Gas Crisis: the Positive Aspects for Ukraine

In Maidan, Mykola Malukha considers the positive aspects of the gas crisis for Ukraine:

For Ukraine and all of its people this is the challenge of civilization. Either the country will continue along the road to European integration, becoming a civilized western nation, having paid a high price (but what in our life these days comes free?) Or, having received “cheap” gas, it will remain an eastern despotic State, a “wild oasis” next to civilized Europe. What does Ukraine want to be – the independent participant in the process of history with a well-developed civic society, social and economic stability, a law-based State, or a colony, a satellite of the metropolis?

The behaviour of the Russian regime will not remain unnoticed in Ukrainian society. Such pressure on their neighbour will be less likely to lead to the “awakening of warm feelings” about a once shared history and single State, but will rather become a catalyst for the strengthening of a sense of national identity and unity among Ukrainians. For this it would be worth looking at the history of the birth and development of the Ukrainophile movement and its subsequent evolution into Ukrainian nationalism. Each Tsarist prohibition not only failed to crush the sense of identity, but actually infused it with a new force which spelled disaster for the tsarist regime

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