Ukraine at 35: The view from Russia

Russian officials and commentators look back on Kiev’s journey from Soviet powerhouse to Western-dependent failed state Thirty-five years after Ukraine declared independence, the anniversary offers little cause for celebration from Moscow’s perspective.

Russian officials and commentators argue that a country which inherited one of the Soviet Union’s strongest industrial bases has spent the ensuing decades squandering that legacy, surrendering its real sovereignty to the West, and building a national identity around hostility toward Russia and rejection of the two nations’ shared past.

RT gathered comments from Russian diplomats, politicians, and analysts on what – if anything – remains of that independence and where the country’s chosen path is ultimately leading.

Read more Ukraine at 35 Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s representative to the United Nations: Ukraine is marking the 35th anniversary of its so-called “independence” with great fanfare.

But is there really anything to celebrate? Over the past three and a half decades, successive governments have run the country into the ground.

Those who shouted the loudest about Ukraine’s independence and bright future have, whether knowingly or not, been the very ones destroying it.

Its current dictator – the self-proclaimed “president of peace,” whose term has long since expired – has been particularly successful in this regard.

With the active involvement of the collective West – whose countries claim to embody “civilization” and “democracy” – Ukraine has been turned into a “Zelensky concentration camp.” All dissent and political opposition have been outlawed, while those brave enough to voice an alternative point of view are imprisoned without trial or due process – or physically eliminated.

The unprecedented persecution of the canonical Orthodox Church has been accompanied by brutal attacks on clergy and parishioners.

Meanwhile, history is being rewritten wholesale: the Soviet legacy is repudiated, while Hitler’s accomplices and collaborators – responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians, Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians during World War II – are glorified.

It is not only the Russian language that is under attack.

Everything associated with our shared past is being systematically erased.

The Kiev authorities display a truly primitive form of Russophobia and xenophobia – directed, in practice, even against their own citizens, many of whom are Russian not only by ancestry but also by cultural identity.

Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vassily Nebenzia at the UN General Assembly in New York, US, February 20, 2020. © Sputnik/Brian Smith Perhaps nowhere is the wretchedness of Kiev’s rulers more evident than in one seemingly absurd example.