Medvedev denounces Zelensky’s ‘territorial claims’ to Russia

Kiev is really trying to draw public attention away from its frontline setbacks, the former Russian president said

The latest decree by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky essentially amounts to “territorial claims” on sovereign Russian regions, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday. Posting on Telegram, he was referring to a document declaring six Russian regions to be “historically inhabited by Ukrainians.”

Signed on Monday, Ukraine’s Day of Unity, the presidential decree claims that six territories that are universally recognized as a part of Russia – the Krasnodar, Rostov, Voronezh, Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk regions – had been “historically” populated by “ethnic Ukrainians” that were then supposedly subjected to “forced Russification.”

The document then orders the Kiev government to develop an “action plan” to “preserve”the Ukrainian national identity in Russia and demands the “true history” of Ukraine be made known to the “world.” It also demands Russia provide people living in these regions with access to Ukrainian-language mass media and to some special “civil, social, cultural and religious rights.”

Medvedev dismissed the decree as a “crude PR stunt” aimed at drawing public attention away from the Ukrainian forces’ failures on the front lines. He also said there was even no need to comment on the contents of the order, since the territories mentioned in it have always been part of Russia.

The former president (2008-2012) also said it was high time Zelensky “stopped” such policies and abandoned them, or he might end up “annexing Canada in the near future.”

Zelensky himself described signing the decree as a way to promote “truth about Ukrainians… and their history.” He also claimed that it was aimed at “restoring the truth about the historical past for the Ukrainian future.”

The Russian regions mentioned in the decree have been regularly subjected to drone and missile attacks as well as shelling by the Ukrainian troops. In December, Belgorod – the capital of one of the regions supposedly “historically inhabited by Ukrainians” – was struck by a major Ukrainian attack. The strike claimed the lives of 25 people, including children. The Russian Defense Ministry also said that Kiev’s forces used banned cluster munitions in an attack targeting the city center just a day before New Year’s Eve celebrations.

https://www.rt.com/russia/591106-medvedev-zelensky-territorial-claims-russia/

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FROM THE BBC:

Ukraine's military intelligence has accused Russia of deliberately jeopardising the lives of prisoners of war, after Moscow said Kyiv had downed a plane with 65 PoWs on board.
The Ilyushin-76 military transport plane crashed in Russia's southern Belgorod region near Ukraine.
Russia's ministry of defence said Ukrainian PoWs were being flown into Belgorod for a prisoner exchange.
Kyiv said it was not told to ensure safe airspace as on previous occasions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68083739

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FROM RT:

Several people captured footage of the crash and shared videos of the incident on social media.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the plane was flying from the Chkalovsky airfield to Belgorod and was transporting the Ukrainian personnel for a prisoner swap with Kiev. Aside from the POWs, there were also six crew members and three accompanying personnel.

All those on board the aircraft were killed in the crash, according to the governor of Belgorod Region, Vyacheslav Gladkov. However, the crash did not cause any damage to structures or people on the ground, landing five to six kilometers from the nearest village.

According to Russian officials, another plane carrying an additional 80 Ukrainian POWs was also in the air at the time of the incident. After the first plane crashed, the second aircraft was diverted, according to MP Andrey Kartapolov.

What was the cause? Following the incident, the Russian Defense Ministry released a statement accusing Kiev’s forces of shooting down the plane using an anti-aircraft missile system. The ministry claimed that Russia’s Aerospace Forces radars recorded the launch of two Ukrainian missiles from the village of Liptsy in Kharkov Region.

The ministry has also stated that the Ukrainian side was informed of the flight ahead of time and was aware that it was carrying POWs, noting that the prisoner exchange was supposed to take place later in the afternoon at the Kolotilovka checkpoint.

Ukrainian media reports Shortly after the crash, the Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainskaya Pravda released a report claiming that it had received confirmation from Kiev's military that the its forces had shot the plane down and that it had been told that the aircraft was believed to be carrying S-300 missiles.

Shortly after, however, the outlet redacted that statement, stating only that Kiev had confirmed that it was aware of the plane crash but could not confirm it was carrying Ukrainian POWs.

Meanwhile, other Western media outlets such as US-state funded Radio Liberty have confirmed from sources within the Kiev government that a prisoner exchange with Russia was indeed scheduled for Wednesday, but no further comments have been provided.

