“Ukraine’s division is fatal for it,” writes a German journalist Andrea Seibel in Der Welt weekly, adding that Ukraine’s nationalist West is seeking freedom with the European Union, while Ukraine’s East wants to tie its fate with Russia. And of course, Russia for Andrea Seibel is a symbol of being not free. So far, the attitude of the vast majority of the European and American media is equally one-sided: West is good and East is bad.
Yes, indeed, Ukraine is divided and this fact is visible from different reactions in various regions of Ukraine to the tragic events in Kiev. In the Western city of Lvov the so called activists attacked a military base and blew up a depot with munitions there. In the eastern cities of Kharkov and Donetsk attempts to attack the local government offices were thwarted by the local population, which fears the rule of Ukraine’s nationalist Western regions.
The question is: who is teaching Ukrainians unity? During the last ten years the European Union has seen such divisions, which it had not experienced since the times of the religious wars in the sixteenth century. The animosity between Europe’s formerly Protestant North and its formerly Catholic South is visible and sometimes reaches beyond the limits of decency. In our times, this animosity is centered over different countries’ attitude to their budget policies and the problems of public debt.
Germany, Holland, Finland and other countries with balanced budgets and good credit ratings happen to be northern and protestant and somehow they often indulge in what is now called euphemistically “anti-Mediterranean rhetoric.” For example, Stephan Richter the director of the magazine “The Globalist” said that the first Protestant, reverend Martin Luther, would have never agreed to include Italy and Spain into the monetary union. Mr. Richter explained his stance by these countries’ Catholic past and their, I quote, “fiscal sins.”
So, even the European Union is not a happy paradise with no divisions. But Russia and Ukraine don’t try to play on these divisions. On the contrary, the Ukrainian elite, as well as the Russian one, had been making efforts for many years to integrate themselves into this European entity. The whole conflict in Ukraine started under the pretext of the Ukrainian president Yanukovich unwillingness to go along that road fast enough.
But let’s not forget: Mr. Yanukovich did not cancel his country’s association agreement with the EU. He just postponed it for financial reasons. But this was enough for the EU to declare a real propaganda war against him, declaring him Russia’s stooge and a representative of the presumably “unfree” East of Ukraine. “Divide and Rule” – this tactic of the ancient Roman imperialists seems to be in vogue now more than ever. But Russia and Ukraine abuse this practice much more rarely than some other political entities – on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
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