Dubai Telegraph - Ukraine's Russian speakers worry about being 'saved' by Putin

EUR -
AED 3.826681
AFN 70.961758
ALL 98.138602
AMD 405.652886
ANG 1.877182
AOA 951.190259
ARS 1045.720247
AUD 1.602814
AWG 1.877897
AZN 1.775245
BAM 1.955573
BBD 2.102956
BDT 124.465544
BGN 1.955294
BHD 0.392554
BIF 3076.642669
BMD 1.041829
BND 1.403837
BOB 7.197164
BRL 6.043693
BSD 1.041579
BTN 87.914489
BWP 14.229347
BYN 3.408604
BYR 20419.848375
BZD 2.099456
CAD 1.456529
CDF 2991.091432
CHF 0.930957
CLF 0.036923
CLP 1018.83097
CNY 7.54601
CNH 7.562783
COP 4573.368835
CRC 530.538382
CUC 1.041829
CUP 27.608468
CVE 110.252195
CZK 25.343745
DJF 185.478458
DKK 7.457729
DOP 62.772709
DZD 139.835759
EGP 51.726992
ERN 15.627435
ETB 127.508391
FJD 2.371151
FKP 0.822333
GBP 0.831435
GEL 2.855018
GGP 0.822333
GHS 16.456089
GIP 0.822333
GMD 73.970229
GNF 8977.957272
GTQ 8.040066
GYD 217.904692
HKD 8.110066
HNL 26.320943
HRK 7.431636
HTG 136.72412
HUF 411.522823
IDR 16610.452733
ILS 3.856892
IMP 0.822333
INR 87.968134
IQD 1364.44153
IRR 43834.955489
ISK 145.523076
JEP 0.822333
JMD 165.930728
JOD 0.738765
JPY 161.244275
KES 134.884334
KGS 90.122166
KHR 4193.512952
KMF 492.268155
KPW 937.645704
KRW 1463.259646
KWD 0.320727
KYD 0.867999
KZT 520.059599
LAK 22878.342838
LBP 93271.167197
LKR 303.144792
LRD 187.998165
LSL 18.795317
LTL 3.076251
LVL 0.630192
LYD 5.086409
MAD 10.478083
MDL 18.997794
MGA 4861.435378
MKD 61.522855
MMK 3383.819949
MNT 3540.134882
MOP 8.35093
MRU 41.443187
MUR 48.810083
MVR 16.10707
MWK 1806.090235
MXN 21.283008
MYR 4.654932
MZN 66.583684
NAD 18.795317
NGN 1767.675143
NIO 38.325549
NOK 11.53576
NPR 140.663663
NZD 1.785942
OMR 0.400943
PAB 1.041579
PEN 3.949541
PGK 4.193513
PHP 61.404399
PKR 289.239507
PLN 4.337676
PYG 8131.055634
QAR 3.798559
RON 4.978071
RSD 116.991412
RUB 108.671879
RWF 1421.834864
SAR 3.911473
SBD 8.734231
SCR 14.272055
SDG 626.663972
SEK 11.497837
SGD 1.402931
SHP 0.822333
SLE 23.68116
SLL 21846.638123
SOS 595.230868
SRD 36.978718
STD 21563.75683
SVC 9.113941
SYP 2617.626467
SZL 18.788818
THB 35.922648
TJS 11.092512
TMT 3.646401
TND 3.309016
TOP 2.440072
TRY 35.9978
TTD 7.074178
TWD 33.946439
TZS 2770.578216
UAH 43.089995
UGX 3848.553017
USD 1.041829
UYU 44.294855
UZS 13362.448044
VES 48.506662
VND 26482.251319
VUV 123.688032
WST 2.90836
XAF 655.880824
XAG 0.033274
XAU 0.000384
XCD 2.815595
XDR 0.792308
XOF 655.880824
XPF 119.331742
YER 260.379151
ZAR 18.915093
ZMK 9377.71492
ZMW 28.772658
ZWL 335.468513
  • SCS

