Kyiv, March 6, 2014. Following the reaction of Ukraine’s officials, different groups of the country’s diverse population voiced their concern over false statements recently made by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. For instance, Ukrainian Jewish community slam Putin’s fabricated declaration of the elevated level of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Concurrently, the Sunni Muslim population of Ukraine, Crimean Tatars, come together as patriots of Ukraine who oppose Russia’s de facto invasion of the peninsula.
Ukraine’s population has been diverse for many generations. Interestingly, “sociologists have found that Maidan’s social, regional and ethnic base was broad,” reads a recent article in the New York Times. It also stated that the series of World Value Surveys found a shift in the past decade — across all regions and ethnic groups — from “survival values” of the industrial era toward post-industrial “self-expression.”
As if to prove the point, Russian-speaking Jewish businessmen, managers, public figures, scientists and scholars, artists and musicians living in Ukraine addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin in the open letter on behalf of the multinational people of Ukraine, Ukraine’s national minorities, and the Jewish community. The Jews give Putin the credit for being hard to fool, yet he was depicted as “consciously picking and choosing lies and slander from the massive amount of information on Ukraine”.
The letter states, that Russian-speaking or ethnic Russians in Ukraine are not being harassed in any way and that their minority rights are not being violated; the signees of the address also condemn Putin’s backing the lies voiced earlier by Ukraine’s former President Yanukovych, namely: “…Kyiv is full of armed people who have begun to trash buildings, places of worship, churches. Innocent people have begun to suffer. People have simply been robbed and killed in the street…”
The Jewish community rebuts President Putin’s claims about the alleged elevated level of anti-Semitism in Ukraine retorting with the fact that last year Jewish organizations have noticed growth in anti-Semitic tendencies in Russia.
With Russia tightening its grip on Crimea, the country’s leadership seems to underestimate another Ukrainian minority – the only native people to the Crimean peninsula – Crimean Tatars. With Tatars composing about 13 percent of the Crimean population, their level of self-organization and patriotism is something Russia will have to deal with at some point. The people who were first deported by the Soviets in 1944 then repatriated during Gorbachev’s presidency, they have no other home than Crimea, which slams the widespread notion supported by pro-Russian population – that Crimea “has always been Russian”. With Russian intervention, the Tatars went from being the Euromaidan revolution heroes to being isolated and pushed away from power.
