Who Are Ukraine's 'Palestinians' ?

 Last year in April I stumbled upon a project by Zelensky called the "Big Israel" which went largely overlooked by Western media until last week. A few days before the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, National Interest published an article by Leon Hadar about this outlandish project for post-war Ukraine.

Zelensky's " Big Israel" project advocates emulating Israel and building Ukraine up as a militarised nation, continuously at war with its internal and external enemies, i.e. mainly its Russophone citizens and Russia. Hadar considers that Zelensky's project has merit and he explains why:

'But the notion that Ukraine will try to be “like Israel” may not sound so farfetched. For instance, like the Jewish State, Ukraine enjoys wide public support among Americans and their representatives on Capitol Hill, who believe that the Ukrainians, like the Israelis, are “like them,” while the Russians, like the Arabs, are the detested “other.”

And, indeed, like in the case of Israel, Ukraine’s efforts to position itself as a natural ally of Washington, in both interests and values, has been accepted as a diplomatic axiom by powerful American foreign policy forces. Both Republican neoconservatives as well as many “conservative nationalists” on the political Right, and by liberal internationalists who dominate the thinking among Democrats, including the one currently occupying the White House, have come on board.'

One does not have to be an expert in international relations to realise how absurd and illogical such a project is. It is, however, revealing for the thinking that dominates  Kiev"s current political elite. For them, Western Ukrainians have much  in common with the Jews of Israel, whereas the Russophones from the Donbas region are viewed as Ukraine's equivalent of the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and Ramallah.

The division of Ukraine along ethnic lines was envisaged first during the 1990s by Samuel Huntington, a valued National Interest contributor and leading national security expert. In truth, since Kiev refused the Minsk agreements, there just aren't any other solutions than the separation of the Donbas region inhabited by Russophones from the rest of Ukraine. 

This separation should not necessarily have caused a war, if the civilised parting of Czechia from Slovakia was any guide. Unfortunately, the Kiev regime knowingly preferred to emulate Yugoslavia's example in dealing with its internal ethnic strife. Worse still, it chose to involve the United States, which obviously saw an opportunity to advance their hegemonic agenda against Russia.

The project shows Zelensky and the other ministers or advisors of Jewish descent from his cabinet are trying to position Ukraine as America's 52nd state, immediately behind Israel. By putting an equal sign between Russia and the Arab countries in the Middle East and by forcing the Russophones of Ukraine to accept Kiev's rule, Zelensky hopes to position Ukraine geopolitically as the US's main outpost against its foe Russia in Europe.

The Jewish minority in today's Ukraine is minuscule. This large country cannot become a Jewish ethnic state in Europe, like Israel is in the Middle East. Indeed, Europe as a whole is unlikely to be fertile ground for the creation of such a huge US military outpost - potentially nuclearly armed - in its midst. Nor is Russia, with its old military tradition and its nuclear arms, willing to play the role of the Arabs for the US and Ukrainian military establishments. 

Although so far Zelensky's lobbying in Washington has proved lucrative, with the $130 billion already received, Ukraine is simply too big and situated in the wrong geopolitical region to be endlessly supported financially by the United States, as is the case with Israel. Last but not least, the Russophones from Donbas have demonstrated since 2014 that they resolutely reject the part of "European Palestinians" in this tragedy, directed by Zelensky on behalf of the Kiev regime.