UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has made an interesting statement on Ukraine, which, for some reason, was overlooked by the Ukrainian media. That’s according to the Ukrainian Choice news portal. The United Nations Security Council has, for the umpteenth time, considered the Ukrainian issue, and experts made a rather unexpected conclusion.
It turned out that Ukraine has no official boundaries. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kiev hasn’t demarked its borders. Nor has it registered at the United Nations the demarcation of its borders as a sovereign state. The Voice of Russia talked to political analyst Dmitry Babich.
What is happening there?
What is behind this? Well, I tried to dig behind that story and I couldn’t find any confirmation except a lot of reports in Facebook which are of course unreliable. But I would say that although it is quite clear that Mr. Ban Ki-moon’s sympathies in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine are clearly on the Ukrainian side, there is that problem: I remember how the so called friendship agreement was signed between Russia and Ukraine in 1997 and at that time the problem was that both sides agreed not to have territorial claims against each other but the question of the demarcation of the border remained on their agenda.
So, there are still some inaccuracies, there are still some not quite clear points, you know, about this border. But I think it is of course a minor issue compared to what is going on right now in Eastern Ukraine and compared to other problems that Ukraine might have with this new government, with its other neighbors. So, to my mind, indeed the world is going to see that the break up of the Soviet Union was a tragedy because if you look at the ethnic map of Russia, Ukraine and neighboring Moldova, you will see that this is a real fruitcake and the formally Soviet borders which used to be just administrative borders inside the Soviet Union suddenly became important in 1991.
And suddenly now we see how dangerous the situation is when there are millions of Russians living in Ukraine, there are hundreds and thousands of Russians and Ukrainians living in Transdniestria, who don’t want to live in Moldova, which may merge with neighboring Romania.
So, you have all of these very, very difficult ethnic issues which suddenly became important right now when we have the break-up of the Soviet Union, we have the new states and we have the nationalist government in Kiev
that little pink blob in the centre is Ukraine With later additions coming from Russian territory and leadership Stalin (green)Tzars (yellow)Kruschev (mauve) obviously CrimeaLenin (blue)I had saved that map from a link that was left here some time ago...When and if I can find the link I will add itSo, the question is... What land makes up Ukraine?