11/24/2004|||110129732489662816||||||

HOW TO SAVE UKRAINE

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, author of the invaluable "Gulag", sees parallels (reg required) between events in Kiev and the division of Europe six decades ago:

"Looking back, we may also one day see 2004 as the year when a new iron curtain descended across Europe, dividing the continent not through the center of Germany but along the eastern Polish border. To the West, the democracies of Western and Central Europe will remain more or less stable members of the European Union and NATO. To the east, Russia will control the "managed democracies" of the former U.S.S.R., keeping the media muzzled, elections massaged and the economies in thrall to a handful of mostly Russian billionaires. Using primarily economic means -- control over oil pipelines, corrupt investment funds, shady companies -- the Russians may even, like their Soviet predecessors, begin to work at undermining Western stability.

"This is not an inevitable scenario. Russia is not the Soviet Union, and 2004 is not 1946. Ukraine is neither as turbulent, nor as violent, nor as physically cut off from the world as were the Central European states after the Second World War. The Ukrainian opposition put 200,000 protesters on the streets of Kiev yesterday, many of whom are too young to recall Nazi or Soviet totalitarianism, and who haven't experienced the intimidation and fear felt by their parents and grandparents. Most have access to communication and outside information -- through the Internet, satellite television, cell phones -- that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War.

"The West, and especially Western Europe, can and should encourage them. To do so is not difficult, but it does require that we understand what is happening, call things by their real names, and drop any of our remaining illusions about President Putin's intentions in former Soviet territories..."

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-to-save-ukraine-washington-post.html|||11/24/2004 11:43:00 am|||||||||

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