July 14, 2010, Kyiv hosted an international conference of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), where was announced the need for large-scale propagation of CSTO among the Ukrainians for “brain washing”.
In the pro-Russian government that was established in Ukraine after the victory of Yanukovych in the presidential elections last winter, most politicians want the further cooperation with Russia, to reach an economic, political and military integration.
So, what about the economic integration it’s already too late for openly pro-Russian politicians as the President of Ukraine Mr. Yanukovych is, because Ukraine is part of the World Trade Organization ( WTO) since 2008. And as Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus are not parts of this international organization, Ukraine can not join the Russian project of customs union. It’s a good news for Ukraine. We must say thank you to Yushchenko that Ukraine joined the WTO and he has saved our economic independence.
Concerning the political integration, Ukraine is not a part of the European Union (EU) nor the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). As the EU shows no political will on the Ukrainian question about possible Ukraine joining the EU, gives every opportunity to Russia for maneuvering to put Ukraine in its sphere of interest (CIS and other projects). Rejecting Ukraine, the EU can have a volatile area near its eastern borders. Otherwise, the EU could show its true face to the people of the EU on double standards concerning a European country as Ukraine. Like this, it will reduce the image of the EU in the eyes of people around the world as an organization/country struggling for democracy and freedoms of people.
Regarding military integration, Ukraine is still a neutral country, but that may change. In 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania, under pressure from Russia, France and Germany, NATO has rejected the application of Ukraine to grant the Membership Action Plan (MAP). So, the population of Ukraine is frustrated, the people of Ukraine were expecting the backing of the expected the granting of MAP, but NATO member-countries refused it. After the complete failure feels forgotten by the West and does not believe in the values announced by the EU. What it gives to the EU and NATO? Above all, NATO risks to lose Ukraine as an active partner (Ukraine takes part in all operations of the NATO from “Active Endeavour” to Afghanistan). Because it is not in the interest of Ukraine to cooperate so deep with NATO without membership. So, the new pro-Russian president of Ukraine Victor Yanukovych pushes Ukraine into the hands of Russia. That is to say, he and his team will promote the CSTO and therefore, as the military bloc is opposed to NATO and the West, in my opinion it is a bad sign/message for European and American politicians. Otherwise, in the future Ukraine may join the CSTO and become a rival to NATO.
Instead of conclusion. The EU and the U.S. must put themselves a question “do they want Ukraine as a stable and predictable partner or they want to have a zone of instability and Ukraine who plays like Russia?”.

This year, almost simultaneously, the court of Donetsk refused to consider Stepan Bandera and Roman Choukhevytch as heroes, but the city councils of Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk gave them the title of Citizens of honor.
The same people for the same actions are considered in one case as heroes and in the other case as criminals, and this is not a personal preference, but decisions of state institutions.
If such an assessment could be heard about this issue from Moscow and Tbilisi, Tehran and Washington, it would be clear that these warring parties are diametrically opposed in their evaluations. But Donetsk, Ternopil are not combatants, they are situated in the same country.
So we can consider this fact as a form of complicated schizophrenia.
The dual personality of a state occurs when two different civilizations coexist in one country.

Civilizational paradigm

This term has gained popularity in political science after the book named “The Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel Huntington published in 1996 – “. When the global conflict between communism and capitalism is over, the author considers the clash of civilizations as the main conflict in modern history.
A civilization can be created by a group of nations and countries, for example, the modern Western civilization. It is also possible that one country forms just one civilization, like China.
It may also happen that two civilizations exist simultaneously in a single country.
Huntington calls these countries as “divided countries”. Such as: Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Ukraine. However, he determines a dividing line and its nature in Ukraine without deep analysis, that’s where he is wrong.
The conflict that divides Ukraine, according to Huntington, is a conflict between Western and Orthodox civilizations. “Western civilization” in Ukraine is represented by the residential areas of the Greek Catholics. So the dividing line should be placed on the territory between Galicia and Volyn and the rest of Ukraine.
As visual confirmation, Huntington uses the results of voting in presidential elections of 1994. At that time, the dividing line was at the eastern border region of Kyiv, Cherkasy, and south of the Cherkasy region, Vinnytsia. But it is clear that these regions are not Greek Catholic, if we take into account the dominant faith.
The results of the presidential elections of 2004 and 2010 and parliamentary elections of 2007 are even more revealing.
The results provide a stable line, which shows that the “western” Ukraine includes the regions of Chernihiv, Sumy and Poltava, which neither geographically nor by religion belong to the line drawn by Huntington.
The stability of such a division is enough to analyze its nature. It is clear it’s not religious. The same Orthodox people live in the two sides of the dividing line.
According to Huntington, in the eastern side of the dividing line lives “the Orthodox civilization.” But more specifically we call this civilization “Russian” or “Eurasian”. Now Russia, including its Muslim population, created a special independent civilization, which also includes the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, which have become independent countries, without leaving the Russian cultural area.
So, the religious definition of civilization is not correct. It includes the Orthodox and Muslims, and also many atheists, formed as a result of Soviet anti-religious policy.
So it is logical that the civilizational division in Ukraine has no religious specification.

