Not Croatian or Korean: Portnikov on what war scenario Russia is preparing and why it is the worst
8 September 05:19
Journalist Vitaliy Portnikov commented on the forecasts of various experts who predict a Croatian or Korean scenario for the end of the war.
However, Portnikov believes that Russia is preparing a Bosnian scenario for Ukraine. He wrote about this on his Facebook page . It was reported by "Komersant Ukrainian".
The journalist drew an analogy and recalled the war in the Balkans after the collapse of Yugoslavia.
“Serbs did not deny Croats their identity, they were simply their enemies. The Korean and Chinese communists had no doubt that Koreans lived in the south of Korea, they just wanted to change the social order on that part of the peninsula. But the situation with the Bosnians was completely different. Both the Serbs and, incidentally, the Croats at first denied them an identity as such. They considered them to be just like Serbs or Croats who simply adopted a different religion, but remain the same, and speak the same language,” Portnikov explained.
According to him, Serbian and Croatian leaders perceived Bosnia as a continuation of Serbia or Croatia and did not understand why they should coexist with it at all.
“The Serbs generally considered the emergence of the Muslim and Macedonian republics to be a whim of the founder of socialist Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. They sincerely did not understand that the communist leader was simply reacting to the national movement during World War II and trying to create a model of coexistence between the peoples of his own country. And this is really similar to the way Lenin reacted to the national movement in the Russian Empire and also tried to create a scenery of coexistence. But Putin, like Milosevic once did, considers Lenin a man who “invented” Ukraine rather than responded to the challenges of the Ukrainian national movement,” the analyst writes.
Consequences
Portnikov recalled that the Serbs carried out ethnic cleansing in those areas of Bosnia where they succeeded. The part of Bosnia called Republika Srpska is close to final secession.
“The Croats accepted the Bosnian identity simply because they had no other choice and realized that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, similar to the way Poles began to reckon with the Ukrainian identity. The West never understood the real reasons for the war in Yugoslavia and in Dayton created an absolutely unviable state model of coexistence between peoples, one of which does not recognize the right to exist of the other,” the journalist writes.
In his opinion, none of the proposals to resolve the war in Ukraine take into account the fact that the main goal of this war is the elimination of Ukrainian identity. The Russians want to eliminate Ukrainian statehood as a guarantee that it will have no identity, and occupy the territories to cleanse it of its identity.
“And until the Russians recognize that Ukrainians are another people with their own civilizational heritage, there will be no conditions for ending the Russian-Ukrainian war, even if decades of confrontation and hatred pass,” Portnikov concluded.
