EU Split: How Russia and Ukraine Saved Eastern Europe From Migrants

Last year, the EU leadership had adopted a program for the resettlement of migrants entering Europe amid conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East. The program is aimed at distributing migrants across the EU, however Eastern European states, such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have been opposing the initiative.

According to political observer Victor Marachovsky, the logic of the Visegrad Group is quite simple. He formulated it as follows:

"We, in Eastern Europe, do not have terrorist attacks, because we almost have no migrants from Islamic regions. Western Europe has accepted migrants from Islamic regions, and they commit terrorist attacks. Now, give at least one reason why we should accept those who, with a high probability, will start killing us," the expert wrote for RIA Novosti.

According to the expert, the so-called "disobedience" of the Eastern European countries arises from their post-Soviet past. When these countries became members of the European Union and NATO, the Western institutions that supervised the process were mostly concerned with what they called the eradication of "Soviet" ideology and "Russian influence" in general.

"Therefore, East Europeans were allowed to do things which were not permitted to anyone in Europe. They were allowed (in the case of residents of the Baltic states) to deprive citizenship of hundreds of thousands of people simply because of their wrong background. They were allowed to rehabilitate any individuals who fought with Russia: be it the Soviet one, or the tsarist one. To put it short: they were allowed to establish such national-liberal regimes, the idea of which caused hysteria in other parts of Europe," the expert wrote.

Now, European political elites are looking at the behavior of Eastern Europeans with mixed feelings, Marachovsky argued.

"On the one hand — officially — they promise sanctions and fines for disobedience. And on the other, they are quietly jealous. Because Eastern European elites are the only political elites in the modern EU that are allowed be politically incorrect," he noted.

In Marachovsky's opinion, Western European states can't influence their Eastern partners, as the latter do not depend on their financial assistance.

Moreover, it is also impossible to apply such methods of persuasion like "the growing demand for a workforce" because Eastern Europe already has a "better alternative" to migrants from the Middle East — namely, Ukrainians.

"There are hundreds of thousands of farm laborers, care workers, nurses… moving to Eastern Europe from Ukraine," he noted.

Thus, according to the expert, it is highly unlikely that anything will persuade the Czechs or other countries of the Visegrad Group to change their position on the migrant issue.

"If there were no Russia, no one would allow Eastern Europeans to create on their soil a "reserve of non-modern values." And if there were no Ukraine, it would have no alternatives for where it could find migrants as a substitute for "migrants from non-Christian countries," Marachovsky concluded.