Dependence Day: A generation after the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine is a ruined proxy of the West

Dependence Day: A generation after the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine is a ruined proxy of the West

Ukraine could have bridged East and West. Instead, corruption, nationalism, and Western meddling left it broken
There is one feeling I often recall from having lived and worked in Ukraine – to be precise, in its most nationalist, full-of-itself city, Lviv – for a total of five years in the 2000s: Thank God, at least there’s no violence!
That is what I, some other foreigners, and quite a few Ukrainians, too, were thinking and even saying then. The country was politically and even culturally polarized, extremely corrupt, and a sham ‘democracy’ even more fake than most of the rest.
It was dominated and bled dry by a greedy, hypocritical, and – despite all the cheap talk, the pious singing-of-anthems-hand-on-heart, and the cheesy peasant braids and stitched shirts – deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs. There was no rule of law, the courts were a bad joke, and the police was a racket.
And yet, while the usual business-crime complex took its toll and there was the occasional , there was no large-scale violence. There was bitter grumbling galore, including about Crimea, all the time. But there was no civil war – as the almighty US intelligence services had infamously in the even darker 1990s – and no one was reaching for a gun either to leave an unbearable country or keep others in it by force.   
While the Americans were busy thinking about the possibility – and perhaps opportunities – of Ukrainians killing each other in large numbers, their British cousins were considering another kind of doom. For them, more than three decades ago, the most interesting question was whether Ukraine and Russia would go to war, specifically over Crimea. There, British spooks back then warned with unusual honesty, and things might become less than cordial if Kiev didn’t watch its steps.
And here we are now: On the 35th official anniversary of its existence outside the former Soviet Union, Ukraine has become the sum of all fears, much worse than even its pervasively corrupt, brutally unfair, and de facto lawless pre-2014 version. It is now ruled by its worst, most corrupt, and most authoritarian and bloody regime ever – hands down – under Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies. They , embezzle, and as if there’s no tomorrow, which, to be fair, there really probably isn’t for them, at least not in Ukraine.
They literally and, in effect, sell their subjects as cannon fodder, so that they can profit and the West can have its slaughterhouse war against Russia, in an insane, evil, and futile attempt to eliminate Moscow as a power to be reckoned with. This is the reality of and nothing remotely like it happened before Zelensky and his accomplices took over. Those who do not readily submit to being treated as combat cattle regularly from ‘falls’ or maybe just blowing their nose.
The Ukrainian mass media have never been remotely clean, objective, or reliable. But the zombified and self-zombifying propaganda machine created under Zelensky is unprecedentedly awful. Those who openly resist the national brainwashing are by kangaroo courts, .
Or : Ukraine’s real population has almost halved since the end of the Soviet Union, and the future looks even worse. And while part of this catastrophe is due to the current war, much of it has been produced by the ceaseless class-war-from-above of injustice, exploitation, and hopelessness that Ukraine’s ‘elites’ have waged on their own subjects for a third of a century while blabbing sanctimoniously about nation this and nation that.
Read more And the results of all these horrors? They are abysmal even on their own perverse terms. Just look at the map: Crimea is gone and so are substantial portions of Ukraine’s post-Soviet east due to a combination of regional rebellion, Kiev’s cack-handed, violent