Kiev’s intelligence A representative of the Ukrainian Intelligence Service, Andrey Yusov, has also confirmed the scheduled prisoner exchange. 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for matters regarding prisoners of war has refused to confirm the planned swap, only stating that it was “collecting and analyzing all the necessary information” while urging the media and its citizens to refrain from speculating on the incident. The body also noted that Russia is “actively carrying out special information operations” aimed at destabilizing Ukrainian society.

Russia’s reaction The head of Russia’s State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, has suggested that the IL-76 was shot down using Western Patriot or Iris-T air defense missiles. He has also proposed calling off any further prisoner swap negotiations with Kiev and insisted that Ukraine should officially be branded a terrorist state and its government a terrorist cell.

https://www.rt.com/russia/591220-russia-il76-crash-recap/

FROM SPUTNIK:

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240124/ukraine-may-have-downed-il-76-because-air-defenses-didnt-get-the-memo-on-ukrainian-pows-onboard-1116366363.html

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MAKE YOUR SINGULAR BRAIN CELL WORK... DO YOU THINK THE RUSSIANS WOULD NOT HAVE TOLD THE KIEV REGIME ABOUT THE PLANE COMING THEIR WAY? WITH THE COORDINATES? THE KIEV REGIME IS LYING LIKE A PACK OF JEWISH PIGS... AND THE BBC INDULGES LIKE THE CRAPPY VOICE OF MI6....

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BY Tarik Cyril Amar

Plan B? Zelensky makes a dangerous move in his faltering fight against Russia
The strange decree on “historically” Ukrainian territories may be a hint at a planned insurgency once the war is lost

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has caused a stir. But this time not by haranguing the West on how much it owes his country (in short: everything and then some). Or because prominent Ukrainians (former presidential adviser Aleksey Arestovich, for instance) are plausibly accusing Zelensky of missing a real and favorable opportunity for peace with Russia almost two years ago.

Rumors of intrigues surrounding the military leadership of General Valery Zaluzhny or accusations of authoritarianism leveled by, for example, the mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klitschko, are not the reason either. By now, that sort of thing is just Kiev background noise.

Instead, this time Zelensky has managed to get attention by issuing a decree ‘On Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’. Much of this fairly short document, which officially came into force on Ukraine’s Unity Day (January 22) is unsurprising. First, there is a rehash of weaponized/nationalized ‘history’ narratives that would make any serious historian blush, painting Russia (including during the Soviet period) as an evil empire that has ‘systematically’ sought to ‘destroy’ Ukrainian national identity for centuries. In Zelensky’s own words, the decree is meant to “restore the truth about the historical past for the sake of the Ukrainian future.”

But the document itself offers not truth but a silly and crude caricature. In reality, modern Ukrainian identity emerged comparatively late, and the Russian-tsarist authorities did try to curtail and restrict it, while the Soviet authorities attempted to shape it by both attacking it and promoting one version of it (as well as fighting alternatives, including a fascist version that allied with Nazi Germany). As you would expect, beyond politics, the even greater complexity of Russian-Ukrainian interactions – across the realms of (mixed) identities, beliefs, and culture, for instance – finds no reflection either.

Clearly, Zelensky decreeing history is not the place to look for an intellectually adequate, useful discussion of the fact that many more Ukrainians fought for the Soviet Union and against Nazi Germany than for Nazi Germany and against the Soviet Union. Or of biographies where Russian and Ukrainian facets were inextricably interwoven, such as that of the writer Nikolai Gogol and the even more complex cases of the painters Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky.

But let’s be fair, Ukraine and Russia have been openly at war – and on a large scale – for almost two years now. (The causes of this avoidable war are, fundamentally, the West’s reckless, shortsighted, and cynical strategy of expanding NATO come-what-may; the Ukrainian leadership’s unforgivable decision to let the West use Ukraine and its people as a proxy to weaken Russia; and last but not least, great miscalculations on all sides.) Against that background, a Ukrainian president – even one less ill-educated than Zelensky – can hardly be expected to deliver a sophisticated lecture on the discontents of national identity. So, let’s not believe the caricature he is offering us, but let’s not get worked up about it either.

What is more intriguing is another feature of the decree. Its central explicit purpose is to protect the national identity and rights of Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation, including but not limited to six named regions. Three of those regions border Ukraine and the other three used to border it before 2014, when Crimea became part of Russia. The decree labels these territories as “historically inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians.” The list of measures to be taken to do so is predictable and, frankly, not interesting. It is a mix of lawfare, international lobbying, and instrumentalization of academics and experts that you would expect (again with a special mission for those historians eager to let themselves be used as information warfare foot soldiers). The Ukrainian World Congress, Ukraine’s Academy of Science, and the Foreign Ministry, for instance, are all charged with making their contribution to what the decree promises will be a “truthful history” – apparently without irony. Pro tip: Truth in history, insofar as possible, never comes from a government decree.