The oldest proof

“Kyiv was invaded in March, the twentieth day, Wednesday of the second week of Lent. And they have looted the entire city for two days. And there was no pity: the churches were burning, the Christians were killed, others were captured, and also women, children cried while watching their parents killed.
And they took a lot of goods, and have stolen things in the churches, and they have removed the bells … and all the shrines were also looted. And even the monastery of Saint-Mary of Lavra was burning, but God through the prayers of St. Mary, saved it.”
This is an excerpt from a report about the total theft and destruction of Kyiv in 1169. This is neither the Kumans, nor the Mongols, this is the army of Grand Duke of Vladimir Andrei I Bogolyubsky and other princes, that he has invited to the case.
Serious conflicts, including murder, were common under the Rurik dynasty. The march on Kyiv of princes of Rus’ is not surprising, the innovation of the Grand Duke Andrei I Bogolyubsky was the fact that he did not want to get the city, but he also wanted to destroy Kyiv.
But why? It was not a civil or religious war. The act of the Grand Duke Andrei did not seem motivated, even the reason for the destruction of Kyiv is absent in the chronicle.
The explanation given by Hrushevskyi seems to be plausible.
Imagine that the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal is America of Kyivan Rus’, it started to develop quickly during the reign of Andrei I Bogolyubsky. Andrei has created that principality as an autocratic state from the very beginning, the beginning of a future Russian absolutism and despotism. So we can understand its relationship with Kyiv.
Hrushevskyi writes, for Andrei “historical traditions related to Kyiv were not nice… this infinite gallery of Princes, the influence of the boyars and the political role of communities. There was no hope to overcome the situation, and Andrei did everything to destroy, humiliate Kyiv.”
If Hrushevskyi is right, the destruction of Kyiv by Grand Duke Andrei can be considered as the first sign of the conflict of civilizations between the Western and the Eurasian.
Although these civilizations did not exist at that time, they were going to settle few centuries later.

Testimonials of Sigismund von Herberstein

In the early sixteenth century in Western Europe there was no expert more enlightened about the countries of Eastern Europe and the Muscovy than Sigismund von Herbertsein, a distinguished diplomat of the Habsburg Royal House.
It reflects the unprecedented power of the Czar in Moscow: “The authority he has on people exceeds the one of all the monarchs of the world … He oppresses everyone and aggravates the slavery. If he gives an order to someone to be in his court or go to war, or be an ambassador, he must obey orders at his own funds.”
Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin were not yet born – but the possibility of a servile use of any person is undeniable. In addition, it is the accepted norm in society.
“These people are happier in slavery than in freedom” – this sentence from Herberstein has become a stamp to determine the merits of the political culture of Russia in the centuries to come.
And what about the European part of Rus’?
At that time it was Lithuania which in the description of Herberstein, extended from Livonia (modern Latvia) to Cherkassy (modern Ukraine). So, at that time, the European part of Rus’ was composed mainly of land of modern Belarus and modern Ukraine.
This is not surprising that Lithuania was predominantly Orthodox, and not Catholic. According to Herberstein, most famous Lithuanians of the time were the Dukes Konstanty Ostrozky and Mychaylo Hlynsky, native Volhyniens and not Lithuanians at all.
Another fact: the original version of “The Lithuanian Statute” was written in Ruthenia language in XVI century.
The lack of authority of the monarch of Lithuania to his subjects surprised Herberstein, especially compared with Muscovy. The Lithuanian magnates, he said, “do not use so much freedom and goodness of their King, but they abuse it.”
It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast between the neighbor countries, political freedom in Lithuania and the serious despotism of the Muscovy.

Where the dividing line is?

As you can see, we can found in ancient history, incredible testimonies with fundamental difference between two political cultures. The place of this line today can be demonstrated very effectively by many criteria, including the most obvious – the electoral geography.
All national elections from 2004 to 2010 give the same line:

I do not know who firstly noticed that this line is the historical border of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century.
I think that the first was Mykola Ryabtchuk who wrote about this division line: “The Polish-Lithuanian… Commonwealth was not an ideal place to live, but it was another civilization than Muscovy. People used to live a long time outside of Russia and the Soviet Union. The south and east, pay attention to this, have never lived outside the USSR or Russia…”
Stanislav Bilytchenko made another interesting geographical comparison: This map shows the distribution of the Ukrainian language as mother tongue according to the latest census. The fact is that this division is not accidental, is also confirmed by a research from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, where it is proved that in Ukraine the political choice is not based on political platforms but on national feelings.
And finally one more thing on the dividing line.
Here is an excerpt from a press release of GFK about the results of the survey on Ukraine’s accession to the EU carried out 16 May 2010. “The inhabitants of central and western regions, and also Kyiv support the possible accession of Ukraine to the EU – 69%, 61% and 60% respectively. At the same time the inhabitants of eastern and southern express more actively against membership – 35% and 31% respectively. »
A direct question about the civilizational identity – a straight answer about who is who.

