Nicolai N. PetroJosh Cohen

The current course of denigrating those deemed insufficiently Ukrainian will only lead to a fracturing of the country.

Earlier this month Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko dramatically expanded his country’s sanctions against Russia by imposing multiyear sanctions on a number of IT companies. Once they are fully implemented these sanctions will impact some twenty-five million Ukrainians, or nearly every Ukrainian internet user.

These were but the latest in a litany of sanctions that began in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea. First, restrictions were imposed on Russian television news programs, then artists, films and, most recently, books published in Russia. Most recently, Ukraine passed a law requiring 75 percent of television content to be in the Ukrainian language—leading one Western journalist to accuse Poroshenko of appearing to “equate being Ukrainian with speaking Ukrainian.”

Critics say the government is trying to create a virtual wall around Ukraine, in a futile attempt to keep out all Russian influence. They worry that once this is accomplished, Kiev will seeks to impose a nationalist agenda on the country by attacking as disloyal the cultural affinity that most eastern Ukrainians feel for Russia.

Comments such as those by Ukraine’s minister of culture, Yevhen Nyshchuk, who called eastern Ukrainians the products of “inadequate genetics” and a “failure of consciousness,” or the insistence of the civilian-military governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Zhebrivsky, that once it is back under Kiev’s control the government will impose “a normal democratic agenda on those people,” by placing a garrison of Ukrainian troops stationed in each of eastern Ukraine’s major cities, only reinforce those fears.

But there are also those who oppose these restrictive measures, because they are impossible to fully implement and are ultimately self-defeating. They point out that one popular banned site, Yandex, is a global enterprise like Google and Bing, and happens to be registered in the Netherlands. Its Ukrainian affiliate, Yandex.Ua, is not only legally separate from its Russian parent, but is also one of Ukraine’s largest taxpayers.

The banning of the country’s most commonly used business software seems particularly odd to many, since it is produced and maintained in Ukraine, and the company just received a certificate from the Ukrainian government saying that the product meets government security standards.

The government justifies its actions with the need to enhance national security in its war with Russia. But even the most sympathetic observers fail to see how denying access to Kiev’s most popular taxi service app, or to the accounting software most Ukrainian businesses use to pay their taxes, improves national security.

What is ultimately much more troubling, however, is that President Poroshenko and his advisors seem incapable of understanding that millions of Ukrainians view such efforts as attacks on their heritage and way of life. Many citizens continue to see Russian cultural and religious identity not as antithetical to their Ukrainian identity, but as complementary to it.

A November 2016 survey by the Razumkov Center in Kiev, widely reported in the Ukrainian press, revealed that more than half of Ukrainians considered Russians and Ukrainians “brother nations,” while a quarter described then as “one people.” It is not Russian propaganda, but the government’s continuing assaults on their cultural, religious and ethnic identity that sustain the belief, still held by the majority of people in eastern and southern Ukraine, that the 2014 Maidan revolt was an “illegal military coup d’état.”

For these Ukrainians, therefore, these are not sanctions against Russia. They are sanctions against them—the “Other Ukraine”, which does not agree with the current policy of severing all ties with Russia and rewriting the country’s history.

©2017 The National Interest