By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 11/21/23

The West’s liberal-globalist elite weaponizes identity politics at home and abroad in advance of their New Cold War bloc’s strategic interests, with there being no principle except for the pursuit of power over their domestic and foreign rivals.

Two statements from leading Ukrainian officials this month about their country’s Russian minority should have raised eyebrows among Westerners but regrettably went unnoticed despite them being deemed unacceptable by that bloc if someone within them said the same about their own minorities. Deputy Prime Minister for European integration Olga Stefanishina claimed that no such minority exists anymore, while Rada Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk said their rights deserve to be infringed.

The first told a press conference on 9 November that “There is no Russian minority in Ukraine. It does not exist. There is not a single judicially defined community identifying itself as a Russian minority.” As for the second, he told state-controlled TV on Monday that “There are no Russian ethnic minorities in Ukraine as of now and there can be none…If a people do not show respect but commit aggression against Ukraine, their rights should be infringed upon in this field.”

Both comments followed the European Commission recommending in early November that Ukraine begin talks on joining the EU, and the bloc didn’t chastise either of those two officials for what they said about their country’s Russian minority, both of whom claimed that the EU supports their stance. Their comments are counterfactual as proven by the US government’s own official statistics per the CIA World Factbook, which reports that 17% of the Ukrainian population is comprised of ethnic Russians.

This is more than the percentage of African Americans in the US and slightly less than the rate of Hispanic Americans so Kiev’s policy towards its Russian minority would be the same as if Washington denied that either of those two exist on subjective administrative and moral grounds. That former Soviet Republic’s “de-Russification” and “Ukrainization” policies created the aforesaid administrative conditions for precisely that purpose, which in turn provoked an uproar that led to the latter faux moral one.

It’s understandable that any people would protest the state’s aggressive persecution of their ethnicity, language, and even religion like post-“Maidan” Ukraine has done to its Russian minority, and it’s within their UN-enshrined rights to peacefully demonstrate against this. Nevertheless, as all objective observers already know by now, the West only arbitrarily upholds the implementation of international law whenever its policymakers expect to derive some strategic benefit from doing so.

In this case, the West in general and the EU in particular turn a blind eye towards Ukraine’s persecution of its Russian minority, its administrative elimination of them from national legal existence, and its official’s justification of the preceding internationally illegal policies as part of their proxy war on Russia. This selective approach embodies the so-called “rules-based order” as was explained above, the specific standard of which in this example would be deemed unacceptable if applied within the West itself.

This insight shows that the West’s liberal-globalist elite weaponizes identity politics at home and abroad in advance of their New Cold War bloc’s strategic interests, with there being no principle except for the pursuit of power over their domestic and foreign rivals. It’s undeniable that Ukraine’s Russian minority is treated much worse than the US’ African American or Hispanic American ones, yet the US won’t say a word since it agrees with Stefanchuk that Russians deserve to have their rights infringed.