A few days ago, after having been insultingly absent from the memorial Parade in Moscow commemorating the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism, Frau Merkel again started saying something about restoration of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
With this in mind, I want to address in this article a large pink trumpeting elephant in the room, that all but a few Western politicians are studiously ignoring:
Ron Paul noticed in one of his articles that whenever forces are set in motion to split off a bit of Russia, these forces are hailed as democratic (like it happened in the 90’s with NATO-armed Islamic terrorist insurgency in Chechen Republic), and conversely, whenever peoples try to join Russia, they get vilified and demonised. As it happened with 2.4 million Crimeans, who for their democratic choice were put under sanctions, disconnected from international payment systems, and Apple and Google closed accounts of those that have some on-line data or development.
Over the last century, Russia’s territorial integrity was violated both illegally and illegitimately on many occasions – in the North, West and South of Russia. In this article I touch upon only three cases pertaining the state, still known today as Ukraine.
In 1917 a violent coup d’etat happened in Russia. It carried many of the characteristics of what later became known as “colour revolutions” – a small minority group, financed largely from the West, carried out a “red” revolution. As the result of this coup Russia became fragmented, large chunks of it being split off. Some, like Finland and Latvia had only lose affinity to Russia (and yet, Finland chose a Russian navy flag from the time of Peter the Great as a template for their own national flag). Other, like Georgia, joined Russia of their own accord to protect themselves and enjoyed centuries of such protection, while remaining largely self-governed. And then there were integral parts of Russia, part of its heartland – Belorussia, Malorossia, Novorossia, Crimea.