Of greater interest is the question of what this decree is really supposed to accomplish. It is, after all, a strange document to issue now. Zelensky’s regime is facing a serious, potentially fatal decline in Western backing. The situation on the front lines – think Avdeevka, the crucial fortress town in eastern Ukraine about to be taken by Russia – is so dire that the common Western euphemism of ‘stalemate’ has simply become silly: This is not what a stalemate looks like, this is what being on the verge of losing looks like. Moscow, meanwhile, has signaled no hurry in making peace, especially after recent Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, some with major civilian casualties.

Zelensky’s decree, it is true, does not lay any direct claims on Russian territory. Yet it does, of course, imply the possibility of such claims. This seems an odd moment to up the ante in this manner.

Did Zelensky feel that he needed something uplifting to offer for Ukrainian Unity Day (22 January, the day of the decree’s publication)? Is the decree meant to confirm that the president wants to continue the war, by hinting that as bad as things may look now, in the future, Ukraine will turn the tables? If so, it seems a risky gamble. Among Ukrainians abroad, especially in the so-called ‘diaspora’, such gestures may still play well. (And maybe that is why the Ukrainian World Congress received separate mention.) It is intriguing, in this regard, to watch Zelensky’s public address on the occasion of Unity Day. Produced in his signature high-stagecraft style (complete with a dramatic score that seems to come out of a Hollywood melodrama), it climaxes in a long sequence highlighting Ukrainians abroad. But those Ukrainians actually in Ukraine could feel alienated. For them, this decree at this time may come across as a gimmick, and worse, as revealing (or confirming?) that Zelensky is no longer attached to reality.

But what if the motives behind the decree are more complicated? Could it be an attempt to create a bargaining chip (weak, certainly, but perhaps better than nothing) for a future settlement with Russia? If that is the case, it is most likely to come across as a sign of despair, a case of clutching at straws. For it is difficult to see why future Russian negotiators would care. If Zelensky – and those around him – really still believe that yet another narrative offensive can compensate for real defeat on real battlefields, then they have learned nothing.

There is yet another possibility. And it is the most unsettling one. Recall that, just before the large-scale escalation of late February 2022, many in Ukraine and abroad did not expect the country to be able to fight for a long time. Against that backdrop, there were signals, promoted by the US, that a quick Russian victory would be followed by a shift to insurgency.

That was an awful idea. But it never went away. While most of the war has unfolded more conventionally, as a clash between large armies, there have also been infiltration, sabotage, and assassination campaigns. With the war going badly for Ukraine, some irresponsible strategists in both Washington and Kiev are bound to consider a plan B – namely, answering a Russian victory with an attempt to launch an extended insurgency.

The guerrilla-style operations undertaken up until now have one feature in common with Zelensky’s strange decree – the targeting of areas inside Russia. It may appear far-fetched, and it is a matter of speculation, but we should not rule out the possibility that Zelensky is trying to hint that Ukrainians inside Russia could become an asset in this type of warfare. If so, then the true intention of the decree would be to promote paranoia inside Russia. And the best response is to absolutely ignore it.

https://www.rt.com/russia/591281-zelensky-historically-ukrainian-territories/

METHINKS THAT ZELENSKY-THE-BUM ISN'T INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO THINK OF THIS STUPIDITY BY HIMSELF... THE IDEA TO GRAB "6 RUSSIAN PROVINCES AS YUCKRAINIAN" WOULD BE COMING FROM THE POOEY BOWELS OF THE PENTAGON — TO STIR THE RUSSIAN PSYCHE... TRYING TO DISTRACT FROM ZELENSKAKA LOSING LEGITIMATE RUSSIAN PROVINCES TO RUSSIA. THE WEST KNOWS THAT PUTIN WANTS TO PROTECT UKRAINE (KIEV IS STILL IN ONE PIECE AND LITTLE MACRONLEONS CAN COME AND GO OUT OF THIS CITY AS THEY WISH) BUT PUTIN WANTS TO DESTROY THE NAZILENSKY REGIME OF KIEV THAT THE WEST IS PROTECTING BEYOND BELIEF. SOMETHING WILL CRACK....

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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