When did Ukraine sink?

Of course, I’m talking about the so-called Euromaidan, as the astute journalist who lived through that event pointed out, former Vanguardia reporter Rafael Poch-de-Feliu (1), in turn, “uprising in eastern Ukraine under Russian auspices”.

This mixed anti-Russian revolution that led to the fall of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government preceded the struggle between the Soviet Union and the European Union for Ukraine to join their economic bloc.

Determined to lure this country with enormous agricultural and mineral resources into its economic space, possibly before joining NATO, the European Union made an offer to the Kyiv government that Poch described as “provocative and destabilizing”.

Indeed, unlike the Customs Union proposed by Moscow, the European offer, according to Poch, was brought up from the outset as “exclusive, incompatible, and non-negotiable with any Ukrainian interest not linked to Russia.”

Given the already existing close relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian markets – 40 percent of the Ukrainian market was Russia – opening the market of the second country only to the EU can only harm the bilateral economy, this was condemned by the Russian Foreign Minister. Sergei Lavrov.

Russia and Ukraine asked Brussels for a tripartite negotiation, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel flatly refused to accept Russia into any negotiations with Ukraine.

Merkel herself, that is, now by the media in her country, is as always bellicose against Russia for doing nothing to reduce the dependence of German homes and industry on Russian gas.

Poch explains that this agreement makes it clear that Ukraine must “be in harmony with Europe in its foreign and security policy”, although until the outbreak of war the majority of Ukrainians advocated good relations with both Brussels and Europe. with Moscow.

President Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the economic agreement with the European Union “exploded social discontent with corruption, oligarchy, ineffective, opaque and socially unjust government.

According to Poch, who was a direct witness to these events, it was then that the Maidan movement erupted, “which arose out of a genuinely popular impulse” but was openly encouraged by the support of Western governments, and especially Washington. media National and international.

The creative “intellectuals”, the students and liberal professionals behind this movement were not enough to put an end to the Yanukovych regime, but “a disciplined shock force willing to risk the physical” was required –

According to the Catalan journalist, this force was “the far-right, armed with the ideology of the Banderovsky tradition (of the fascist and ultranationalist hero Stepan Bandera), supported by oligarchs and Western geopolitical fathers.”

What happened then was never fully clarified, although some Western observers, including Richard Sakwa of the University of Kent and Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa, concluded that the far right played an important role in these events. As a coup against Yanukovych.

Regime change in Kiev precipitated the uprising in the largely Russian-speaking east of Ukraine. First in the Crimea, which declared its sovereignty and wanted to join the Russian Federation, then in the Russian-loving republics of the Donbas.

Meanwhile, Poch remembers something that he himself witnessed and that seems to be forgotten today: the demonstrations in Odessa by tens of thousands of citizens against the new government in Kiev and Ukraine’s anti-Russian nationalism.

This protest was crushed by “another massacre, the Union Assembly responsible for the far-right, and the football fans who came to bring order to the city from all over the country, in a massacre that resulted in the deaths of 46 people. 214 injured”, many of them burned in a five-story building.

The new government’s response to these pro-Russian protests in Kiev was to send the army on a “counter-terrorist mission”, which led to militarization and a scenario of civil war with 14,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons. People who are hardly covered in the Western media.

Meanwhile, Poch has no illusions about Vladimir Putin’s regime.

and rightly explains, “Russia acts in the Commonwealth of Independent States as the USSR did in Eastern Europe: it defends the status quo and hinders social autonomy.”

(1) Author of a highly recommended little book for understanding the conflict, entitled “Invasion of Ukraine”. Ed. Writing Contestants.