Ukraine’s future depends on the courage of the Eastern residents.

Vitaliy Portnikov
Translated by Yuliya Nesterenko
Edited by Isis Wisdom
Source: http://rus.newsru.ua/columnists/27jan2014/borba.html

Vitaliy Portnikov

Ukraine’s future depends on the courage of the Eastern residents.
What is happening around the regional administrations in the eastern parts of the country is tragic but an exact confirmation of along which lines Ukraine really is split. Not along the line of confrontation between West, Centre and East, no. But along the line of struggle between the authority and all the rest of the population.

When people ask me why mainly residents of the western and central regions stand on Maidan – by the way, in exactly these regions they managed to establish control over  administration buildings without war – I recall one simple thing. The residents of the Centre and West – in addition to their own civic initiatives – have political representation in the form of opposition parties. The residents of the East do not have such representation – the Party of Regions monopolized and “mopped up” the political framework of the huge part of our country with the same cruelty that it now is «cleaning up» regional administrations.

This is not the first decade in which the East is living in the atmosphere of real fear and propaganda pressure, spreading from Donbas and the Crimea deep into Ukraine. The fact that not everybody likes such a life was demonstrated in the presidential elections of 2010, when many residents of the eastern regions voted for Sergiy Tigipko, who seemed to them a reasonable alternative to the “king” [of parties] the Party of Regions. But Tigipko preferred successful business in the governmental armchair and deputy’s seat to the recovery of the East, and the East again remained face-to-face with their predatory oppressors.

That’s exactly why there, in the East, people are punished with such a demonstrative cruelty. In the East and in the West live people who were always considered by the Party of Regions as strangers, who can be driven off only with water cannons. But Easterners, for the authority, are ordinary slaves, who need to be taught a lesson for the future so that they keep heads down, don’t succeed, and continue to fill, by their own labour, the money-boxes of the brazen crooks. That’s why they are beaten with such a fury. By their own? Yes, by their own people – subdued, driven into a stall, frightened. And that’s why both those who walk into the squares of the eastern cities and those who sympathize with them in fear at home need to be taught a worthy lesson: so that they always keep their heads down. So that they agree with the split of the country if such a decision would be made in Moscow.

That’s exactly why the future of our state depends on the courage of the residents from the eastern regions, on their readiness to be free of slavery, and resist the creeping occupation of their native land. I remember very well how many flags with the names of Eastern cities were on Maidan. I imagine well how many people don’t want «to be beasts» according to the Belarusian scenario. And I know, how hard it is for them to live in a practically destroyed, mentally scorched region, tortured by the Holodomor, devastated by the industrial dislocation of the late 1980s and hobbled by the thieves who have assumed property and power. But I believe in these people.