yuzhmash - a company which produces space rockets, ballistic rockets for military purposes, and which was created decades before that. It will be very, very hard to restore it.
Actually, the Ukrainian economy is deindustrialized and has turned into a desert.”