Possible variants

In the conflict of two civilizations, in this case of Western and Eurasian civilizations in a single country, the following developments are possible:
1. Eurasian civilization conquers Western civilization.
2. Western civilization conquers the Eurasian civilization.
3. The status quo is preserved.
4. Each of the warring civilizations creates its own separate state.
Option 1. The easier one. This is the situation of the last three hundred years, but significantly reducing positions of Eurasians compared to previous years.
First, we must say they do not dominate by number, just as when Ukraine was a part of Russia and the USSR. Secondly, they have no repressive forces as they used to have in the USSR. Therefore, the total removal of the representatives of the other civilization, as it used to be after the accession of Western Ukraine to the USSR, does not seem to be real. At least, the required repressive apparatus is not yet renewed.
So the future development of this option would be – the repressive use of Ministry of Interior, Security Service of Ukraine, the Prosecutor’s Office, courts, tax services primarily against political opponents and journalists, and then against all dissidents.
Option 2. The least likely due to two factors. Firstly, there is no significant advantage of number in Ukraine, and secondly, the total inability to act together and strictly.
The presence of these two factors in Latvia and Estonia has brought a quick victory to Western civilization.
In Ukraine, even in the 2005-2009 period, when there was a chance to conquer the population of Eurasian cultural regions, there was no action. These regions were not – de facto – subordinated to the center, which was just pretending to manage them.
It remains the possibility of a peaceful conquest, the gradual cultural acquisition. It’s theoretically possible, but the process can take a considerable amount of time. We never noticed any sign of this process over the past 20 years.
Option 3. In practice, this can be accomplished by the division of power among the representatives of both cultures.
The country is divided administratively into equal numbers of Eurasian and Western lands, which form proportionally a federal parliament, split the posts of President and Prime Minister. Much of the power and budget remain at the level of the land.
This construction is possible, but very unstable. The change of social groups, the contradiction of the new social balance to the old political structure, the intervention of the extremists – all this issues build up over the years and imbalance the situation. And we go to one of three options.
Option 4. Representatives of each of the two civilizations do not want to consider this option because both parts think subconsciously, that one of it can overcome the other part and dominate the whole territory.
They are all for a united Ukraine. Maybe they are right, more specifically – one of them. But this remains very hypothetical.
This dominance in any case will be violent.
Nobody can persuade the other party. Furthermore, nobody wants to convince the other party.
We then choose consciously violent conquest of representatives of a culture by the representatives of the other. On balance there is on one side, the negative of the preservation of a violent state, and the other side – the ill process of creating of two states civilly homogeneous, mostly less confrontational.
Today nobody is going to say on which side will tip the balance. It’s clear that we cannot live like this anymore. But how it’s possible? This is not yet clear.
May God give Ukraine the forces to implement the option that will bring misfortune to less people as possible. And may God gives us the spirit of finding this option.

http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2010/06/11/5126765/

On March 11, 2010 Dmytro Tabachnyk was appointed as minister of education and science of Ukraine. Immediately on March 12, 2010 the discontent of Ukrainian intelligentsia raised.

Let’s explain what exactly caused it. You have to understand who this Mr. Dmytro Tabachnyk is. The data from “Wikipedia”: Dmytro Tabachnyk was born on November 26, 1963 in Kyiv. He is a Ukrainian Russian-oriented politician. He is a doctor, professor, academician of the Academy of Science of Ukraine. He officially recognizes Ukrainians as “Little Russians” as a part of the “Russian people”. He makes an anti-Ukrainian xenophobic policy. A lot of social and political forces consider his views as radical anti-Ukrainian sentiment (Ukrainophobia).

As a result of such an appointment was a creation of “AntiTabachna campaign” or “Tabachnyk, go away!”. This campaign reflects the protest of the Ukrainian public, students and youth’ organizations, local governments, political parties, employees of education and science structures for the dismissal of the minister of education and science of Ukraine, known ukrainophobe Dmytro Tabachnyk. Launched in March of 2010.

I’d really like to know whether or not the civilized world has such precedents (excluding the former colonies). If someone has the answer, please, write in comments.

There is nothing wrong, but the fact that it’s not only the year of Russia in France, but also a year of Kyivan Rus’ in France. At the first glance, it’s difficult to understand what’s the problem. But the problem is that for French people the word Rus’ and Russia are synonyms. So in this way the historical truth is distorted. Since Ukraine is the heart of Rus’, and is the place where began Kyivan Rus’. Kyiv was its capital, as is now the capital of Ukraine.
On the Louvre’s request to send exponents, Ukrainian museums refused to provide this exhibition with their exponents, organized by Louvre under the name of “Holy Russia”. In such a way Ukrainians are boycotting the historical injustice.
The French people believe in “twins” Ukraine and Russia. They do believe that this two nations are fraternal (see the same people). But let’s imagine the situation if the French said that the Roman Empire is the Motherland of France? And the Italians, Spaniards, Romanians and other nations are fraternal or are the same people?
In my opinion, the French people are so arrogant to learn more on this question. For them, pro-Russian information of the French government and mass media are the only truth.
The attitude to my state and people insults me.