Professor Borys Babin, ARC expert
In December 2022, the Russian occupiers’ propaganda announced the illegal arrival in the Crimea of a “delegation of compatriots” from France, namely “count Sergei Kapnist” and “hereditary nobleman Mikhail Vinogradoff”, whose relatives were once “lucky” to be shot by the “young Soviet authorities” near Sudak.
And while these “lucky ones” served as a backdrop for the allegedly “happy Crimean residents”, the Kremlin “on occasion” can be heard fakes about the “inextricable connection” and “the fate of being Russian forever.” And “in response”, of course, one could say that none of the actual French “politicians and public figures” would dare to go criminally to the occupied Crimea now, even for significant “material assistance”.
But someone can also ask himself the question – is there a difference between the Crimean execution cellar or the provincial French cemetery, where many “Russian emigrants” ended their journey, does such difference exist for that same “Russian world”, which, according to the Kremlin criminal statements, “borders with whomever it wants”.
There are French cemeteries near Sevastopol, where the victims of the Eastern War are buried, but it would be strange to hear statements about the alleged “inseparable connection” and the “French peninsula” from the authorities of the Fifth Republic on this occasion.
The Kremlin generally has “everything bad” with the “graves of the fathers”, since 2014 they have been criminally trying to “sell” the picture of the “Russian world” on the occupied peninsula to Europeans, speculating on Crimean Bulgarians, Crimean Greeks, Crimean Germans, and even Crimean Estonians.
But the “broken link” of these fake algorithms was the fact that all groups of European colonists, allowed to “develop the peninsula” by Russian autocrats a hundred and two hundred years ago, later disappeared without a trace in the crucible of the communist regime, leaving only destroyed rural churches and abandoned tombstones.
And now, on the peninsula, regular Russian officers are appointed according to the order to play the criminal role of “Crimean Germans and Estonians”, hold fake “presentations” in Geneva and correspond with “European blood brothers” in search of a “weak link”, while themselves, as a rule, having with these ethnic groups have very little in common.
And here it’s not even about the fact that the Russian occupiers destroy ancient and medieval temples, and it’s not about the long-suffering Sevastopol Catholic church, the tasty lands under which the aggressor wants to “invest profitably”; we will also not be talking about the Greek church in Yevpatoria, whose “centennial anniversary” was “celebrated” during the occupation not by the priests from the Phanar, but by the subordinates of the Moscow Patriarch.
Let us just recall that the indigenous Christian population of the peninsula was taken out to the lands near Sea of Azov two hundred and fifty years ago by its then “newly minted masters”, forever destroying the ancient Goth and Kafa Metropoly. Now, in 2022, thousands of their descendants, who survived and preserved their language and culture, were killed by Russian invaders in the ruins of Mariupol or in the surrounding depopulated villages. There, the aggressor will obviously not invite “guests from Athens” in the near future at the fresh mass graves of children and the elderly.
Other indigenous peoples of the Crimea also fully felt the “charms” of Russian imperialism. After hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars fled to Turkey from the racism of imperial officials in the 19th century, and after hundreds of thousands of their surviving compatriots in the Crimea were taken to Central Asia by the Stalinist regime, the current “descendants” of tsarist generals and Soviet commissars are trying criminally to escort them to Moscow fake “meetings of Crimean Tatar compatriots”, but there is no one to bring there from third countries.
No, more than a million descendants of the once emigrated Crimeans still live in Turkey, representing a powerful social and political force, but “for some reason” they do not want to communicate with the Kremlin. Interestingly, if the Nazi regime, by some whim of fate, had survived and held “meetings of Jewish compatriots” in Nuremberg, then how many “social activists” from Tel Aviv, for example, would have come there.
And if we already recall the Semitic roots of the Crimea, then, for example, the Karaites of the peninsula managed to survive the Nazi occupation but “did not stretch out” the decades of “Soviet friendship of peoples”, when they were forbidden to profess their faith and there were no opportunities to learn their native language.
The tragicomic “historical roots” of the Russian occupiers are so unreal and strained that, having criminally declared Kerch as the allegedly “ancient city of Russia,” they did not bother to explain what the Bosporan kings, Tmutarakan kagans or Crimean khans had common with today’s Moscow.
Why then not “with Paris”, because in the Bakhchisaray Khan’s Palace, burned down by the “Russian liberators” half a century before the colonization, they still managed to stage several plays by Molière.
Interestingly, since the summer of 2022, the Crimean collaborators began to speak violently and a lot about colonialism. True, for some reason they are worried about exclusively French colonialism, and not regarding some historical examples, but basically something modern and desirable – closer to the African deposits of diamonds and uranium ores.
Of course, colonialism is bad, just like alcoholism is bad, especially for those who do not consider themselves alcoholics. For some reason, Russia refuses to recognize itself a colonizer, although a hundred years ago no one in Moscow and St. Petersburg was ashamed of such a term, including with regard to the Crimea.
“Sharing the legacy” of the Ottoman Empire was then considered a kind of “European sport”, but France, for example, had long since left from Syria, and the British – from Egypt. Moscow not only does not want to leave anywhere, but it also claims fake “historical roots”; The Kremlin is trying to “galvanize” criminally the phantom pains of its empire, in Minsk, Donetsk, Simferopol, Batumi and Lankaran, Ashgabat and Alma-Ata.
