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No solution in sight in Ukraine

August 2nd, 2014

Western Ukrainians, including ethnic Hungarians, refuse to fight in eastern Ukraine, and thus the war against the ethnic Russian insurgency cannot be won, an analyst born and raised in western Ukraine predicts.On Cink, Albert Gazda, a leading online journalist who emigrated to Hungary in 1991 from the Sub-Carpathian region, paints a desperate picture of the prospects of Ukraine’s civil war. He brings up data to prove that the Ukrainian army engaged in crushing the revolt in the East is showing surprising weaknesses. Its 79th Division, for example, has been encircled and left without supplies of either food or ammunition for several days. Another example he gives is that of 250 ethnic Hungarian men drafted in a small town for military service, who all went into hiding or crossed the border into Hungary. However, Gazda explains, one does not have to be ethnic Hungarian, Romanian or Polish to reject the idea of fighting for eastern Ukraine. He believes that there is no such a thing as an overall Ukrainian identity, if not in the Western regions. But west Ukrainians do not feel that the East is their land, and thus, Gazda believes, the insurgents have a higher stake in the conflict and are incomparably more determined to fight than western conscripts. He finds a very similar disparity on the international level. Russia wants Ukraine (as a friendly country), he asserts, while the West doesn’t – it would be too costly. It merely wants it not to belong to Russia. Both have made the wrong calculations and now, Gazda believes, there is no way out. The insurgency cannot be crushed – it will continue in one form or another. “This madness will never end”.

 

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