On Wednesday, June 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a number of statements addressed to Ukraine and its President Vladimir Zelensky.
The emphatically relaxed format of the interview, in which the president answered the questions of the VGTRK journalist Pavel Zarubin (the correspondent's winter jacket, Putin's informal appearance - apparently, the interview was recorded at the ice hockey ice), testified to the urgency and importance of the state level.
The first question is about the introduction by the President of Ukraine Zelensky to the Verkhovna Rada of the bill "On the indigenous peoples of Ukraine."
A very provocative law for Russia - if it is adopted, it should be noted.
And Putin's reaction to him did not appear spontaneously, but immediately after the State Duma deputies at a plenary meeting on June 8 adopted a statement "On the initiative of the Ukrainian authorities to exclude Russian and other peoples from the indigenous peoples of Ukraine."
The statement is the reaction of the State Duma that Moscow is categorically opposed to its adoption.
What is it about the bill that caused a flurry of comments - from deputies and State Duma Chairman Volodin to President Putin?
We'll see.
The first thing that cannot be overlooked is that the number of the indigenous peoples of Ukraine includes the Crimean Tatars, Karaites and Krymchaks inhabiting Crimea.
The one who, according to the new Constitution of the Russian Federation, is “ours”.
It turns out that the indigenous peoples of Ukraine live on the territory of Russia?
And she, too, may want to defend them, as Russia protects the Russians.
That is, the new Ukrainian bill is a time bomb.
This is a ticking mechanism.
But the very Crimean Bridge, about which everyone said it was impossible - the 19-kilometer road bridge across the Kerch Strait - the artery of life connecting the peninsula with Russia after a predictable total blockade from Ukraine - was built six months ahead of schedule ( !) and launched in May 2018.
Of course, the emotional reaction of Putin was calculated in advance by Kiev.
Probably, for greater loyalty, it was at this time that the players of the Ukrainian national team were photographed in yellow T-shirts, on which, in addition to the traditional "Glory to Ukraine - Glory to Heroes!", Were printed maps of Ukraine and Crimea.
So that Putin could not help but react.
Mikhail Podolyak, advisor to the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said this with pleasure yesterday: “The words of the Russian president were predictable and aimed at the domestic Russian audience.”
(I have to disagree with the latter, because we understand perfectly well that the official reaction of the Russian Federation to sensitive legislative initiatives of Ukraine was demonstrated by the State Duma on June 8, by the President on June 9 (exactly one week before the meeting of Putin and Biden in Switzerland), and it is there that demarcation red lines - both on the possible entry of Ukraine into NATO, and on the Crimea and the fate of Donbass.
But let's get back to the next “surprise” of the draft law “On the indigenous peoples of Ukraine”: there are no Russians, Belarusians or Moldovans in it.
Although, according to the latest census of Ukraine, 17.2% of the citizens inhabiting it consider themselves Russian and, perhaps even more importantly, were not afraid to publicly call themselves Russian during the census, given how difficult the relationship between the Ukrainian government and Russia is.
Give me a hug, brothers!
I know firsthand what it means to recognize one's national identity under conditions of almost war.
Do not change your surname, do not hide the language spoken by your grandfathers or parents, do not deny the role of the cultural heritage that shaped our worldview, and remember who we are, the names of our ancestors.
So, the correspondent asked Putin a question about his attitude to this law.
And, of course, I received what is called the full program.
“The very division of people into indigenous, first-class categories, second-class, and so on - it just looks like the theory and practice of Nazi Germany.
Nobody wants to be second-class people, I'm not talking about discrimination in language and those other components of a person's normal life, but this will lead to the fact that hundreds of thousands, and maybe even millions, will be forced to leave, not wanting to be second-class people. varieties, or they will begin to rewrite themselves in some other way, ”Putin replied to the correspondent.
This is the case when you not only agree, but are ready to print out Putin's words, put them in a gilded frame and hang on the wall so that you can see them every day.
For five good (or bad) years I have been reading about myself on the Internet in information garbage dumps, that I am the granddaughter of a "Bandera", "Maidanutai", I walk around the house in an embroidered shirt (as if it could be a crime, if it turned out to be true), therefore , for me it is necessary to find some article of the Criminal Code.
These same people (perhaps they are really Nazis and fascists, as the president says) were sincerely happy to learn that I, a “Jew” and “Maidanutai,” had been arrested in Iran and I was facing the death penalty.
And all this madness began with the fact that in 2016 I publicly said in an interview that my grandfather Vasyl Yuzik is Ukrainian, originally from Western Ukraine.
He fought in the Soviet army against fascism, was wounded and has military awards - and, I'm sure, he did not do this in order to see fascism in the lands for which he shed blood, 70 years after our Great Victory.
Fascism is a brown plague, and I don't care if it sounds trite.
It must be eradicated like a weed, like a cancerous tumor, so that it does not take over the entire body and does not kill it.
I know very well what bullying and threat to life on the basis of ethnicity is.
