Senators were asked to equate “Ukrainianism” with extremism

The Federation Council Committee on International Affairs held a round table on Wednesday on the topic “The ideology of “Ukrainianism” as the basis for the project of forming “anti-Russia”.” Those gathered discussed the threat posed by this phenomenon and options for countering it. Social activist Vladimir Rogov, for example, proposed equating “political Ukrainianism” with the “LGBT movement” (recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation).

The essence of the issue was presented to the event participants by the Deputy Head of the 2nd Department of the CIS Countries of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Elkin. He stated that the problem of Ukrainians is “multifaceted and not fully studied,” but it is already posing a number of urgent questions for Russia: “How to live with this phenomenon, how to fight it?” At the same time, according to the diplomat, one cannot “lump the regime, the local authorities and the people together.” After all, for example, residents of the new constituent entities of the Russian Federation “have lived for decades in the modern Ukrainian state, they know this problem from the inside, feel it and understand it.” Mr. Elkin himself believes that Ukrainianism is both “anti-Russia” and Bandera’s neo-Nazism, and “our fathers and grandfathers showed how to fight it in 1945.” “I don’t think that Ukraine will be empty after the successful advance of the armed forces – the population will remain. We will have to work with this population and look for answers to their questions: what to do with education, culture, what to do with the fact that they are on their own land,” concluded the Foreign Ministry employee.

The head of the Commission of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation for the protection of sovereignty, patriotic projects and veterans’ issues, Vladimir Rogov, as a native Cossack, said that he remembers well the “conspiracy in Belovezhskaya Pushcha”, and how he voted against “independence” in the 1991 referendum, and how people “ forced to swear allegiance to the Ukrainian state.” “And conversations with the military were conducted directly on the topic of whether they were ready to fight with Russia,” the social activist emphasized. The worst hit from him was the second president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, who, according to Mr. Rogov, in the 1989 census called himself Russian and emphasized the last syllable in his surname, and already in 2001 “realized that he was Ukrainian and changed the emphasis on the first syllable.” “The first transnational, by analogy with a transsexual, was Leonid Danilovich, who publicly renounced his own roots, and already at the mature age of 63,” Vladimir Rogov quipped. In this regard, he invited the senators to “initiate a discussion and take practical steps” towards consolidating the legal definition of “political Ukrainianism” in the criminal legislation of the Russian Federation: “Political Ukrainianism should be declared extremist by analogy with their twin brothers – the international LGBT movement (recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation .— “Kommersant”), given that the same characters stand behind them.”

A leading expert at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Oleg Nemensky, however, returned from practice to theory and complained that in the Russian Federation there is no “school of Ukrainian studies,” which is why “society is surprised why they hate us so much.” There is no “good Ukrainianness,” since in any version it is an ethnocidal ideology, which is characterized by rejection of one’s own history and perception of it as slavery, the fight “against the oppressors from Moscow,” the expert emphasized: “In this regard, all Ukrainians are transnationals, they are all formerly Russian.” At the same time, Mr. Nemensky called for separating Ukrainian nationalism and Nazism, since from a scientific point of view the former arose “much earlier, not in connection with Nazism and has a completely different logic”: there is no racial issue in Ukraine, and Nazism is primarily a racial ideology. It is also important not to forget that there is no interethnic conflict in Ukraine, the expert added: “This is not a conflict between Russians and Ukrainians, it is a conflict between bearers of different identities and related national projects in a single ethnocultural environment. And our task is to return Russians from Ukrainianness back to Russianness. It is precisely the Russian ethnocultural identity, and not the Russian one, because the Russian one is civil and allows the option of Ukrainians.”

At the end of the round table, the head of the philosophy department of MSTU, Vitaly Darensky, shared his thoughts, who warned the audience that Ukraine “is no longer a soap bubble, but a granite block”: it has captured the minds of millions and has become a deep-seated belief. “This was clearly visible before 2014, and the SVO showed it in practice. A huge number of people in the Armed Forces of Ukraine are convinced people, the resistance is colossal, they fight for cities like for Stalingrad,” the scientist emphasized. He recalled that in Ukraine there have already been several generations who “know nothing about Russia,” therefore, in the new regions of the Russian Federation, approximately a third of the population are “waiters” whose worldview “will not change.” “There was an opinion that we needed to work with them. Useless. They will die out naturally over time, that’s all,” Mr. Darensky concluded.

Andrey Prah