Against the background of statements about the need to support Ukraine in case of aggression from Russia, the U.S. announced on January 2 the evacuation of a number of employees from its embassy as well as their families. In an interview with Front News - Ukraine, political analyst Oleksiy Golobutskiy talks about how this decision affects Ukraine's level of trust in NATO, as well as about the upcoming resumption of the Normandy format.
The United States, Britain and Australia could not have been unaware of the stir that the announcement of the withdrawal of a number of embassy staff would cause. And yet - they publicly announced this decision For what reason?
We have 126 diplomatic missions in Ukraine, and only three of them have announced that their families are going home. But let's think if God forbid a war really breaks out, then not only these three embassies will be bombed, given that some others are in the same area as them. The information comes from a variety of different countries, so I do not think that we should react violently to this message.
Today, for example, the Czech Republic has said that it will allocate troops, and Croatia, on the contrary, that it will withdraw troops from NATO in the region if it has to confront Russia. This is information pumping, in which everyone solves his own problems. The West wants to make Russia understand the obvious dilemma: either you start a war - it won't take place on U.S. territory anyway - or you retreat and forget what you've been charging us - that is, raising the stakes. And to do that, it needs to be as clear as possible - if Russia tries to do something, the price will be very high.
If we had done this 10 days ago, it would have been one information background, but now, when I see references to publications of such countries, from which I did not expect not that they are not only Ukraine, but at all interested in something - reports about our situation, when the whole world is focused one way or another on Ukraine - will or will not. Well, how long can it last? 2-3 weeks. And then the Western countries rationalize that this tension cannot last forever. There has to be a détente one way or the other - either collapse or de-escalation with a withdrawal to the basic positions.
In your opinion, is there a danger of terrorism on the territory of Ukraine from Russia's side?
We had a lot of mysterious deaths - people who took part in the ATO died. Well, we have a huge number of people in our country who took part in military actions - hundreds of thousands. Russia has every opportunity to commit such terrorist attacks, but they don't do that today. I don't even know by what logic.
Maybe at the moment they don't see the expediency in this, and they have it planned for the next stage. But they have all the possibilities for that, because with all of our special services, we understand that Russia's penetration into Ukraine was quite high, and remains so. We speak, we understand each other, we are ethnically close. So it's kind of easy to carry out subversive activities here, while remaining an inconspicuous person. So this danger remains and always will be, as long as the tension between Ukraine and Russia. And it may last for a long time - for years, if not decades. And, accordingly, there will always be the danger of terrorist acts - single acts or a terrorist attack against Ukraine.
Last week, the U.S. imposed sanctions against two current MPs, Taras Kozak and Volodymyr Oliynyk, as well as against Vladimir Sivkovych and Oleg Voloshyn, who left Ukraine. Is the struggle against the Kremlin's agents of influence real or they remain as strong as under, for example, Yanukovych?
No, of course, there is no shadow of the influence that was in Yanukovych's time. The mood of our people has also changed. We're a democratic country, we haven't eliminated pro-Russian political projects from the political field, they are present in our country. We need to introduce legislative changes - to pass a law on the inadmissibility of anti-Ukrainian activities, so that people don't create pro-Russian political projects, because they will be banned immediately.
And if you let them into your political field, then you have made a mistake and a part of your population will perceive the persecution of these politicians not as persecution of the fifth column, but as reprisals against political opponents. Which would be wrong from an informational point of view. And the fight is going on permanently - various information cells are being opened, the SBU occasionally announces that it is closing some telegram channels.
How are these sanctions useful? They have more of a psychological significance. Because the two officials who escaped have nothing to do with anything anymore, they are sitting in Russia. And the other two? Well Kozak - he's been under Ukrainian sanctions for a long time. But for many people who are agents of the Kremlin, not in fact, but for political expediency. They just deal with the relevant electorate.
We understand that many of them have the same attitude toward Russia as many of their opponents, but they got the electorate that traditionally votes for a pro-Russian agenda. Here it is necessary for them to just think: does it make sense to continue their activities, if they have the potential to get serious trouble in their future lives.
On January 25, Macron said that he was going to meet with the Russian side in the Normandy quartet format. Does Ukraine have a chance to achieve a revision of the Minsk agreements at these talks or is participation in such a format a sure loser?
Russia and the separatists continue to commit multiple violations of the Minsk agreements. Shelling is taking place, Russian passports are being distributed, and a bill has been introduced in the Duma to recognize the DNR and LNR. These are all violations of the Minsk agreements. But Ukraine's position is that time is passing, circumstances are changing, and some kind of sequence of events is necessary - not in the Russian version. Because it is clear what sequence there is, but in some adequate variant. As Merkel said, the Minsk agreements are not dogma. So it is necessary to negotiate, and for this purpose Europeans are needed.
If Russia doesn't change its approach at all - it violates the agreements itself, but demands that others strictly implement the agreement in the way it thinks it should, it's just not realistic. Any government or president who agrees to this will meet great resistance in Ukraine itself.
What are Ukraine's plans for these agreements? Is Ukraine really ready to grant a special status to the eastern regions?
It's all on the palm of our hands: they want to insert the DPR and LPR back into the format in which they exist today. This is unacceptable to us. Because it is a time bomb that can drive the country all the way to its collapse. Even after Putin's death, I'm sure that Ukraine will have a lot of problems with Donbass. Especially since, as history shows, Russia does not give up its seized territories. There will have to be some kind of global catastrophe like the collapse of the USSR or the Russian Empire. So it's a long shot. In addition, we are not the kind of state with the economy that can afford to take on the restoration of Donetsk and Lugansk at this stage.
Georgian politician Zurab Dzhaparidze believes that Russia has outplayed NATO, because today we are not discussing the de-occupation of Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, but the prevention of a new Russian aggression.
Strategically, Russia has losses because it is a very rich country, and as you can't say, a European country. But it becomes more and more of a pariah every year because of Ukraine and Georgia. Strategically it will lose - it is not developing, not becoming modern, on the contrary - it is getting closer and closer to the Soviet Union than to the normal world. And tactically? Well, Putin is in power. And he will probably remain in power until his death. Perhaps this is his only task, this is how he sees his historical mission. That is, tactically, he has sold the conditions under which there is an authoritarian regime in the country, and it is deteriorating every year. And there are no internal threats to this regime. But it has social and economic worsening. Kazakhstan's experience has shown that all of this can explode very quickly.
And they have developed a line from Soviet times: if the country is surrounded by enemies, it is necessary to unite from these enemies. And these zones of instability - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Donbass - keep us, Ukraine and Georgia, in a state of instability. We can neither fully integrate with NATO, nor with the EU. We can't develop the way we could have developed under peaceful conditions. And at the same time it is an opportunity to put pressure on us. But your politician is not quite right here: Putin has shown that he can seize territories and hold them.
Have any recovery processes begun in Ukraine itself in terms of fighting corruption?
This is a permanent process - the fight against oligarchs and corruption. Two years ago it sort of came to its political denouement - anticorruption legislation was adopted and corresponding bodies appeared. But during these two years there has been something like a profanation of this process. Corruption has not become less; it has become more chaotic than it was two years ago.
Does Zelensky have the will to start a real fight against corruption or will he have to wait for a new president?
This requires political will. It is necessary not to take part in corruption schemes himself and not to let his entourage do it. But Zelensky has no will: on one hand he does not take part in these schemes, but on the other he does not stop anyone from his entourage allowing them to be drawn into these corrupt intricacies.
Front News - Ukraine