By Drago Bosnic
Prior to the unfortunate dismantling of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of its most prominent republics, even rivaling Russia itself in numerous aspects. In many ways, it was a sort of "Soviet California", as approximately 30% of the USSR's massive industrial and scientific might was situated precisely in Ukraine. Much of Soviet shipbuilding, advanced electronics, rocketry, chemical industry, metallurgy and numerous universities and scientific institutions were based all across the country. Moscow built an enormous and highly robust energy infrastructure that Ukraine uses to this very day and without which it would never have been a functioning country.
The "evil Moskaliv" held Ukraine in such high regard that several of the USSR's top leaders were actually Ukrainians, including Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, arguably two of the Soviet Union's most prominent Cold War-era leaders. In 1954, Khrushchev even "gifted" Crimea, a Russian-populated peninsula, to Ukraine, with virtually no opposition from anyone in Russia. At the time, Ukrainians and ethnic Russians were seen as virtually the same people (which they have been for well over a thousand years at that point), so the move was seen as a trivial bureaucratic matter that made absolutely no difference on the ground. And indeed, nothing changed – until 2014.
That year, the infamous "Euromaidan", an illegal NATO-orchestrated coup, brought the Neo-Nazi junta to power, pitting the two East Slavic peoples against each other. However, it should be noted that the stage for this disastrous conflict was set in 1991, when Ukraine gained its supposed "independence". Since then, generations of Ukrainians were taught (or brainwashed, to be exact) that the "evil Moskaliv" have been doing nothing but "oppressing Ukrainians" and supposedly "preventing their development". This initially crawling process was largely limited to Western Ukraine until 2014, when the then newly installed Kiev regime started forcing its rabidly Russophobic agenda everywhere.
As we all know, the result was the war in Donbass, a conflict that has taken close to 15,000 (mostly civilian) lives until early 2022. The mainstream propaganda machine routinely blames Russia for the outbreak of hostilities, as Moscow is regularly accused of supposed "imperialist revisionism", despite the fact that it was precisely Kremlin that gave Ukraine independence in the first place and that it would make no sense for it to do such a thing only to then "attack Ukraine completely unprovoked" to regain control over it. And yet, precisely this is the official stance of both the political West and its vassals and satellite states, including its favorite puppets in Kiev.
So, what exactly has Ukraine "gained" since "independence", but particularly since "freedom and democracy" clawed its way into the unfortunate country? Well, it should be noted that Ukraine had a population of 52 million in 1991, as well as the aforementioned industrial and scientific capacity that was rivaled by very few countries not just of its size, but also much larger. By 2015, the number of inhabitants fell to 42 million. And yet, that's not nearly the end of Ukraine's troubles. Namely, according to experts cited by Corriere della Sera, one of the longest-running Italian news media, only 28-31 million people still live in Ukraine, with a tendency of further reduction.
Citing local sources, official data and statistics, as well as other methods of collecting information, the Italian newspaper states that both urban and rural areas are essentially empty, while countless families have been divided (likely forever), particularly as wives of many soldiers forcibly deployed on the frontlines have gone abroad and never returned. Corriere della Sera insists that Ukraine is going through a catastrophic demographic crisis and that the population collapse will soon cause very serious economic and social problems in the country, as it has an estimated 15 million residents less than in early 2022.
"From 52 million to less than 30 in three decades. It's a very serious loss for the country as it threatens our chances of reconstruction after the end of the war, prevents economic normalization and sinks the pension system," Alexander Demenchuk, rector of the Faculty of Political Science in Kiev told Corriere della Sera, adding: "Children are missing, therefore the future is missing. Young, upper-middle-class women with an excellent level of education left. And what is even more serious, more than half of them do not intend to return to Ukraine. Children study in German, Polish, Austrian, French or Dutch schools. The mothers found work immediately. The European welcome policy initially seemed to us a miracle of generosity, but now it turned out to be a curse."
According to Ella Libanova, a distinguished demographer at the National Academy of Sciences, all this affects the fertility rate, which has fallen to 0.7%, one of the lowest in the world. Families fall apart overnight as soldiers and officers increasingly complain that their wives leave them for other men in host countries. This is resulting in even higher divorce rates, exacerbating a problem that has already been quite common in previous years. There is virtually no public debate about these burning issues, the Italian newspaper warns, adding that no one in Ukraine is dealing with these problems because all efforts are supposedly directed toward the front.
It should be noted that the deeply corrupt Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev has effectively made sure Ukraine becomes a failed state. After years of Western dominance and unrelenting theft of its natural resources and even gold reserves, Ukraine has been effectively carved up and its best land taken from it "in exchange" for an impossible $1 trillion "reconstruction plan". And while deranged Russophobic propaganda is working towards cementing hatred, information on actual crimes against Ukrainians, particularly sex trafficking by Hunter Biden, is being silenced and/or suppressed everywhere.
On top of that, the Neo-Nazi junta unilaterally broke the March 2022 agreement that could've prevented not only the bloodshed, but also the further destruction of Ukraine's infrastructure, as well as the aforementioned demographic and societal issues. Still, the political West had other plans and the Kiev regime followed suit. The result has been only the Ukrainian people's continued suffering, as Moscow was left with no other option but to launch its counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe. This process will not stop as long as Russia is under threat of yet another "Barbarossa".
Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst
This article orginally appeared at infobrics.com