27
November 2025
Ukraine in 2014
In 2014, one cannot speak of a real coup d’état
in Ukraine, as the subsequent election results demonstrate. However, the problem
is that about a quarter of the Ukrainian population is in fact Russian-speaking.
The spark of the uprising in Donbas was precisely the decision to no longer
recognize Russian as an official language alongside Ukrainian, as it had been
until then.
The broader issue, which became evident with the dissolution of the USSR and the
creation of 14 republics, is that in each of them (Russia included) about a
quarter of the population belongs to other ethnicities. Therefore, I am
surprised that the problem has erupted only in Ukraine so far.
The disintegration of the national unity of the USSR, carried out without any
consultation or preparation, does not seem to me a wise solution. In the coming
decades, one of the possibilities for Putin and for Russia could be to
reconstitute the former national unity.