One cannot serve Minsk (and heads of the best Novorossiya leaders on Salome's platter to the Empire) and truly respect the Donbass and Russian people on May 11 referendum at the same time

What happened in the last few days over the so-called euphemistically called "constitutional amendments" to the "Ukrainian Constitution," really, the Constitution made to suit the Nazi, Bandera, anti-Russian regime, is remarkable, but it is also very significant.

So what happened? Over the weekend, the Kremlin dispatched Surkov to Donetsk to oversee the next step in the "full and unconditional realization" of Minsk (1 and 2). In practice, this meant that, yet again, people like Pushilin (who knew why he ran away from Strelkov last July when the latter suddenly reached Donetsk from Slavyansk where, according to Kremlin's friends such as Kurginyan, he was just to die with all his "300 Spartans") were told exactly what to and what to say. In other words, the "amendments" to the Ukrainian Constitution were handed down to them. Pushilin's and Deynego's role was just to serve as couriers feebly pretending to act on behalf of someone else--as representatives of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, which, as Putin emphasized on Saturday, he sees both as "self-declared" (hence not legitimate) and "unrecognized" (hence again not legitimate). Moreover, the Kremlin and nearly all its controlled media have expelled the word "people's" from the name of these two republics a long time ago as well. Just as Putin did.

The "amendments" were not much else than a very slightly and mildly diluted version of the same "unconditional" Minsk "agreements," which Putin "unconditionally" agreed on on behalf of the two republics and which, also much unconditionally, were dictated to them as their fate decided by "the partners united" for upholding and imposing Ukraine's (junta's) sovereignty over Donbass.

In this, the true masterminds of this new "Molotov-Ribbentrop" pact (but now at the expense of Russian anti-fascist resistance and the Russians in Ukraine) never lost from sight the almost trivial thing that sovereignty, in its Western standard understanding, means "a monopoly on the violence." In other words, when Moscow (both Putin and Lavrov started very early on with this) was saying that the one overriding principle is "Ukraine's sovereignty, integrity, and unity" (for the Nazis and the Banderas in power are "partners" eligible for gas discounts and billions of dollars from Russian state banks), they were saying only with different words that they agreed with the Nazi junta's monopoly on violence--the "sovereignty" of Kiev--as a matter of (the one and only) principle and in the absence of any other stated or otherwise traceable principle on their part, including Russian national interest, security, national liberation, anti-fascism, self-determination, or the Nuremberg Trial and the founding of the post-World War II order on the principle and idea of de-Nazification.

The rest are details, implementation, and manipulative massaging and fogging of the issue and the meaning of Moscow's Minsk self-effacement and self-abnegation, which was a continuation of the criminal absence of any detectable strategy for Ukraine for the last 25 years, 15 of which were under Putin's watch. Very likely though, a defeated superpower and colony is not or was not allowed to have any effective strategy on this so crucial direction. In addition, Russian oligarchy had other priorities than to care about the return of Nazism and the gradual transformation of Ukraine from a brotherly nation into military real estate and launching pads for the US and NATO just 400 miles from the Red Square in Moscow.

The Minsk appeasement with not so optional surrender was very cleverly conceived. One thing was overlooked though. The whole process was (like the overthrow of the communist system in the Soviet Union from its own top) to be well timed and served piece by piece without revealing the whole too early--even though there is never such a thing as one-off treason, which would not demand and necessitate another and another. When, so soon right after the horrible Odessa massacre, Putin and the Russian government started calling the Odessa murderers endearingly "our esteemed partners," "Ukraine's best opportunity," and "Pyotr Alekseyevich," the Minsk (the new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for Russia itself, at the expense of Russia) was made out of legal wedlock and, from there, the Frankenstein's living corpse endowed with so much dishonesty and cunning, started to develop.

A question: How do you think would Commander Mozgovoy react to Pushilin's and Deynego's (read: the Kremlin's) "amendments"? The Minsk party thus made sure that Commander Mozgovoy would not in a condition to react at all.

When the "amendments" (that is, the same Minsk 1+2 merely self-served and repackaged as "amendments" or rather "amends") were at last presented and published (for safety reasons late at night), the unforeseen ability of the people concerned about Novorossiya to read and think immediately established that, by virtue of one treason, another comes along automatically--accepting Kiev's (Banderas') sovereignty and hence all its political, military, and police rule as supreme, the DPR and the LPR would also have to submit to the junta's stance and policies on Crimea. Defense and foreign policy is and was to be a sovereign prerogative of the junta in Kiev, not a matter of some local regions to decide or interfere with. Being betrayed and accepting betrayal would thus also require and entail betraying Russia and Crimea in return. This, by the way, also exactly what happened with Eastern Europe after 1989 and 1991. Stefan Fule, a MGIMO graduate, played a notable role in NATO expansion into the Baltics and also in the Maidan, Bandarite putsch. Miroslav Laichak, a Slovak Foreign Minister and another MGIMO graduate, served as a EU Protector in Bosnia. But this dialectic of self-reproducing self-abnegation and mutual betrayals defines the animus of all the East European post-communist, ex-communist elites.

In responding to the explosion of the public outrage, when the meaning and consequences of the Minsk deal (till then more or less obscured still to many) came into the open, both hapless Pushilin and Deynego and the Russian Foreign Ministry tried to extinguish the fire with some damage control moves: it was just a typo; nothing happened; just misunderstanding; not important at all; small oversight; as important as if Honduras was claiming Crimea, and the republics decided to join Honduras and not a Nazi state terrorizing Russians ... The next day, the Russian media and their headlines even victoriously claimed that the "amendments" were taken back.

In fact, if you bother to read the actual proclamation, Pushilin and his partner (with Moscow behind) denounced and recalled only that one part concerning Crimea, which, if they do accept the Nazi's state sovereignty and unity and its Constitution, they would have no power over anyhow, together with many other things, including their own existence.

This is exactly what Pushilin and Deynego were forced to admit in one of their first panicking responses--namely that, under the Minsk unconditional dictate, what they can decide or not decide is rather very narrow; so narrow that they cannot really decide on their own much at all. Many "fundamental" political questions are by virtue (or by disgrace) of Minsk out of discussion and not for their discussion at all. No dignity, no political freedom, no safety, no rights ... rights under a Nazi rule?

So what to do? Surkov's command fell back on pretense. Thus, Pushilin and Deynego began to pretend that they are suddenly denouncing "their own" amendments in full (not true) and that, if they submit themselves and Donbass to Minsk, that they have and will have the freedom to choose which part of the Nazi state's Constitution (i.e., on the question of Crimea or any other question) they would like, not like, subject themselves to and opt to violate.

After all this debacle, which exposed the poverty, amorality, and the lack of character and principles of Russian oligarchy and its pretense to be Che Guevaras in disguise, it is just more clear what Minsk always meant, what is means, and what some of its despicable consequences would be--for example, demanding to become traitors to one's own traitors, being enlisted in the Bandera army and so on. One of these unconditional obligations would be to obey the junta in the question of Crimea ... not to mention in the question of Donbass itself AND Russia too!

It has been the old imperial practice (and both the Romans, the British, and the Americans mastered it very well) to enlist the defeated, the subjected, and the enslaved as their crack, often most zealous units against their own (former) brothers and sisters. Self-alienation and self-betrayal energizes and produces lots of anger, zeal and hate.