LCN Opinin’ 019 – LSJohn: Ukraine / Russia History Refresher(part 1)
Posted on November 14, 2022 by LCNews
https://libertyclick.news/2022/11/14/lcn-opinin-019-lsjohn-ukraine-russia-history-refresher/
In 2014, Ukraine President (ethnic Russian) Viktor Yanukovych was negotiating with Brussels and Moscow, playing the two against each other regarding financial and other ties Ukraine would have in the immediate future. In the end, he concluded that Moscow had offered the better deal and moved forward to ink the pact.
This did not sit well with the strong majority in Central and Western Ukraine — 75%+ of the national territory — that had European roots and leanings.
Aided by the US State Department, some 3-letter types, and an influential ultra-nationalist paramilitary minority group, a coup-d’etat was performed to replace the previously elected President and the established government. Immediately when the new Parliament was seated it set out to outlaw the Russian language, spoken at home by about 30% of the population, and spoken fluently by more than 50% overall.
The Russian language, culture, religion and traditions were predominant in the southeastern and southern parts of the country that had been part of Russia prior to post-war gerrymandering of national borders long ago.
President Yanukovych fled the country to Moscow. Citizens in two eastern Ukraine states, Donetsk and Luhansk, who were well over 50% ethnic Russian or minorities identifying historically as Russian, started talking about secession. They took the outlawing of the language that operated in their government functions and schools to be a warning of further rough treatment from Kiev.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe joined with Russia and representatives of Donetsk and Luhansk to open negotiations with the Kiev government, seeking special autonomy for the people of the two regions under Ukraine Law, with priority # 1 reinstating the Russian language. An agreement that later became known as Minsk 1 was reached in a series of meetings in Minsk, Belarus in 2014; it granted the regions a degree of autonomy in crafting their state laws which the new parliament was to enshrine in national law, but never did.
A minority group of Ukraine ultra-nationalists that had been incorporated into the new Ukraine government as a paramilitary arm of the Department of the Interior — notable for the uniform insignia and tattoos notorious for having been fashionable in Germany’s Third Reich — and still angry at Russians whom they blamed for Germany’s defeat in WWII, started bombarding the regions that had been denominated for autonomy in the two regions.
One often hears this paramilitary group, self-styled as “The Azov Batallion,” referred to as “neo-Nazis.” This term is often heard as implying anti-semitism, of which there may well be some among them — but their primary targets for hate are Russians, which they call “Orcs” in a manner we would recognize as similar to the use of the “N-word” in the US. Their revered national hero, for whom there are statues in Ukraine, is Stepan Bandera, who led a Ukraine-manned German Regiment against Russia in WWII.