    0.2300

    13.27

    +1.73%

  • CMSD

    0.0150

    24.46

    +0.06%

  • RIO

    -0.2200

    62.35

    -0.35%

  • BCC

    3.4200

    143.78

    +2.38%

  • GSK

    0.2600

    33.96

    +0.77%

  • CMSC

    0.0320

    24.672

    +0.13%

  • NGG

    1.0296

    63.11

    +1.63%

  • RBGPF

    59.2400

    59.24

    +100%

  • BTI

    0.4000

    37.38

    +1.07%

  • BP

    0.2000

    29.72

    +0.67%

  • BCE

    0.0900

    26.77

    +0.34%

  • RELX

    0.9900

    46.75

    +2.12%

  • RYCEF

    -0.0100

    6.79

    -0.15%

  • AZN

    1.3700

    65.63

    +2.09%

  • VOD

    0.1323

    8.73

    +1.52%

  • JRI

    -0.0200

    13.21

    -0.15%

Ukraine's Russian speakers worry about being 'saved' by Putin
Ukraine's Russian speakers worry about being 'saved' by Putin

Ukraine's Russian speakers worry about being 'saved' by Putin

Kyiv driving instructor Andriy Atamanyuk does not want to be saved by Vladimir Putin despite the Kremlin chief's pledge to fight "discrimination" against Russian speakers in Ukraine.

Text size:

"Never," the 48-year-old Ukrainian said in Russian. "There is no-one to save here. There is no discrimination. It is utter nonsense."

The treatment of ethnic Russians -- many of them living in Ukraine's industrial southeast -- has been an obsession for Putin ever since a pro-EU revolution pulled Kyiv out of Moscow's orbit in 2014.

But the issue has gained added attention as Putin tries to reverse NATO's post-Soviet expansion, sending more than 100,000 troops to Russia's border with Ukraine.

Analysts and some Western governments fear that Putin may use language and the perceived mistreatment of ethnic Russians as a pretext for launching an all-out war on Ukraine.

So does Atamanyuk.

"These fairy tales about the language are just an excuse to invade," he said. "There is nothing for Putin to see here."

- 'Native land' -

Ukrainian became the former Soviet republic's official language during Mikhail Gorbachev's embrace of democratic freedoms in 1989.

The collapse of the USSR two years later created economic mayhem on a scale so sweeping that politically sensitive issues such as language became trivial by comparison and were put aside.

But the Kremlin's March 2014 annexation of Crimea and the Moscow-backed revolt in Ukraine's east that broke out around the same time stirred up patriotic passions and reopened old fault lines.

The Western-backed government in Kyiv began to unroll legislation designed to promote Ukrainian on television and in the streets.

And the Kremlin started to grumble about the alleged persecution of ethnic Russians by a Kyiv administration that it casts, by turns, as a puppet of the US government and an offshoot of neo-Nazis.

Russians "are not being recognised as indigenous people on what is effectively their native land", Putin fumed earlier this month.

- 'Hybrid war' -

The latest rules require Russian-language publications to release Ukrainian editions of similar circulation and content.

The law particularly upsets Putin because it makes an exception for English-language media in Ukraine.

Human Rights Watch said the new law raises "concerns".

But the New York-based rights group also stressed that the "Ukrainian government has every right to promote its state language and strengthen its national identity".

Finding the difficult balance of doing this without provoking Putin has been something IT entrepreneur and philanthropist Yevgeniy Utkin has been mulling over for some time.

Utkin says he speaks Russian "out of principle, because I love it very much".

But this has not held him back from serving as an adviser for the Ukrainian government or appearing on political talk shows.

"I have never -- not once -- had a single incident related to me speaking Russian," Utkin said.

Yet he worries that any attempts to strengthen the Ukrainian language will be seized upon by Putin and provide added ammunition for the Kremlin media's unrelenting attacks on Kyiv.

"Language is simply another bullet in Russia’s hybrid war," said Utkin. "There is an information war being waged in our heads."

- Putin's essay -

The Kremlin's current standoff with the West escalated a few months after Putin penned a 7,000-word essay last July entitled "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians".

"The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us," Putin said in the English version of the text.

The article was widely interpreted as Putin's defining argument for stripping Ukraine of its independence and subjecting it to Kremlin rule.

It has also been picked apart by historians as wildly inaccurate.

"Russian propaganda depends upon myths and counterfactuals, all spun in the direction of Russian greatness and innocence," Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder wrote.

Many leading thinkers in Ukraine believe that the two countries have drifted too far apart to be rejoined by force.

"Freedom is now in Ukrainians’ DNA. And the problem is that the Russian elite does not understand this," said Utkin.

Ukraine's bestselling Russian-language author Andrey Kurkov summed it up along similar lines.

Russians subscribe to a "collective mentality", he told AFP. "Ukrainians are individuals."

I.Uddin--DT