Now Ukraine's people may face a similar test after supporters of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich threatened to seek autonomy should the rightful winner of the country's presidential vote, Viktor Yushchenko, actually become president. Who can doubt that the hand of Russia is behind this? Would Moscow's Mayor Yuri Luzkhov, a loyal creature of Putin, have dared to attend the rally where autonomy was demanded without the sanction of the Kremlin's elected monarch? Indeed, Putin openly claims this part of Ukraine as a Russian "internal matter."
It is to be hoped that Ukraine's Russian-speaking citizens, having witnessed the economic despair -- and sometimes the bloodshed -- caused by the Kremlin's manufactured pro-autonomy movements, will realize that they are being turned into Putin's pawns. The test for Yushchenko and his Orange revolutionaries, as it was for Lithuania's democrats in 1990 to 1991, is to show that democracy does not mean that the majority suppresses any minority. Lithuania passed that test; I am confident that Yushchenko and his team will do so as well. But Europe and the world are also being tested. Russia is passing from being the Russian Federation of former president Boris Yeltsin to a unitary authoritarian regime under Putin and his former KGB colleagues. Europe, the US and the wider world must see Putin's so-called "managed democracy" in its true light, and must stand united against his neo-imperialist dreams.?
The first step is to make Russia honor its binding commitment to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as to the Council of Europe, to remove its troops from Moldova and Georgia. Any plans to "defend" Yanukovich and the eastern part of Ukraine by military force must be confronted.
Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania's first president after its indepen-dence from the Soviet Union, is now a member of the European Parliament.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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