EuroMaidan Revolution
OP-ED
Oleg Kashin: Russia has always thought of eastern Ukraine as Russian land
“Our people, our fatherland is in danger, our tanks are in a foreign land,” the dissident Russian singer-songwriter Alexander Galich crooned in 1968, as Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia. The Soviet empire was a very experienced aggressor and not one case of that aggression was justified: not the invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, not the occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in 1940, and certainly not the post-war incursions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But we shouldn’t project this history onto the Crimea. The current crisis in the Ukraine is unprecedented. “Our tanks are in a foreign land”—that is a terrible thing. But what if the land is not foreign?