Jaroslav Miko: It is Russia who violated the Minsk Agreements, and Ukraine did not decide to occupy Czechoslovakia in 1968
Two absurd arguments about Russia's war on Ukraine are being frequently repeated on Czech social media. The first argument is that the Minsk Agreements beginning in 2014 were allegedly violated by Ukraine, and the second argument is that it was predominantly Ukrainians who occupied Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
Because this nonsense is really getting on my nerves, I would like to set the record straight here. First, the Minsk Agreements are, in my personal view, like a second Munich Agreement of 1938, which ceded some Czechoslovak territory to then-Nazi Germany.
Russia stole Crimea and the western states, in their naivité, so they wouldn’t have to bother themselves, and doubtless also so they could continue to draw on cheap Russian mineral resources, condoned the Minsk Agreements, which meant the de facto legalization or, at a minimum, the tolerance of occupied Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine. Ultimately it was Russia who violated these agreements earlier this year when it attacked the rest of Ukrainian territory, just as Nazi Germany in March 1939 occupied the rest of democratic Czechoslovakia.
Just as in 1938, so in 2014 the West backed down in the face of the aggressor, in the present case, Russia, in a way that was simply inadequate to the situation. As for 1968, Ukraine was part of the USSR at that time, and the order to occupy communist Czechoslovakia came from headquarters in Moscow, not from Kiev, because the USSR was an absolutely centralized state.
To assert otherwise would be like claiming Russia is not “really” attacking Ukraine because just a tiny minority of the soliders in the Army of the Russian Federation are ethnic Russian and most of its soldiers deployed to Ukraine have been conscripted from the impoverished regions in the east, from its ethnically and geographically Asian parts. I am convinced all of these assertions are just part of the usual, unending search for pretexts under which to defend our own absence of basic human empathy for the suffering of others, our own miserliness, and our own selfishness.
