What Russia Should Do with Ukraine
"What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, romanized: Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat s Ukrainoy),[a][1] is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.[2] The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state, as well as the full destruction of the Ukrainian national identity in accordance with Russia's aim to accomplish the "denazification" of the latter.[3][4] The article contrasts the views that Russian president Vladimir Putin expressed in the speech announcing the invasion, where he stated there were no plans to occupy Ukraine, and the Ukrainian people's right to self-determination would not be infringed upon.
It was published on 3 April 2022 in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine,[2] on the same day as the bodies of dozens of civilians were discovered after the retreat of Russian forces from Ukrainian city of Bucha.[3][5][6]
The article caused international criticism and outrage[3][7][8] and has been condemned as evidence of genocidal intent.[9][10][11]
Content[edit]
The article advocates for "brutal censorship" of the Ukrainian culture, large-scale "de-ukrainization" of Ukrainians on the territories occupied by Russia in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.[4][12][8]
The author insists that Ukraine's ethnocentrism is an artificial perversion,[13] that Ukraine's existence is "impossible" as a nation-state,[12] and that the word "Ukraine" itself cannot be allowed to exist.[3][4] According to the author, Ukraine should be dismantled and replaced with several states under direct control by Russia.[14] He adds that the "ethnic component of self-identification" of Ukraine would also be rejected after its occupation by Russia.[12]
The author claims that "most likely the majority" of Ukrainian civilians are "passive Nazis and Nazi accomplices. They supported the Nazi authorities and pandered to them",[12] thus, they "technically" cannot be punished as war criminals, but can be subjected to "denazification" and are to blame.[15] While Sergeytsev notes that there are no Nazi parties, symbols, racist laws, or other evidence of actual Nazism, he counters that by asserting that "Ukrainian Nazism is unique due to its amorphism and ambiguity", which is, per Timothy Snyder, equivalent to a "special Russian definition of Nazism".[5] The author asserts that Banderites are actually marginal to "Ukro-nazism", and that the real menace is Pro-Europeanism.
He claims that Ukrainians must "assimilate the experience" of the war "as a historical lesson and atonement for [their] guilt". After the war, forced labor, imprisonment and the death penalty would be used as punishment. After that, the population would be "integrated" into "Russian civilization".[12] The author describes the planned actions as a "decolonization" of Ukraine.[13][14]
According to Anton Shekhovtsov, writing in Haaretz, the article is an expanded version of a 2016 article[16][17][18] by Russian columnist Alexander Zhuchkovsky,[19] who is linked to Russian Imperial Movement. In that article, Zhuchkovsky called for the dehumanization of Ukrainians, saying "It is natural and right, as we are fighting not against people but against enemies, [...] not against people but against Ukrainians."[20]
Author[edit]
The author of the text, Timofey Sergeytsev, advised Victor Pinchuk projects from 1998 to 2000, including Pinchuk's 1998 parliamentary election campaign in Ukraine, and was a member of the Board of Directors of Interpipe Group.[21]
He was born in 1963.[22] He studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1980, where he was a student of Georgy Shchedrovitsky.[23][24]
In 1999, he worked for the presidential campaign of then incumbent Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. In September 2004, he was a consultant to Viktor Yanukovych. In 2010, he worked with Arseniy Yatsenyuk.[21] During Russia’s 2012 presidential elections, he worked as a consultant for Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and his party Right Cause.[25] In 2012, Sergeitsev co-produced the Russian feature film Match which was criticized for Ukrainophobia.[26] In 2014, it was banned on the territory of Ukraine as propaganda.[27][28]
According to Der Tagesspiegel, Sergeitsev supports the (since 2015) pro-Putin (formerly opposition) political party "Civic Platform" financed by one of the oligarchs from Putin's inner circle.[4] According to Euractiv, Sergeitsev is "one of the ideologists of modern Russian fascism".[29]
Reactions[edit]
Domestic reaction[edit]
Dmitry Medvedev, the current deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, as well as former president of Russia between 2008 and 2012 and former prime minister of Russia between 2012 and 2020, reiterated the main points of the article a few days after its publication. According to Medvedev, "a passionate segment of Ukrainian society has been praying to the Third Reich",[30] Ukraine is a Nazi state like the Third Reich that must be "denazified" and "eradicated", and the result will be a collapse of Ukraine as a state.[31] Medvedev claims that the collapse is a path towards "open Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok".[31] Medvedev has continued this rhetoric, posting lengthy diatribes against Ukraine aimed at domestic audiences. For example, in his "On Fakes and True History", he claimed that "the very essence of Ukrainianness, fed by anti-Russian venom and lies about its identity, is one big sham".[32]
On 26 April 2022, Putin's national security adviser Nikolai Patrushev said that "the Americans by using their proteges in Kyiv decided to create an antipode of our country, cynically choosing Ukraine for this, trying to divide an essentially single nation" and that "the result of the policy of the West and the Kyiv regime under its control can only be the disintegration of Ukraine into several states".[33]
Russian opposition politician Leonid Gozman, former co-chairman of Right Cause, called Sergeytsev a "scumbag".[25] Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst at Carnegie Moscow Center, said that consultants like Sergeytsev can be used to create strategies for authorities but they "don’t have any serious influence on anything".[25]