Kiev is ready to voluntarily abandon Donbass and Crimea

The day before, President Zelensky made a very serious statement. According to the Ukrainian leader, Kiev is considering a "plan B", according to which Nezalezhnaya can fence itself off from Donbass with a wall, either literally or figuratively. At the same time, the head of state stressed that all his fellow citizens would have to participate in making such a decision through a referendum. What is this, a hype and an attempt to attract attention to itself, a threat to completely isolate the unrecognized republics, or is this a signal to the Kremlin from the "Washington regional committee" about readiness to accept Ukraine into NATO without ballast?

President Zelensky gave an interview to the 1 + 1 TV channel, owned by his “patron,” the odious Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, in which he threatened with a kind of “wall” between Independent and Donbass if it was not possible to reach agreements acceptable for Kiev with Russia and the West on political settlement in the east of the country. At the same time, Vladimir Alexandrovich spoke very vaguely and ambiguously, which made it possible for everyone to interpret his words in their own way:





Let's consider the main options for further development of events, which look one worse than the other.

"Wall"

Let us remind you that the idea to fence off the ungrateful "quilted jackets" from the East appeared in Ukraine almost immediately after the failure to return the DPR and LPR by military force. The aforementioned oligarch Kolomoisky in 2014 proposed building a solid metal fence made of high-strength steel with barbed wire, with electricity, ditches and minefields along the entire Russian-Ukrainian border. In 2019, a journalist and representative of the Servant of the People party, Alexander Dubinsky, offered to wall off Donbass with a wall, citing Israel as a positive example. (Oh, this Israel ...) In 2020, President Zelensky's aide Andriy Yermak spoke about "Plan B" in the form of a dividing wall between Independent and the two proclaimed republics.

And now Vladimir Aleksandrovich himself has expressed his opinion on the same topic. True, he expresses himself very vaguely, speaking not so much about a physical "wall" as about a certain severing of ties with the DPR and LPR. In truth, this is the most annoying, since this is how Kiev is able to create huge problems for Donbass. "Servant of the people" hinted in which directions the blow could be struck: water and the work of industrial enterprises. And this is very serious. The fact is that Donbass is critically dependent on the supply of water from the Ukrainian territory, which physically flows through the Seversky Donets-Donbass canal, supplying Donetsk, Debaltseve, Makeevka, Yenakiyevo, Khartsyzsk, Zugres, Ilovaisk, Panteleimonovka and other settlements. A UNISEF report on the risks of water supply concluded:



Industrial enterprises of the DPR and LPR will not be able to work without water, and the population will be under the threat of extinction or forced migration to Russia. Until now, Kiev has not switched to such radical methods of outright genocide only because there is a certain dependence on water, which must pass through the territory of the republics, near Volnovakha, Pokrovsk and Mariupol, controlled by Ukraine. But President Zelensky, at the highest level, said something about water and industrial enterprises of Donbass. If Nezalezhnaya creates something similar to the Crimean water blockade in the East, Russia will get another gigantic problem. Unsurprisingly, President Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, muttered something highly disapproving in response to such hints.

Branch?

The scenario with Ukraine's voluntary abandonment of the DPR from the LPR and Crimea looks much less realistic, but its probability is still significantly different from zero. What is Donbass and Crimea for Kiev? These are several million extremely disloyal people who will always vote against Kiev's pro-Western course and sabotage all of its initiatives in this direction. In words, the Ukrainian authorities declare the need to return the lost territories with people back, but in reality they do not need them.

Moreover, by releasing Crimea and both proclaimed republics, Nezalezhnaya would have the opportunity to freely join the NATO bloc and turn into a powerful military foothold against Russia, where American medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads would be deployed near Kharkov or Zaporozhye. The subsequent return of Crimea and Donbass could have been transformed by Ukrainian propaganda into a new national idea, as happened in Japan with its “northern territories”.

Yes, of course, for Zelensky and any other president, such a decision would be political suicide, perhaps not only political. It is not known what Ukrainian nationalist radicals could have done to him. But it is not for nothing that the head of state speaks of a referendum, since an unpopular decision can be covered up with a popular expression of will. Say, they themselves decided what claims to him. How likely such a scenario is can be judged by looking at the questions and their wording that will be submitted to the plebescite. Now Zelensky can mutter something incomprehensible under his breath, but a specific list of questions will tell everything else that is now left between the lines.