Mirror-Imaging over Ukraine
Saturday, April 26th, 2014Take a look at the latest word issuing from Voice of Russia, the international radio broadcasting “service,” and associated website, of the Russian government. Hubert Orzechowski of the Polish edition of Newsweek first picked this up.
Translation: “Russian radio: Poles in Zhitomir want autonomy, and Warsaw pushes for the break-up of Ukraine.” Zhitomir is a province of Western Ukraine, with a lot of ethnic Poles in it (although, interestingly, it’s not one of the two Ukrainian provinces that actually abut Poland itself).
The lede (of the Voice of Russia article he cites):
Ethnic Poles living in Ukraine demand a referendum in the Zhitomir Region to create a Polish autonomy with broad self-governance rights. They also insist that the Polish language be granted the official status along with the Ukrainian language.
As I say, it’s the Polish Newsweek that points this out but, fortunately for us all, the article where Voice of Russia lays out this case of Polish agitation in Western Ukraine was published in the English-language section of their site (from where I took that above lede), so you can click that link to read it all, in English which is often less-than-perfect but still quite understandable.*
Just be aware that it’s all a crock. That’s the point of Orzechowski’s Newsweek piece. Yes, parts of Western Ukraine are what used to be Poland, before World War II; yes, there was considerable tension between Poles and Ukrainians over those lands – even leading to infamous massacres – in the 1930s and 40s. But for Poland a lot of water has passed under the bridge since that era, a lot of changes-of-regime, plenty of time for a change of attitude. Further, there has been no indication of this sort of alleged unrest among ethnic Polish citizens of Ukraine other than that cited in Voice of Russia’s fevered imaginings.
These days the Polish government acknowledges its special relationship with Ukraine in more positive ways, such as actively supporting its eventual EU membership, as well as having taken the lead (along with Germany, in fact) in EU diplomacy towards Ukraine and Russia back when the Maidan Square crisis was at its height the first couple months of this year. This leading Polish role is not so much the case anymore, probably because NATO is becoming a more important forum for Europe to confront these increasingly alarming developments to the East.
So the propaganda purpose of this sort of article is self-evident. As Orzechowski says at the end of his own commentary, “you can’t help feeling that this description fits perfectly yet another neighbor of Kiev’s”; one doesn’t know whether to mock Voice of Russia for its lack of imagination, or to admire it for its audacity, in trying to project onto Poland the very same irredentist trick its sponsor government is itself trying to pull in Eastern Ukraine.
* But do let me give credit to Voice of Russia’s English-language writers where it is due: they actually nail the subjunctive there (“. . . insist that the Polish language be granted . . .”), something far beyond, say, at least 75% of English native speakers.
