Europe’s Ill-Advised Policy the Root of All Troubles in Ukraine, World

Europe’s inability to foresee the outcome of its policy has set off an avalanche of refugees and cost Ukraine its Crimean peninsula and quite possibly the Donbass region, a Kiev-based political analyst said on Tuesday.

“When the Europeans helped destroy the Middle Eastern states under the pretext of changing their authoritarian regimes, didn’t they realize that by doing so they were preparing this massive influx of migrants? Did they really think that dictator Kaddafi would be replaced by a democratic Libyan parliament, which would legalize same-sex marriages? I don’t think so,” Mikhail Pogrebinsky, the director of the Center of Political and Conflict Studies in Kiev said, commenting on the current migrant crisis in Europe.

He added that the European leaders never bothered to think what their rejection of the idea of a federative Ukraine on the false assumption that this would undermine the country’s territorial integrity would eventually lead to. As a result Ukraine lost Crimea and is now losing Donbass too, not to mention the thousands of lives lost and the ruined economy.

“Instead, they should have engaged in a broad-based dialogue on a type of federalization that would prevent Ukraine’s disintegration,” Pogrebinsky added.

He also noted that when Jean-Claude Juncker and others make calls for a united Europe and introduce migrant quotas while, at the same time, criticizing the East European leaders for their ‘un-European’ policy and flatly refusing to join forces with [Syrian president Bashar] Assad against ISIL, they act just as inconsistently as they did regarding the situation in Ukraine.

"Sometimes they do say that there will be no peace in Syria without Russia, but they never go any further than that… Well, when they are finally ready, it could be too late!” Mikhail Pogrebinsky warned.