Why Ukraine’s Borders Are Back at the Center of Geopolitics:
Excerpt:
NATO’s pressure against Russia exacerbated and joined with extreme Ukrainian nationalists—including fascists such as the Azov Battalion—to drive an anti-Russian cultural and political movement in the country. Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who benefited from Western backing, put forward a language law in 2017 that hampers the teaching of the minority languages in the country’s schools. The target for the law was to de-Russianize the population, but it had an impact on the country’s smaller minorities. For that reason, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Romania filed complaints with the Council of Europe.
Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said on Facebook in late 2020 that his government would “stand up for Transcarpathian Hungarians in every international forum.” Ukraine, he said, “not a member of NATO, has launched an attack against a minority group originating from a NATO member country.” The contradictions of Ukraine-NATO’s anti-Russian agenda run afoul of other NATO members for reasons that were not calibrated carefully.
Firing across the Ukraine-Russia border has stepped up, egged on by Biden’s full-throated support of Zelensky’s newly found anti-Russian ambitions. A senior United Nations official at the Department of Political and Peacekeeping Affairs tells me that they want military forces to withdraw from the border. All the main platforms for negotiation—the Normandy Format and the Arria Formula meetings at the UN—are in a stalemate. “We need cool heads to prevail,” said the UN official. “Anything other than that could lead to a catastrophic war.”
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