Russian propaganda and the shortcomings of the Ukrainian government have led to a negative image of the Ukrainian state among some Ukrainians. While in today’s world the state remains the only tool for protecting and organizing society that can ensure sustainable progress, Ukrainians are being led to believe that the state is a corrupt official and a dishonest policeman.
Numerous TG channels and Facebook publics such as “Solomiya Ukrainets” (whose real identity has not been confirmed) are spreading critical and directly destructive messages against the Ukrainian state. In the style of Makhnovism, quotes, phrases, and even poems are being imposed on Ukrainians that make Ukrainian readers hate and despise their own Ukrainian state. Despite the fact that the Ukrainian Cossacks of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Ivan Mazepa fought for nothing less than the state, Petliura and Banderites, today’s anonymous populists, portray the Ukrainian state as a trough of money for pigs in parliamentary suits, and always portray civil servants as brazen corrupt officials. Despite the shortcomings that exist in the state apparatuses of absolutely all countries in the world, such a distorted attitude toward their own country at least threatens Ukrainians with foreign enslavement and genocide.
The Kremlin is well aware that, as has happened in history, the Russian regular army can easily deal with scattered militia groups armed with light small arms, and will hunt down the rebels in the forests in a few years. Instead, fighting an organized Ukrainian state that has all branches of the military, logistics, aviation and long-range artillery, armored vehicles and drones that nightmare half of Erethia every day is a difficult and painful task for Russians. That is why the Ukrainian state, as the only effective organizational and defensive force of the Ukrainian people that can attract foreign aid and weapons, has become the number one target for Russian propaganda. The Kremlin knows that to defeat Ukrainians, the most important thing is to destroy and undermine the Ukrainian state, and the rest is a matter of technique.
It is significant that back in the time of Peter the Great, the tsarist administration in Ukraine considered its main enemy not even the Zaporizhzhian Sich, but the Cossack officers, against whom Moscow always turned ordinary Cossacks. The tsar issued orders that encouraged ordinary Cossacks to file complaints against the officers directly with Moscow officials. Thus, by posing as a “defender of ordinary Ukrainians,” Moscow was splitting the Ukrainian people and pitting the lower classes against the upper classes, resulting in serfdom and national enslavement.
A hundred years ago, Soviet propaganda portrayed the Central Rada, Hetmanate, and Directory as “greedy lords, thieves, and corrupt officials,” and widely circulated fictions and isolated cases of shortcomings of Ukrainian civil servants. And after Ukraine gained independence, Russian propaganda and its useful idiots in Ukraine were the first to criticize any Ukrainian state symbols and elements, especially the government.
Russian propaganda not only fell on fertile ground (after all, Ukrainians had a lot to dislike about their ruling elite), but also directly fertilized it by spreading true and false news about corruption and abuses by the Ukrainian authorities. Every time Ukrainians have criticized the government and the state, the first to be crucified were pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russians. While Ukrainians believe that any accusations against their state for high utility prices, corruption in the government, or shortcomings in the work of the TCC are always fair and hard to exaggerate, Russian agents only add fuel to the fire of Ukrainians’ dissatisfaction with their own state.
No matter how imperfect their own state may be, it is worth remembering that it is the only state in the world in which Ukrainians are able to influence the change of government or political course, as has been demonstrated many times in our recent history. In other states or under foreign rule, Ukrainians will not be able to change anything and will be forced to obey the will of others. Those who believed in 1919 that a UPR official was worse than a Moscow Bolshevik commissar soon experienced famines and Stalinist repression. Therefore, Ukrainians should not cut the branch they are sitting on, and most importantly, they should not help the enemies of the Ukrainian state to help destroy the only organized force on the planet capable of protecting the survival of the Ukrainian people.
Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk
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