Putin’s aim is to annex Ukraine: Stop him
Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko shakes hands with cadets of the Academy of Frontier Troops during her campaig trip to the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnitsky on April 9, 2014. AFP PHOTO/ TYMOSHENKO PRESS-SERVICE/ ALEXANDER PROKOPENKO
What you need to know:
- Despite the Russian army massed against us, we are embarking on an election campaign.
- For Putin, a federal system is a means to make mischief and ultimately incorporate Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions into the Russian Federation.
The quiet period between the declaration of war in September 1939 and the Nazi blitz on Belgium and France in May 1940 is often called “The Phony War.”
Since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and began massing troops and armoured columns on our eastern border, we in Ukraine have been living through a “phony peace.”
There is nothing phony, however, about the efforts we Ukrainians are now making to defend our country and our democracy. Our young men and women are volunteering for military service like never before.
Our government has negotiated a standby loan agreement with the IMF that will give us some of the tools that we need to get our financial and economic house in order.
That agreement will also impose real economic pain, but Ukrainians are willing to pay the price to preserve our independence.
After a time of neglect, a time when we – like the rest of Europe – believed that the continent’s borders would never again be changed by force, we are also increasing our defence spending, despite our economy’s precarious state. There will be no more surrendering of sovereign Ukrainian territory. Not an inch.
Most important, despite the Russian army massed against us, we are embarking on an election campaign. Next month, Ukraine’s citizens will freely choose a new president – the best rebuke possible to Russian propaganda about our supposed failure to uphold democracy.
And yet, as Ukrainians work to rebuild our country after Viktor Yanukovych’s predatory rule, we are facing a new threat, in the form of a “peace offensive” – that old staple of Soviet diplomacy designed to undermine Western resolve.
PUTIN'S GAMBIT
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent phone call to US President Barack Obama to seek renewed diplomatic talks, followed by a Russian white paper on how to resolve a crisis of the Kremlin’s making, is in fact offensive to peace.
Putin’s gambit is akin to the infamous Yalta Conference on Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt complicit in a division of Europe that enslaved half of the continent for almost a half-century.
Today, Putin is seeking to make the West complicit in the dismemberment of Ukraine by negotiating a Kremlin-designed federal constitution that would create a dozen Crimeas – bite-size chunks that Russia could devour more easily later.
Of course, federalism sounds like a good thing. Devolving political power closer to where people actually live is always appealing, and usually effective. But the wellbeing of Ukrainian democracy is not what Putin has in mind; for him, a federal system is a means to make mischief and ultimately incorporate Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions into the Russian Federation.
One has only to look at the Russian proposal’s fine print: Ukraine’s new federal units would have a powerful say over “Ukraine’s foreign-policy direction.” That provision would enable Putin to try to coerce and manipulate Russian-speaking regions into vetoing the country’s European future.
Ukraine’s constitutional structure is for its citizens to decide. Russia can have no say in it – and nor should other countries, however helpful they wish to be.
Ms Tymoshenko, twice prime minister of Ukraine and a former political prisoner, is a candidate for president in the May election. (C): Project Syndicate, 2014. www.project-syndicate.org
