OPINION
Monday, December 1, 2014 7
The Bear’s Nightmare
Putin’s struggle to revive the soviet state
taras koulik › contributor
I
“
guess i’ll shake your hand but I have only
one thing to say to you: You need to get out of
Ukraine.” These were the words used by Prime
Minister Stephen Harper to the President of
Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in their initial meeting during the first day of the 2014 G20
summit. This was Canada’s official response to what
has been a devastating year for Ukraine, which began
with the ousting of a Moscow-backed corrupt president and was followed by the annexation of Crimea.
The situation then evolved into a continuing invasion
of eastern Ukraine by Russian-backed mercenaries
and soldiers, all for the purported purposes of stamping out Nazism and protecting the Russian ethnic
population from the Fascist-Banderites (Banderites
are Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups used in the
Russian government’s propaganda machine to assert
the claim that the entire country is under a pro-fascist regime). In the fog of war, Russian-backed terrorists utilizing a Buk anti-aircraft system managed to
knock the now infamous Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
forty-thousand feet out of the air and murder all twohundred ninety-eight people on board. What started
as direct aggression between Russia and Ukraine had,
through this atrocity, brought itself to the attention
and focus of Europe, and of course the West.
Now that that Ukraine is in the spotlight, the question faced by the international community is: what
should be done? But in determining what must be
done, it is necessary to understand what has already
happened. The West is aware of what is happening
now, but Ukrainian history tells a longer and more
convoluted story. To fully appreciate some of the rhetoric Putin has used over the course of this past year to
legitimize blatant breaches of international law and
order, the historical context between the two countries is discussed in this article. In considering this
history, I stress that we, as Canadians, must understand our attachment to this conflict.
Ukrainian nationalism, or Ukraine’s existence as
an independent state, has been a sore spot, a source
of resentment and contempt, for a century of Soviet
rulers, who are now represented by Putin. Before
1991, when it proclaimed its independence after the
formal collapse of the USSR, numer