Perspectief 2019-44

2019-44 Thema - Oekraïne – katalysator van kerkelijke en politieke spanningen Prof. dr. Cyril Hovorun 99 3. Russian propaganda One of the issues often raised in connection with the protests at the Maidan is whether they pursued a nationalistic agenda. Indeed, there were nationalist and radical right-wing groups at the Maidan, but they constituted a minority. The majority of the protesters did not pursue any nationalistic agenda. They wanted their country to be free of corruption and authoritarianism, upholding European values and human rights. This was an agenda that surpassed the modernist agenda of nation-building. It was an agenda of building an open civil society. Because of its civil and not nationalistic program, the protests for long time remained peaceful and did not yield to the provocations to apply violence. The gov- ernment of Yanukovych tried to provoke violence, at now avail—until the first casualties among the protesters happened. The first victims who fell at the Maidan were not Ukrain- ians in their ethnic background: Serhiy Nigoyan was Armenian and Mikhail Zhiznevsky was Belarusian. The Russian media, however, presented the Ukrainian protests as nationalistic. This was a deliberate policy, which aimed at compromising the civil protests in Ukraine in the eyes of the Russian citizens, who recently protested against, as many believed, fraudulent elections to the Russian Parliament in December 2011. When in 2012 Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev swapped their offices, and Putin became Russian president for the third time, this enhanced the dissatisfaction of many Russians with their political establishment. The Maidan, therefore, was dangerous for the Russian regime, which began disseminating lies about it. The report on the Russian aggression against Ukraine prepared by the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (assassinated in Moscow on February 27, 2015) summa- rizes the distorted image of the Revolution of dignity propagated by the Russian media: Descendants of World War II collaborators and radical nationalists joined together in favor of European integration (as only this was discussed), and they were practi- cally ready to carry out ethnic cleansing. The number of mentions of the Ukrainian nationalist organization “Right Sector” in the Russian media at a certain point sig- nificantly exceeded mentions of Putin's United Russia party—despite the fact that “Right Sector” garnered less than 2% of the votes cast in the Ukrainian elections. 1