The situation in Ukraine continues to stay in the front pages of the global media.
The upcoming five-year anniversary of the tragic events in the Independence Square (known as Maidan) in Kyiv in January-February 2014, which led to a violent change of power, now prompts many policy makers in the West to take a closer look at the reasons and consequences of the Maidan, and to reevaluate what was going on in Ukraine from a more realistic standpoint.
Now is a good time to ponder whether there are any winners as result of the so called “revolution of dignity”.
The definite loser of this policy is the people of Ukraine, who as a result of the actions of the current Ukrainian government lost parts of Ukraine’s territory, got sucked into a bloody war in Donbas and as a result are on the way to total impoverishment while Ukraine is sinking into chaos and lawlessness. Western countries are also on the losing end, because they have effectively become hostages of the insane radicalism preached by the Ukrainian authorities, and now are forced to endure economic losses resulting from deterioration of relations with Russia.
More and more Western policy makers, diplomats and media already understand that the slogans of “fight for democracy” and “fight against corruption”, which were so actively supported by Western governments and media back in 2014, which served as banners of the “revolution”, were in fact manipulation and provocation of historic scale. These slogans were used to usurp power and organize wide ranging political persecution of dissidents and political rivals.
Here there is a direct analogy with the events of 1989 in Romania, which only now have been officially and objectively assessed by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Romania – former high-ranking officials who came to power as a result of the “Romanian revolution” were accused of crimes against humanity. The Prosecutor General’s Office of Romania concluded that “in December 1989, an atmosphere of “total psychosis” was created in the country with the help of disinformation, which led to chaotic violent actions and contradictory military orders. As result, within a few days after December 22, 1989, 862 representatives of the former government were killed, and 2,150 people were injured or subjected to harassment”.
Obviously, the Romanian scenario was taken as the blueprint for the events that had taken place in Ukraine in winter of 2014. The usurpation of power by the “revolutionaries”, attempts to find and kill the incumbent President, persecution of representatives of the ousted government after the coup — all these points are precisely matched in the news reports from Romania in 1989 and from Ukraine in 2014.
In his testimony and interviews about the events of the winter of 2014, the first President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, confirmed that in February 2014 he was aware of the “Ceausescu plan”, which envisioned plans to murder President Yanukovich at that time.
The organizers of the coup in 2014, who came to power, acted in a more sophisticated way than their Romanian “colleagues” in 1989. Not disdaining the loss of human life, they organized shooting of protesters and law enforcement officers in order to discredit the authorities and the incumbent President Yanukovych. This point is confirmed by a number of investigations conducted by a number of American and European journalists.
Subsequently, the leaders of Maidan used the chaos of the events and persuaded the authorities of Western countries to impose sanctions on the representatives of the overthrown government in order to completely isolate them from the outside world. And in Ukraine those who worked in the overthrown government immediately became subject to criminal cases and special laws that directly put blame for some crimes on them without any trial or investigation.
A good example is the situation of President Victor Yanukovoch, who has been demonized daily and accused of various crimes in the Ukrainian and world media throughout these five years.
Yanukovich and his policy have been supported for many years by tens of million of Ukrainians. He personified the opinion and was an ideological leader for at least half of the nation, and definitely a key politician of the most densely populated region of Ukraine – Donbass, which also gave a quarter of Ukraine’s GDP. It is apparent that the main role of his persecution is suppression of those who disagree with the violence and chaos that followed the revolution of 2014, and who stand against the current government. It is an apparent vendetta of the winners against losers.
For five years, not a single country in the world has confirmed existence or froze any assets belonging to President Yanukovych. No court in the world has issued an indictment against him. The only criminal case, which the Ukrainian authorities started against Yanukovich, in their utterly hopeless situation, is the obviously political process of the so-called “high treason”.
According to many Ukrainian and international lawyers, this court has become a farce and a mockery of justice, and a part of the unprecedented, systematic and organized political persecution.
In fact, the political repressions against Yanukovich and representatives of the former government became the official ideology of the current Ukrainian government. Repressions are the main part of Poroshenko’s plan to change the political agenda in the country and to divert public attention from Poroshenko’s economic failures, divisive policies and unwillingness to return peace to the country and reach an agreement with the Donbas. The Ukrainian authorities continue the disinformation campaign they had started in 2014 about what had happened in the Maidan and the subsequent actions, including inciting war, corruption of unprecedented scale and pauperization of Ukrainians.
The time has come for an objective and truthful assessment of what is happening in Ukraine. Common sense and democratic norms should return both to Ukrainian politics and to how it is perceived by the West.
The ongoing political repressions have nothing to do with the rule of law and the democratic future of Ukraine, and must stop immediately. This opinion is incrementally becoming dominant among the true friends of Ukraine in the US and EU.
In this spirit, at he end of 2018, the Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilus III sent a letter to President Poroshenko asking for reconciliation and calling upon President Poroshenko to stop political persecution of President Yanukovych. He also called for the former President to be involved in the peace process in the Donbas. Given that the Minsk process is at a deadlock, and the amount of negativity in relations between Ukraine and the Russian Federation has exceeded all reasonable limits, Yanukovich participation in the peace process can be an effective opportunity to achieve truce, and most importantly – reconciliation among the Ukrainian nation.
This concept is seriously considered in the White House. The recent meeting of GOP senators confirmed that President Poroshenko’s most important issue is establishment of peace and beginning of the process of reconciliation. His voters have been waiting for 5 years for these decisions from him. There can be no excuse for failure to deliver.