Moscow Times: Death of Novorossia – Why Kremlin abandoned Ukraine …
A Pro-Russian rebel arranges a flag of the self-proclaimed Federal State of Novorossiya in the town of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Sept. 16, 2014 (AP Photo)
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“The Novorossiya project is frozen until a new political elite emerges,” said Alexander Kofman, foreign minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic
Standing in front of a small Moscow church last September, President Vladimir Putin told journalists that he had lit candles inside for people who had been injured or given up their lives defending Novorossiya.
The historical term, meaning “New Russia,” was first used by the president last April and was subsequently picked up by insurgents in Ukraine’s east to define their effort to spread their anti-Kyiv rebellion across the country’s southeast — the same large region north of the Black Sea that became known as Novorossiya after Russia conquered it during 18th-century wars with Turkey, and that became part of Ukraine after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
Read also Russian-backed ‘Novorossiya’ breakaway movement collapses
Russian conservative ideologists and Putin himself used the term to justify their claim that it was the Kremlin’s duty to protect the interests of ethnic Russians there.
In June, amid the pro-Russian rebellion in Ukraine’s east, Novorossiya was proclaimed by rebels as a separate entity with its own parliament, flag and news agency.
Novorossiya was supposed to unite the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics into a confederation and also absorb other regions of Ukraine in the future. Full story
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