Partitioning Ukraine? Threats to Jews and Others; Does Brzezinski Want to Partition Russia?

BBC reports: "Ukraine's interim President Olexander Turchynov has warned of the dangers of separatism following the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych. His comments came amid continuing opposition in Ukraine's Russian-speaking regions to the new administration in Kiev. The formation of a unity government has been delayed until Thursday."

FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America's Toughest Questions. Boyle said today: "The Ukrainian Parliament terminated Russian as an alternative official language, thus illegally stripping about 30 percent of Ukraine's population of their basic human rights. And there is no effective government to speak of." Boyle argues that "under these circumstances international law would permit Russian-speaking sections of Ukraine to move toward secession if they so desire."

He also notes: "In Kiev there are public demands for murdering Russians, Jews and Communists by neo-Nazi, fascist and rightist groupings. The situation is so dire that the Ukrainian Chabad Chief Rabbi Reuven Azman has recommended that Jews leave the city and perhaps the country." See in the Jewish Press: "Ukrainian Jews Urged to Leave Kiev."

Boyle also criticized Zbigniew Brzezinski (who has advised President Obama on foreign policy and appeared on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program on Sunday) as well as much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as having "a long-term anti-Russian bias." Boyle noted that Brzezinski "started the Afghan Mujahidin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and bragged about it. Brzezinski wants to do to the Russian Federation what was done to the Soviet Union -- crack it up into pieces." Boyle graduated from the same Harvard PhD Program that produced Brzezinski before him.

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in "A Geostrategy for Eurasia" in the journal Foreign Affairs (1997): "Russia's first priority should be to modernize itself rather than to engage in a futile effort to regain its status as a global power. Given the country's size and diversity, a decentralized political system and free-market economics would be most likely to unleash the creative potential of the Russian people and Russia's vast natural resources. A loosely confederated Russia -- composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic -- would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbors. Each of the confederated entities would be able to tap its local creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow's heavy bureaucratic hand. In turn, a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization."