Was there a threat for ethnic Russians in February 2014 in Ukraine (Crimean question)?

 

Ukrainian and Western politicians always say that the Ukrainian crisis allegedly began in the spring of 2014, when the Crimea joined Russia and fights in Donbas started.

However, now these politicians don’t like to be reminded that before the spring of 2014 there was the Euromaidan in Ukraine and at some point, the pro-Western protesters began to burn and kill during this Euromaidan.

By the way, earlier this month I have written in an article that now nobody in Ukraine can explain why they had begun to burn and kill (please see here).

And my present article deals with another subject: Was there a threat for ethnic Russians in February 2014 in Ukraine (Crimean question)?

And I would like to give you some examples to this subject below.

In January 2014, police officer Oleksandr Kyselevskyi was stabbed to death by a Maindanist in the city of Kherson. His murderer was arrested on the day of the crime but the next month - immediately after new rulers had come to power in Ukraine - he was amnestied and released.

But this murder cannot be explained by a self-defense at all, since no one of protesters was ever killed in Kherson during Euromaidan.

In February 2014, the protesters attacked an office of the Party of Regions in Kiev. This office was burned down and one of its employees, Volodymyr Zakharov, a programmer, died in the fire.

On the night of February 21, 2014, in Cherkasy Oblast a large group of Ukrainian nationalists stopped buses in which residents of the Crimea returned home from Kiev. The residents of the Crimea, where the ethnic Russians are a majority, were severely beaten and their buses were burned down.

After the President Yanukovych had unconstitutionally been removed from power on February 22, 2014, new rulers at once declared an amnesty for so-called political prisoners including murderers. For example, Dmytro Pavlychenko was released who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder of a judge.

And after this “Victory of Euromaidan” – although Euromaidan had initially been declared as a movement for human rights – the Ukrainian Parliament at the same day voted for a repeal of the Law on Regional Languages though this Law had guaranteed some language rights for national minorities including ethnic Russians.

Three months later, the first post-Maidan Ukrainian President Poroshenko in his interview for Le Figaro called this decision of the Parliament a mistake (please see here), but later this law was finally repealed.

The facts, which I have presented in this article, confirm that there had been a real threat for ethnic Russians in February 2014 in Ukraine.

Therefore, the Russian Government’s decision to accept the Crimea into the Russian Federation in March 2014 can be justified.

Of course, one can say that the Russian Government had to wait, observe the development of situation and draw attention of Western politicians to violent actions in Ukraine.

But subsequent events showed that the Western politicians were absolutely indifferent, e.g. to mass death of opponents of new Ukrainian rulers on May 2, 2014, when 42 of these opponents had died in a fire in the Trade Unions House. I personally cannot remember that a U.S. President or a German Chancellor ever demanded from any Ukrainian officials to investigate this mass death.