by Dirck Smits van Oyen: Dear friends, In a bizarre and cruel twist The Netherlands became involved in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing more than 190 Dutch as well as over a 100 other nationals. We imagine Holland is in shock over this atrocity and our thoughts and sympathy go out to the thousands who lost beloved ones. Ukraine too is in shock and the square in front of the Dutch embassy in Kiev is buried under flowers and candles left there by Ukrainians, the last thing anybody here wanted to happen is a country for which there is unlimited sympathy to suffer a loss of this magnitude. There is little doubt that the MH17 was shot down by Russian separatists using a Russian supplied Buk ground-to-air missile system thinking they were shooting at a Ukrainian military aircraft. Separatists admitted to so much on social media and the Buk was sighted in terrorist hands near the location of the crash a few days before it happened. Several Ukrainian planes were shot down in the weeks before using Russian supplied missiles. It is unbelievable how Putins war against Ukraine can touch us all, even people living thousands of kilometers away. Putin has given many reasons for his war against Ukraine, all of them easily refutable. There have been no reports that the rights of Russian speakers or ethnic Russians were under threat (as Vika, who is a Russian speaker and 50% ethnic Russian can testify. If any language has been under threat it is Ukrainian, suppressed for centuries by Tsars and Soviet commissars); the majority of Donbas has no desire to separate from Ukraine (the minority that does consists mainly of Soviet-nostalgic pensioners who, like in Crimea, hope Russia doubles their pensions); no Nazis are to be found in the Ukrainian government (2 candidates who are moderate nationalists by the standards of the new EU parliament got less than 2% of the vote during the presidential elections in May); NATO membership is not on anybodys agenda, (as declared numerous times by both Ukrainian and NATO officials); Ukraines government since the Maidan revolution is legitimate by common democratic standards (being elected by a parliament which according to the Kremlins own earlier statements was legitimate); etc., etc. Immediately after the victory of the Maidan revolution Putin invaded and occupied Crimea on the flimsy excuse that it has always been Russian. This too is untrue, only a brief period between 1945 and 1956 was Crimea administratively part of nowadays Russia, a short time in which Russians ethnically cleansed it from its Tatar population, killing half of them. For thousands of years Crimea has been politically and economically linked to the Ukrainian mainland with which it has its only land bridge over which people, goods, energy and fresh water can reach the peninsula. Putins claim to protect the roots of the Orthodox church by securing the Crimean town where Vladimir the Great was baptized (as if it had to be prevented from being contaminated by equally orthodox but inferior Ukrainians) is equally disingenuous: Prince Vladimir was a Kievan prince and in 988 when the baptizing is supposed to have happened Crimea was part of the Kievan Rus kingdom and Moscow was still a swamp. The real reasons for the war against Ukraine can also be found in Putins paranoid statements and are based on the same ethnic nationalist ideology which created havoc in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, ravaging Ukraine probably more than any other country and killing off at least 25% of its population at the capable hands of Stalin and Hitler. Putin has regularly claimed publicly that Ukraine has no right to exist as a country, that large parts of its territory were lost to true Russia (meaning Moscow) after the humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union. That the West took advantage of Russias weakness at that time to break it up (as in Dolchstosslegende), that his mission is to reunite the Russian people into one nation (as in Heim ins Reich), that this gave him the right to annex Crimea and other parts of Ukraine (as in Anschluss) and that the Maidan revolution was not a homegrown fight of both Ukrainian and Russian speaking Ukrainians for freedom and dignity (which it was) but a vicious CIA plot to undermine Russia. Ukraines history is complex with Kiev and its central and western lands historically aligned with Europe since the middle ages, being exposed to the ideas of the renaissance when Moscow was still a tributary to the Mongol Khans. Today, Ukraine is struggling to reestablish its historical links with Europe and de-sovietize its economy and society while Russia is pulling back into Asia and re-sovietizing rapidly under Putin who wishes to pull Ukraine with it. Without Ukraine, Russia is no longer a European nation and, much worse, a successful and European (as in democratic and rules based) Ukraine will be a threat to a re-sovietized Russia and its regime through its moral influence on Russians (interestingly, today the largest support for Ukraine within Russia can be found in its only European city, St Petersburg). The stakes for Putin are enormous. Winning Crimea is no consolation for loosing Ukraine. It will put him in Russian minds in line with Gorbachev (who destroyed the Soviet Union) and Yeltsin (who destroyed Russias economy and social structure), it can fatally undermine his increasingly authoritarian claims on power (and wealth). This explains his desperate and escalating actions in east Ukraine, using proxies to send in and finance ever more Russian, Chechen, Ossetian and other battle hardened mercenaries and ever more powerful weaponry such as Buk ground-to-air missile launchers. How deeply sad that 298 innocent people became the victim of this conflict which did not concern them. Our thoughts and those of Ukrainians are with them and their relatives and friends, full of sorrow. Best regards, Dirck Smits van Oyen
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 19:53:13 +0000
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