At the same time, Moscow decided to revive the literally Kiplingian image of the “white man”, returning to the mythology of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, not just about the “great Russian people”, but also about their alleged “God’s chosen people”.
And now in the Crimea they remember Nikolai Danilevsky, a Russian publicist who not only tried to refute Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also wrote in his “Russia and Europe” that Russians were destined to become a “separate civilization”, “naturally” – “higher” than European one.
I have always wondered why such ideas in “Mein Kampf” are recognized as criminal by civilized countries, but the statements of the ideologists of the “Russian world” are still not. However, recently Patriarch Bartholomew in Abu Dhabi was not afraid to say that the Kremlin, with its ρωσικός κόσμος, the “Russian world”, instrumentalizes religion, and at the same time he determined the Moscow “hawks” as “actors, often not believing in anything.”
And then the same cynic and “devout atheist” Putin suddenly played “anger and amazement” a year ago when Ukraine refused to recognize ethnic Russians as an indigenous people in a separate law. And the point is not that such a legal act should reflect international standards and protect the previously colonized, and not their colonizers.
The fact is that someone in Kyiv “dared” to equate the Russians, for example, with the Hungarians or Romanians, the same national minorities within the framework of the standards of the Council of Europe. Russians, according to the Kremlin, under no circumstances and nowhere can be a minority. And, as you know, the very word “minority” in Moscow has long been a deadly insult in relation to the opponent.
Here, representatives of the “higher civilization” can really “take an example” from the same Danilevsky: when he bought an estate near the Crimean Mshatka in 1867, Crimean Tatars lived around him, and after forty years they were no longer there at all, and even only one name remains from that village.
The ability to become a majority through genocide is a fairly common task for imperial Moscow, but there is one “little problem” here: in the modern world it is “necessary to substantiate this somehow”.
It will not work to tell criminally, in the style of the “skull measurers” of the Third Reich, that supposedly “there are no Ukrainians, but there are Russians enslaved by the Nazis” and that supposedly “there are no Crimean Tatars, but there are just Tatars who came from afar”, but the Kremlin “does not add up” just with history and historians.
Of course, all self-respecting states know how to correctly “place accents” in their own history and respect poets and philosophers who can create myths.
It’s just that someone gets “Henry V” at the same time, and someone is content with “modern” sugary films about some heroic “Great Patriotic War”, from the pathos and caricature of which even Soviet propagandists would be horrified.
There is a saying in Moscow that the “severity of the local laws is facilitated by their optionality”, and, by direct analogy, due to the delusional concept of the “exceptional Russian world”, it is instructed to distribute it to individuals with the narrowest outlook.
However, these figures are “friends” with the real history of the Crimea only in one case – when there is an opportunity to “dig up and take out” something “worthwhile” from the long-suffering Crimean land.
That is why it is confessed criminally by Russian occupiers “for the masses” in the style of the “Old and New Testaments”, when the “truth” is proposed to be counted from 1945, and preferably – within the framework of a short sermon about “old and new heroes”, without reading not only the primary sources, but also in the real “lives of the holy Soviet martyrs”.
As it was then and precisely in the Crimean Yalta that Stalin divided Europe, and only half a century later this artificial section of the continent began to overgrow.
Now Simferopol fake and criminal “government” declares “abandonment of liberal pseudo-values” such as “democracy and human rights”, and that aggressor “has never been and never will be Europe”.
Definitely the Crimean khans with their Molière look quite European against the background of the current criminal “head of republic” Aksyonov, a native of local gangsters, and “speaker” Konstantinov, a professional swindler-developer. These collaborators obviously will not go to the theater or to the museum voluntarily.
Also, the “creed” from the “Russian world” not only denies history, if it is not about the “victories of Russian weapons”, often mythical, it not only rejects the very fact of Moscow’s centuries-old colonialism, but it also criminally “justifies” the genocide – against Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and other victims of that colonialism also.
And not only “justifies”, but also criminally tries to repeat: following the Golodomor (death from hunger) 90 years ago, the Kremlin is now declaring Holodomor (death from frost) to Ukrainians and deliberately bombing power plants and boiler houses in winter cities.
And also, when after the Soviet deportation of the Crimean Tatars their descendants returned to the Crimea under the Ukrainian authorities, the “bearers of the highest values of the Russian world” drive criminally “mobilized” on peninsula to die in the role of “cannon fodder” to the long-suffering lands between the Dnieper and Sivash, where Russian “wise generals” have lost their invading regular army in the steppes this year.
And in November 2022, the Council of Europe recognizes Russia as a terrorist state, and the Polish Sejm in December – as a pirate state. And the European Parliament, in its resolution of December 15, directly says that the manipulation of history for the Kremlin regime has become a “tool of its survival”. However, so far we are talking not only about “survival”, but also about the Russians’ criminal revisionism.
The only question is where, who and how will put up a barrier to such a large-scale revisionism of modern Russian Nazis. And if someone in Marseilles or Nantes thinks that the terror and Nazism of the “Russian world” is far from him, then he is deeply mistaken.
“Hereditary Crimeans” and “professional compatriots” such as Kapnist and Vinogradoff, brandishing new-stamped “Russian passports” at the Kremlin propagandists’ cameras, will be able to criminally, quickly and realistically dispel this illusion of security.