And I was sincerely glad that the president of my country, who saved me by the fact that I am a citizen of Russia, and made me proud that I am a citizen of Russia, knows what bullying is and understands what it leads to.
What does he think of those 17.2% of Ukrainian citizens who consider themselves Russian, and that is why, perhaps, he reacts so emotionally to Ukraine's departure to a voyage free from Russia and its desire to forget about the past that binds us.
“The Bolsheviks, organizing the Soviet Union, created, among other things, union republics and the Ukraine.
It may be recalled that these territories became part of the Russian state, the process of their reunification with Russia began in 1654, after the Pereyaslavl Rada.
And then those people who lived in these territories (and these are, in today's language, three regions) - so these people considered and called themselves Russian and Orthodox, it's all in the documents, all these documents are in the archives, ”says Putin.
And I’m thinking about this.
For seven years now, all the news related to Ukraine has been stirring my heart.
To better understand how I and other Russian and Ukrainian citizens with ethnic and cultural "dual citizenship" feel today (and I am sure there are millions of us on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian borders), I will compare the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine with the divorce of my parents. ...
What to do when the parents whom you love so much, having lived most of their lives together, decide to leave?
They hire expensive lawyers who compete in courts with such keen eloquence that your heart is cut to pieces when you hear what your loved ones are saying about each other today.
How to choose whom you love more, father or mother?
What about the families and destinies of those who are half Russian?
Who is half Ukrainian?
Will they hang us in the squares?
Cast out, forcing to participate in courts, where we have to choose - father or mother, to perjure, lie and deny one of them?
My paternal grandfather Vasil (Vasily) was an ethnic Ukrainian, his mother (my great-grandmother) was from the Ternopil region, and his father (my great-grandfather) was from Khmelnitsky, and on weekends they went here and there (in Ternopil, by the way , were the first private breweries in Ukraine that brewed excellent beer, and this was a weighty argument to visit my mother-in-law more often).
My father Victor addressed his parents as "you" even when he was 50 - and this is part of the "Western" Ukrainian tradition.
When my grandfather and grandmother (not a Ukrainian) moved to the free Don steppes (bordering today with the notorious LPR, and then - with the Luhansk region of the Ukrainian SSR), they worked without unbending their backs in their garden and in the garden, thanks to which they were kept in the cellar all winter was filled with fresh fruits and vegetables and was equipped with glass jars with fruit and vegetable and berry canning so that it could survive the nuclear winter.
And the word "kurkul" - ironic, but filled with tenderness, reminds me of the Ukrainian habit of working on the earth and thinking about tomorrow and about economical consumption.
On my grandfather's birthday, grandmother and grandfather sang Ukrainian songs at the table, and I was born and lived all my life on Gogol Street, who was born in the Poltava province and is considered a great Russian writer.
How to be like me?
What to expect for those whose surnames end in "-ko", "-uk", "-yuk" and "-ik" (the latter can also include Poles with Jews - and then a holiday in general: if there is no water in the tap, you yourself know what happens next)?
But what about those 17.2% of Ukrainians who consider themselves Russian?
“Zelensky himself is a Jew by nationality.
I don't know, maybe he has mixed blood there.
What to do with these people?
They will be now, as in Nazi Germany, to measure their skulls, other parts of the body with compasses and determine how they defined a real Aryan and a fake?
So here they will define the real Ukrainian and the fake?
I'm not talking about other components, ”says Putin, and I want to quote his words again, because they are now very important for all of us.
Here and there.
In this madness - red demarcation lines, talk about NATO, the time of the arrival of missiles, mutual hatred - I ask you: let's stop and not go behind them - it will be very difficult to return to good neighborly relations from where.
Or even impossible.
As a child who has heard a lot in court about the betrayal of parents, the division of property in the presence of bailiffs and armed guards, in a stream of endless hatred and resentment, wiping away my tears, I ask you one thing: to stop in this hatred and remember that we are native people.
We don't have to fight.
We should not give joy to those of our geopolitical rivals who are destroying perhaps the most valuable and last thing that we have along the outer nearest perimeter: our ethnic, linguistic, family kinship.
Anyone who incites hatred between the fraternal Russian and Ukrainian peoples is for me an enemy working for a geopolitical enemy, whose name is already known to everyone.
Losing Ukraine for Russia is not just painful, it is a geopolitical mistake that can be very expensive in the future.
But it is dangerous for Ukraine to become an enemy of Russia both now and in the future, because even the North Atlantic Alliance, about which Poroshenko spoke, and Zelensky continued, is in no hurry to admit Kiev to NATO.
During this or the next summit of the presidents of Russia and the United States, the "Ukrainian issue" may be exchanged by Washington for something more valuable on the current agenda - today, for example, China.
Both in Moscow and Kiev this is understood by any sober-minded politician in the categories of real politic, I apologize for the tautology.
And then what is left for us to do?
Even if our armies collide, we still have to return to dialogue after.
To speak in the ruins or to speak before everything is completely destroyed - we still have this option of choice.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.