Ukraine lives in a lie, and that lie is about European integration, and even bigger lie is about an Euro-Atlantic integration of the country…

TV station “Pryamyi” belongs to the current president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, and naturally it runs a black PR against other candidates in the presidential race. Accusations of a lack of patriotism against Tymoshenko has been a steady feature on these channels. Recently one of its shows featured former member of parliament and general-lieutenant of SBU, Hrihoriy Omel’chenko, who said he heard Tymoshenko utter the unimaginable in 2009. She dared to put in question the Euro-Atlantic direction of the Ukrainian state on a Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe conference. I translate:

“Yulia Volodymirovna, without regard to the fact that it is written in the law on national security that the aim of Ukraine is to join NATO and the EU, said after a speech delivered by the Deputy Vice-Premier of the Russian Federation, Ivanov: “Ukraine will not enter the EU or NATO because it goes against the national interests of the Russian Federation, and we will work on a collective plan of European security…”

I am not going to debate here whether this hearsay is true. Tymoshenko certainly sings a rather different tune now. What I would like to discuss are Ukraine’s chances to join the two organisations. I will start with the EU, which I believe there is greater chance Ukraine will join in the future.

At present however, Ukraine is not even a candidate for membership in the EU. I don’t dispute Ukraine will become one in near future, there is good chance she will, but why didn’t she become one in the last 5 years? Why is it so hard to simply join the queue with Serbia and Turkey? On the website of the European Parliament, only the countries of Western Balkans are seen as candidates, or potential candidates for EU expansion.

The EU at present is gripped by an internal crisis. And there is a strong chance, the EU may cease to exist in its present form within the next decade. I certainly hope it will, and will do my bit to make this happen. By the time Ukraine is ready economically and socially to join the union there may be no union left to join. But perhaps there will be a Visegrad Union. There are many who dream of Intermarium out there.

With NATO things look rather bleak, an ongoing conflict in the East of the country makes Ukraine rather unattractive for NATO membership. Wishful thinkers, such as the academic Taras Kuzio liken Ukraine to West Germany, which was part of NATO. However, West Germany was a rather special case. There has not been an open armed conflict between West Germany and East Germany. East Germany, having risen out of the Soviet occupation zone, had more or less clearly defined borders, which the DNR and LNR do not. And finally, West Germany did not complain about Soviet aggression.

The other day, my Moscow resident friend sent me this “Sponsored” content that appeared on his Facebook page…

Honestly, somebody spent money to promote this piece of crap in Moscow? I wonder, is the man OK in the head? It looks like it isn’t the only post he promoted to Russians…

This John Michael Reed appears to be suffering from a serious case of Russiagateism, and Trump derangement syndrome, and should get professional help.

Dear readers, never mind the title. This is a post for a friend in Kiev that I Skype with, and this was a subject of our last talk. I hope the rest of you will enjoy it as well, although this will be familiar to some readers from Russia-Ukraine debates on Anatoly Karlin’s blog.

I was telling him about maps based on the 2001 census (Ukraine did not conduct a census for 18 years now), which eerily seem to copy Russia’s 2014 territorial acquisitions, official (Crimea), and unofficial (Donbass Republics). The map shows Russia only took the areas where the “Russian cultural element” was predominant, places where people identified themselves as ethnic Russians, and their native language as Russian. I provide translation underneath the pictures. You can also see that in the Donbass, the Russian element appears weaker than in Crimea. Maybe it is this what Zatulin means when he says that the people of Donbass are not Russian enough? But it would have been better if he kept his autistic opinions to himself.

Anyway, Here is what I meant when I said Russia’s territorial interests in Ukraine appear “ethnically motivated.”

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Attention, fellow citizens of the Union!

I have never voted in the European Parliament elections but seeing that certain characters that I do not like are very worried about its outcome, I decided to cast a ballot this May. What prompted my decision was an insidious article in The Wired magazine, which claims the EU elections may be hacked. The homosexual pornstar hero of this blog, Jakub Janda is quoted saying:

“If you have lower turnout, it’s much easier to focus on specific electoral groups favouring the far-right and mobilise them to a greater effect,” says Jakub Janda, the Prague-based executive director of the European Values think tank, which maintains a Russian-interference monitoring arm.

