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World/Foreign Affairs / Re: The Battle over East vs West (Russia vs Europe) continues in Ukraine
« Last post by patentlymn on Today at 08:46:22 PM »https://original.antiwar.com/gregor_baszak/2024/04/30/ukraine-today-is-not-a-democracy-an-interview-with-former-ambassador-jack-matlock/
‘Ukraine Today Is Not a Democracy’: An Interview with Former Ambassador Jack Matlock
by Gregor Baszak Posted on May 01, 2024
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I went to Kyiv, it must have been either 1993 or 1994, with a group of people who had worked on our National Security Council. We had an agreement with the Ukrainian government to come and describe to them how we operated in the National Security Council in Washington. When we finished our presentation, a senior Ukrainian official commented: “You are talking about foreign relations, but our problem is internal.” And then they showed us maps of where the voting had been, with one side beginning with 85, 90% of one party in the West and then in the East 85 or 90% in the other party. And actually these elections were split almost 50-50. Over the following years, sometimes one side would get 50.1%, sometimes the other side, but it was always very close.
What made this particularly dangerous was the Ukrainian constitution which had the President name what we would call the state governors, the provincial chiefs. There was no election at the provincial level the way we Americans have. Obviously, that would not work if the country is very much divided, but that was how the problem started there and they got deeper and deeper and by 2014 the violence was started in the west and primarily by these Neo Nazi groups who first of all started taking over the provincial governors’ offices.
This is why one of the requirements of the Minsk agreements was that Ukraine would adopt a federal constitution that would let these Russian speaking entities elect their own leaders the way citizens of American states elect their governors. If we Americans had had the sort of system Ukraine had, we would have broken up long ago. You need a federal system like Switzerland has, for example, or Belgium, or in Finland where the Swedish minority has full cultural rights. But this is something the current Ukrainian government, those who control it, never conceded and, as I said, that was one of the requirements of the Minsk agreement. Why Germany and France didn’t insist that the Ukrainians abide by it if they were going to get any more aid, I don’t know. The United States should have, too. We approved the agreement, though we were not a signatory.
The current tragedy is that it is bad for everybody. Obviously the people suffering most are the Ukrainians and we also know that a few weeks after the Russian invasion they came very near coming to an agreement but were discouraged by Boris Johnson. They were also, I’m sure, discouraged by the United States.
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