Were the Ukrainians in the Maidan demonstrating on behalf of their borders?

To Understand Ukraine,

We Must Remember The Communist Past

by ROGER SCRUTON

It seems that we made a mistake in thinking it was all over, that the inscrutable Russian empire was only distracted for a few years, and that its demonic urge to control its neighbors is now fully revived.

It is twenty-five years since the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and we ought to be celebrating. But a shadow has been cast over what sparse festivities were planned by the situation in Ukraine. It seems that we made a mistake in thinking it was all over, that the inscrutable Russian empire was only distracted for a few years, and that its demonic urge to control its neighbors is now fully revived. Or is there some other and more comforting explanation?

The European Union has played an interesting part in the drama. Its foreign ministers, weakly flapping their arms, and in the German case merely shrugging their shoulders, tell the Russians to respect the "territorial integrity" of Ukraine, and to recognize internationally agreed borders. But the project of the European Union, from the outset, has been to remove the concept of territorial integrity from the government of Europe, and to dissolve the continent’s borders.

Were the Ukrainians in the Maidan demonstrating on behalf of their borders? Surely not; they wanted to get out of the Russian sphere of influence and into the European. Their hope was not to secure the territorial integrity of Ukraine but to earn their right to flee the place, as so many other citizens of the post-communist states have fled, so as to take up residence in the West and put the memory of Soviet communism finally and irreversibly behind them.

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