Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be goaded into a reckless and impulsive response to Ukraine’s killing of Russian civilians in Crimea, said filmmaker Regis Tremblay, but will carefully consider its options as it works to construct a multipolar world order.
The American documentarian, who now lives in the Crimean city of Yalta, responded to Sunday’s attack on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program.
“In 2014, an overwhelming number of people in Crimea voted to return to the Russian Federation, where they have been since the time of Catherine the Great, at the time of our American Revolution. And so, to talk about Crimea as being the focus of Ukrainian attacks, I would like to dispel this lie and this myth once and for all,” said Tremblay, rejecting the notion that Russia’s reintegration of the peninsula was the ultimate cause of the current conflict with Ukraine.
“This has been a war – a declared war – by the United States of America on Russia,” he insisted. “Its stated, publicized foreign policy goal, repeated over and over, has been the strategic defeat of Russia. This has never had anything to do with Ukrainians’ freedom or democracy. Ukraine has been a pawn.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, the chief advisor to Volodymyr Zelensky, caused controversy this week with comments calling Crimea “a large military camp” populated by Russian “civilian occupiers.” Crimea has been culturally and geographically considered part of Russia for centuries until 1954, when then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev placed the territory under the administration of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
But the peninsula remained joined with Russia as part of the Soviet Union, only becoming separated from it during its collapse. Khrushchev’s transfer of the territory commemorated the 300-year anniversary of the Pereiaslav Agreement, the 1654 pact that formalized a political union between Ukraine with Russia. The peninsula maintained key military significance for Moscow, hosting its storied Black Sea Fleet.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 left millions of ethnic Russian people living in its constituent republics separated from Russia, causing Putin to describe its demise as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called Podolyak’s controversial comments “reminiscent of the Nazi German attitude to Crimea,” suggesting the Ukrainian official wished to “cleanse” the territory of its ethnic Russian inhabitants. Host Garland Nixon faulted US President Joe Biden for his alliance with Kiev’s nationalist government, claiming the United States is attempting to “militarize” various countries to protect its own hegemony.
“Many people are not able to connect what’s been happening in the Donbass since 2014 – that’s 10 years now – which is a very slow motion genocide,” said Tremblay. “The killing of innocent civilians. It’s directly connected to the killing of more than 20,000 innocent people in Palestine at the hands of Israel and their backers, the United States. The United States is complicit in both of these atrocities. It’s barbaric.”
Nevertheless, Tremblay noted that “Putin has never acted impulsively.”
“Will Russia respond? Yes, certainly it will respond, but not in a way that will trigger World War Three,” said the filmmaker. “President Putin has made it very clear that he is not going to do anything that would inadvertently trigger a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Putin will respond asymmetrically as he is doing.”
“Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, has been traveling throughout Asia and through Africa signing agreements, long-term agreements for development, for strategic partnerships and for military partnerships,” he noted. “This is, to me, how Russia is responding to the neverending United States escalation on Russia. Putin will not take the bait.”
“This is a very high risk, long-term vision,” Tremblay concluded. “They’re looking long-term, completely believing that the hegemon is in rapid decline, and that their vision of a new world order is based on international law. It’s based on the principles of the United Nations Charter. It’s based on the sovereignty of all nations. And they do not want to risk this future world that they envision with some kind of an irrational, knee-jerk reaction that triggers the end of the world.”