Adhering to etiquette, the EU is still gracefully pretending that the door remains open for an association with Ukraine – if the always known prerequisites, which already have been trashed by Ukraine’s president, are met.

As the Eurozone is teetering at the edge of a financial meltdown under the weight of sovereign debt in several of its member states, it sends jitters around the globe. Banks are ditching billions of euros of Eurozone governments’ bonds. The EU doesn’t need more headaches or mealy mouthing.

When the USA, in the midst of its economic depression, is erupting with social unrest in the streets against Wall Street oligarchs, against the inequality between the rich and poor, and against war, something begins to stir in the corridors of power.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who until now was chided by his own Democratic Party’s left-center for being too accommodating toward the Republican right wing, opened up with fiery speeches berating the greed of the super-rich and pressing for an income tax surcharge for millionaires. The Republican Party presidential hopefuls for next year’s election, already known for their bizarre mentality relative to America’s social contract, suddenly look uglier and sillier than before.

In Ukraine, on the other hand, where the wealth chasm between the oligarchs and the rest is even wider than in the USA, and where the misery of poverty is overwhelming, there is resentment, silence and no evidence of a committed social protest.

Ukraine is occupied by its own regional foreign power and squeezed dry by its oligarchic mafia. The government has convicted and imprisoned Yulia Tymoshenko, a genuine national hero who put her life on the line as the on-the-ground leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution. The conviction is politically motivated under a corrupt judicial system. It is a degrading slap in the face of the apparently docile and anomalously compliant Ukrainian people.

By persecuting and imprisoning democratic leaders, the Yanukovych regime issued a challenge to national Ukraine. That challenge was not met. Democracy has been crushed. Only a shadow of Ukraine’s independence exists today. Many are still in denial — in Ukraine and in the diaspora.

Public protest over Tymoshenko’s conviction is evidenced by not much more than a flutter of a dozen of different political opposition party names that are difficult to remember. After Vitali Klitschko, the world boxing champion came to Kyiv to defend Yulia Tymoshenko, guess what – a new party name mushroomed, his own UDAR party.

It looks as if the proliferation of political parties is a copout for avoiding a real struggle for social and political change and dismantling of the bestial oligarchic capital web.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 2, Tymoshenko sent a letter from prison with a plea to the European Union (“Dear European family”) to help Ukraine. Published in the Kyiv Post, it makes several important points: Number one, the present regime is in the process of destroying any remaining hope in free elections.

The second point is the recognition that Ukraine’s nascent democracy is unable to stand up against the authoritarian Party of Regions regime.

And there is her statement that “To begin to recover our liberty, we urgently need the assistance of the world’s democratic community. Such assistance would be the signing of the Association on the Free Trade Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union.”

It is doubtful, to say the least, that such signing would make a dent in the clutches of the authoritarian regime. Keeping and tightening his grip is the priority for Yanukovych. Also, the prevailing mood in Ukraine seems to be that it doesn’t matter who runs a corrupt government or how, as long as there is an illusion of some sense of stability.. The advantage of an association with the EU, apparently favored by majority polls, is seen primarily in economic terms.

Ukraine’s democracy is disappearing because it is not getting sufficient support or trust from the people. They do not respect their own heroes, living or dead, and do not stand up against oppression – except perhaps once or twice in a hundred years.

Not getting involved seems to be an eternal, damning trait in much of the country. For too many, non-involvement is a virtue, signified by an age-old proverb “Moya khata skrayu” (My house is on the sideline). This is an entrenched pre-condition for a monumental absence of civic awareness, which pre-disposes the populace to obedience rather than participatory initiative.

Maybe a Taliban type rule could be a fitting test of the legendary Ukrainian patience. If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is not over the rim.

Recall Yanukovych’s humoresque just before his election in 2010, saying that. Tymoshenko, as a woman, should stay in the kitchen. Apparently that remark sounded cute for the voting majority. Putting it mildly, such mentality is at odds with Western values and customs the EU has been stressing, aside from Ukraine’s disrespect of law.

And let’s not be deaf to the rumblings in Kyiv government circles about the need to establish a “state religion” – obviously a Moscow-tuned orthodox religion — and to prohibit religious institutions to engage in educational activities. Is this not aimed at the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which has been a bastion of Ukrainian identity over many centuries?

As part of a sweeping pro-Moscow religiosity campaign, the Yanukovych backhoe would also be making an end run to crush the Orthodox Kyiv Patriarchate.

Trying to get help from the European Union to push away the Eurasian backwater would be nothing short of self-deception. Recall British 19th century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s aphorism “States have no friends, only interests.”

It would be quite a selling job to convince anyone in the West that their self-interest requires involvement in Ukraine’s mess.

Reliance on foreign powers to get their own house in order or to provide liberation has always been the wrong way. If Ukrainians have not learned that lesson, they need to take it up now, before the noose is tightened.

This task is not as difficult today as it was in 1941 for Stepan Bandera when he took the hard road of national self-reliance and openly defied Nazi Germany from the moment of the start of war on Ukraine’s soil, which led to his arrest and to the concentration camp in Sachsenhousen, where his two brothers were killed. His colleagues of imprisonment, Kurt Schuschnigg, former chancellor of Austria, and Leon Blum, ex-premier of France, a Jew, in their memoirs praised Bandera as the man of honor and honesty.

For those who had been brainwashed to revile Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, it may be recalled that only two years earlier the Soviet supreme despot was drinking up with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s foreign minister in the Kremlin, and was praising Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo chief for matching Lavrentiy Beria, KGB chief in “doing a good job.” Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959 in Munich.

These reminders will not impress the “contemptible malorosy”, the core of the Regions Party support.

Failure to learn from own history has been perhaps at the root of Ukrainians’ disastrous choices in modern times, beginning with their reluctance to defend their own National Republic in the 1918 -20 period. .

As the price for such breathtaking political obtuseness and abysmally vacuous national consciousness and morbid passivity, millions had perished in the genocidal, epochal 1933 terror famine in the villages of death by starvation in Ukraine’s Eurasian Sovdepia.

Does anyone recall how the people were fuming at President Viktor Yushchenko a few years ago for focusing on refreshing their memory of the Holodomor (one of the few things he had done right) rather than cleaning out Ukraine’s Aegean stables, by fiat — which all of them should be steadfastly doing but are not doing ?

Staying on the sidelines now, after 19 years of relative freedom which flashed some light for Ukrainians on their history, makes a strange and pathetic sight.

Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.