In relation to the web of shameless lies and slander coming down on the whole world and Serbia under orders of those who have long since been upholding the policy of destroying international law and undermining the central role of the UN in global affairs, I would like to voice our opinion once more on the events in Ukraine.
The West ignored the Donbas tragedy
The state that the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) had been in prior to being recognized by Russia was in many ways similar to the state of affairs in the second half of the 20th century. In 1914, our country had no other moral choice except to declare mobilisation and go into World War I to defend the fraternal state of Serbia, which had been presented with an unacceptable and humiliating ultimatum by Austria-Hungry. We did not have a choice today either. The Kyiv authorities, much mightier in military terms that Donetsk or Luhansk, had been preparing in recent months for a military operation in southeast Ukraine. They had been getting training from instructors from the West, receiving increasing amounts of lethal weaponry and ammunition from the NATO countries. They studied the Zagreb experience in the ousting of 250,000 Serbs from Croatia in 1995 (since 2016, a Ukrainian-Croatian interdepartmental working group tasked with "reintegrating territories" had been active").
Over a period of eight years, more than four million inhabitants of Donbas – women, the elderly, and children – were constantly shelled by the Kyiv regime. That is twice as long as the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 lasted, in which the USSR and its allies, including Belgrade, broke the backbone of fascism and liberated the continent of that ideology. Think about whether that was too much or too little from the example of your country, which in the same period, in a mutually beneficial partnership with Russia, managed to make a major economic breakthrough and strengthen its leadership positions in the Balkans.
Kyiv's sponsors from the West, who had supported the anti-constitutional coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, ignored the tragedy of Donbas. They attached much greater importance to the tasks of conquering Ukraine, imposing a militant nationalism, and instigating a church rift, in order to turn that country into the grounds for putting pressure on Russia, which pursues an independent foreign policy, preventing the attempts by the West to substitute a "rule-based order" for international law.
Mission getting accomplished
All these years, Russia has been investing a great deal of effort to resolve the armed conflict within Ukraine by negotiations. It admitted over one million refugees. It delivered humanitarian aid to both the DPR and the LPR, taking care of people in distress.
It was a key contributor to the development of the 2014 Minsk Agreements, and in 2015 proposed a series of measures on how to implement it, which were approved by the sides in the conflict – Kyiv, the DPR, and the LPR, followed soon after by the UN Security Council. It kept insisting on implementing this document so that permanent peace would return to Donbas. Kyiv, on the other hand – with a cynical tacit approval of the West – pointedly ignored the agreements made. It pandered to an expansion of neo-Nazi ideas and persecuted those who thought differently, even through out-of-court clashes with their political opponents.
Kyiv waged on the war against all those who thought of themselves as Russians and had not renounced their identity. It did not stop the shelling of the DPR and LPR after Russia recognized these republics and signed mutual aid agreements with them. On the contrary, the shelling was intensified. This was why we felt compelled to respond to the request by Donetsk and Luhansk, and start a special operation to protect them, under Article 51 of Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
The Russian Armed Forces have been consistently and successfully accomplishing the tasks of ensuring the rights and security of the DPR ad LPR, demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine, as well as removing the unacceptable threats to Russia by the North Atlantic Alliance, which strove to entrench itself in the Ukrainian territory. These terms are now discussed in negotiations, including with the Ukrainian side. I would like to point out that the Russian soldiers do not carry out air, artillery, or shelling strikes against residential areas and civilian population. We are not planning, and have never planned, the occupation of Ukraine.
Gratitude to Serbs
The Russian Armed Forces do not pose the real danger to civilians. Rather, the danger comes from the Kyiv regime and the "national battalions", which are now virtually out of Kyiv's control. It is they who have been deploying heavy-duty weaponry, i.e. armoured vehicles, artillery units, and multiple rocket launchers near school and nursery walls. Women and children are being held as hostages. Criminals have been released from the prisons. There is an ongoing uncontrolled distribution of tens of thousands of automatic weapons, which only instigates robbery and looting. Ammunition banned under international humanitarian law is being used. This must be stopped.
And another thing. Some colleagues, whose collective essay was published in the March 2 issue of Kurir, did not hesitate, in a bout of sincerity, to say that they found it "funny" to hear of the eight-year-long tragedy of Donbas. Unlike them, I find nothing funny about it. The anti-Russian sentiment that has swept over the West – now including culture, sports, and everyday life, the areas that even during the peak of the Cold War were considered windows of communication – is sad and hysterical. The masks, as the old saying goes, have fallen.
I am immensely grateful to the thousands of Serbs who refuse to succumb to the aggressive propaganda and show true solidarity with Russia. Rest assured that our cause is just. Together we have weathered more violent storms. God willing, we shall weather this one too.
Kurir.rs
