You're reading: Putin’s aide calls opinion that all Ukrainians want European integration “sick self-delusion”

Russian presidential advisor Sergei Glazyev has said he is sure that the idea that Ukraine should not join the Belarusian-Kazakh-Russian Customs Union is being lobbied by biased Ukrainian officials and experts "carrying out an anti-Russian agenda."

“Millions of people working in the industrial sector, with which we cooperate and which has thousands of ties with Russia, want [Ukraine’s accession to the Customs Union]. These are rocket constructors, shipbuilders, chemists, metallurgists, and especially farmers and producers of food, whose products are not in demand anywhere else except Russia,” Glazyev said in an interview published in the Russian-language Ukrainian newspaper Vesti on Wednesday.

“Numerous political scientists and experts, who have fed on European and American grants for 20 years, don’t want this. They are doing a certain political job on their clients’ behalf. In addition, a whole generation of diplomats and bureaucrats has appeared after the years of the ‘orange’ hysteria, who are carrying out an anti-Russian agenda,” he said.

“These people are too far from the economy and real life, they don’t really know their country’s history, they are divorced from its spiritual traditions and are in fact quite biased,” he said.

“But the scope of this partiality, which is present in Kyiv, creates an effect that Ukraine doesn’t want. When I hear the foreign minister saying that all of Ukraine favors the European choice, I don’t understand what country he is talking about. After all, sociological surveys by Ukrainian sociological services say something different: 35 percent of people prefer the European Union and 40 percent the Customs Union,” Glazyev said.

“Therefore, saying that all as one want [European integration] is some kind of sick self-delusion,” he said.