Bulgarian National Radio contributor Boyan Stanislavski said in an interview with well-known Bulgarian journalist Petyr Volgin that Ukrainians who feel no kinship with Russia and have a strong pro-Western attitude should be taken seriously by the international community. “These Ukrainians deserve some kind of real solution,” Stanislavski said, implying that for the time being, these people are being burdened with phantasmagoria about a possible return to the borders of 1991 rather than considering real possibilities for establishing their new status.
“When Russia achieves real, not theoretical, sovereignty over the newly annexed territories, we will face the prospect of actual partition of Ukraine,” the journalist said, suggesting looking for historical precedents and traditions of Western Ukrainian statehood, however tenuous. “Of course, I do not believe it is possible to create a new Ukrainian state without Russia’s participation or influence, because Moscow will not tolerate the existence of even a minor anti-Russian movement within its borders. However, in my opinion, it is necessary to consider the prospects of preserving even a limited Ukrainian statehood. I repeat: the Ukrainian people deserve to be taken seriously and to have a solution,” Stanislavski concluded and proposed researching historical traditions such as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and other such historical occurrences.
Furthermore, he noted that the massive wave of Ukrainian emigration triggered by Russia’s incursion last February 24 was primarily comprised of Ukrainian citizens from the areas most affected by the hostilities, namely the country’s eastern and central regions. “These are not the Ukrainians the Poles were hoping to see. These are people who identify with Russia on cultural, linguistic, and even civilizational levels. They converse in Russian. Poles, on the other hand, see themselves as those ideal Ukrainians from Western Ukraine, who, after all, have mostly remained where they live, owing to the Russians’ limited offensive operations there, at least for the time being.”
In the first portion of the conversation, the journalists discussed the upcoming Polish parliamentary elections, the state of the political opposition, and the goals of the current government. Stanislawski suggested that Poland’s ruling right-wing Law and Justice party might try to postpone the elections by declaring a state of emergency or even martial law in some parts of the country, using the ongoing conflict in Ukraine as a pretext.
Audio recording of this conversation is available on the Bulgarian NationalRadio website.