He basically gave a blueprint here, we should not ignore the election and vote the “far-right”, or whatever Eurosceptic there is on the ballot. They are all “far-right” to the globalists. The EU supports literal fascists in Ukraine, so they might be cool with few in the European Parliament. There might be several individuals vying for office with varying chances of success. But I have figured out a way to make the right choice.

Vote for the one party which worries your local globalist elite the most.  The Czech Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tomáš Petříček worries about SPD for instance. He says the party is a danger to Europe’s liberal democracy. I don’t know what’s more undemocratic than the EU but I guess people who are a danger to liberal democracy would fit right in.

SPD is anti-immigration and supports direct democracy, Swiss style. I would never vote for them in Czech parliamentary elections because I do not trust their leader, who is a hapa businessman, Tomio Okamura. But if Petříček says I shouldn’t vote for them, well I will vote for them. Unless of course, a better candidate comes along.

Even in Western Ukraine…

What you see to your right is a page from the Ruska Chitanka, in translation “Russian Reader” edited by Vasily Kovalsky. It has been circulating around Ukrainian nationalist Twitter pages, and the name caught my eye. It was published in Vienna in 1852. Kovalsky was a professor at Lvov university, and the book was likely intended to teach literacy to school children.

What it show is that in 1850s, the people in Western Ukraine did not think of themselves as Ukrainians. In fact, many did not think of themselves as Ukrainians all the way into the first half of the twentieth century. A town in Western Ukraine is still named Rava Ruska, which reminds us of those days.

So what happened? Nationalism happened! Somewhere in the latter part of the nineteenth century, activists in Western Ukraine adopted the ethnomyn “Ukrainian”, which was invented by Polish intellectuals. And thus, Ukrainian nationalism began.

I have another book on my shelf, it is called Obrazy z Rus, that is “Images of the Russias”, written by the Czech nationalist Karel Havlíček Borovský. Russias is in the plural because the author means: “Little, Greater, and White Russia”. He clearly doesn’t see a difference in ethnicity between the inhabitants of these lands. In his discussion of Russian culture, he goes into a lengthy description of a Little Russian Cossack, and does not make a difference between his behaviour and the behaviour of people in Greater Russia.

Therefore, Ukrainian nationalism is an ideology, which seeks to alienate an invented community called Ukrainians from their kin. The Ukrainian nation is literally little more than 100 years old. Therefore, when we talk about Ukrainian history, it is this story of how Ukrainians came into being that ought to be the main topic. Any pretences to the history of Medieval Rus’, the Cossacks, the Haydamaks are but historical usurpations.

Couldn’t The Romania Journal find a better photo of USS Fort McHenry? Or perhaps use a little Photoshop? I have real doubts about NATO’s ability do defend Eastern Europe from Russian Aggression in case of an actual conflict now…

But then again, I never trusted in the ability of NATO countries to mount an effective defence.

Every time the Poroshenko administration does something to alienate his country from Russia, he utters words that have now become a meme. In English they sound like: “I once again say goodbye to the Russian Empire.” And every time he says good bye, some hack declares “Putin, Russia, Russia’s imperialist ghost  has lost” Ukraine. The problem is, Russia doesn’t own Ukraine and did not since 1991. Hence, the Russians had limited influence over Ukraine. And even if I think Russia could be more active in dealing with Ukraine before 2014, it is questionable whether Russia would have won this fight against the West.

Basically, Ukraine as it exists now is virtually useless to Russia. Crimea is Russia, forever. The Nord Stream 2 will be constructed soon enough. Any resources Russia needs can easily be bought from the Ukrainian oligarchs. Russia also accepts immigrants from Ukraine, making use of her human capital. Since Ukraine, already under Yanukovych, refused to join a grain cartel proposed by Russia, Ukraine has become a competitor to Russia in the agricultural sphere.

Russia does not need an agricultural superpower with Russophobic hillbillies. We have seen the capability of Ukraine to wage war in the cauldrons of Donbass and the strait of Kerch. But look on the map, Russia and Ukraine are part of one geographical space. One day hopefully the government in Ukraine will change. And until then, we will have the current situation.