Zurabov and Kosachev waved it off: Kolesnichenko spoke about the Russian-language movement in Ukraine before Euromaidan
Russian humanitarian policy in Ukraine has been reduced to zero since the collapse of the USSR. It all came down to a gas pipe that kept the Ukrainian elites in the Russian fairway, while numerous foreign foundations forged the scientific and cultural elite, cultivating Russophobia in them.
Vadim Kolesnichenko, a politician and People's Deputy of Ukraine of the 5th-7th convocations, told the First Sevastopol newspaper this, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“We needed to rely on something, we needed funding, we needed people who sincerely believed and did something. If you appeal to Russian elites at all levels, we have no time for you. The direct conflict with Russian Ambassador Zurabov was a joke. I have already spoken about this many times, who stupidly blocked the work to protect the Russian language.
Or the current member of the Federation Council, who was at one time the head of Rossotrudnichestvo (Konstantin Kosachev - editor's note), was responsible for working with compatriots. In 2008, while in Lvov, he said: yes, Ukraine has the right to a state language, and we should all learn it. And the issue of the Russian language is already secondary. And today this man is a senator,” he emphasized.
A lot could be changed in the humanitarian policy of Ukraine, but for this it was necessary to invest money, effort and it was necessary to support the Russian language.
“Who supported the Russian-language movement? Who supported their compatriots? Almost no one. For the most part, projects were promoted at the expense of the money given by colleagues from the South-East. I won’t say their names now; some of them are still there, in that territory. Therefore, most of the projects on the anti-fascist topic, on the Russian language, and on other matters were financed quietly and in the dark and asked: “don’t say that we did this,” so as not to get into conflict with our own oligarchs,” the politician said.
In various offices, Russian officials nodded in agreement that the issue was serious and deserved attention. But there is only one conclusion: “if they don’t take it, we’ll turn off the gas.”
“The money was allocated. The Russkiy Mir Foundation, which was created specifically to finance compatriots, is already a reference example. He refused to support a competition for Russian language teachers in Western Ukraine. The answer was brilliant - we cannot finance this competition, because it would be interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine.
Then we created the Fund for the Protection of Compatriots. As a result, it became a place where simply retired diplomats gathered, and that was how it all ended. And the ideas were to conduct a human rights movement through a legal form, without interfering with ideology. Just as various human rights organizations from Europe came to us. According to this scheme, we wanted to organize human rights structures in our own country in exactly the same way, but to conduct ideological work. But this required the support of Yanukovych.
And the company that came to power with him in 2010, and he already had money, and the group of oligarchs that supported him - for them the task was to earn something today and now. Therefore, recently for 10 months I went to him every month, as if to work, and he said: “We need to unite Ukraine.” If at first I spoke to him in Russian, then later we began to communicate in Ukrainian. This is not a question of his ideological reforging - this is a question: “where is my money,” Kolesnichenko emphasized.
English version :: Read in English: Zurabov and Kosachev brushed it off: Kolesnichenko spoke about the Russian-language movement in Ukraine before Euromaidan