Ukraine is increasingly reminiscent of the African Zaire of the 1970s, Elena Panina, a member of the State Duma’s international affairs committee, told RIA Novosti.
So she commented on the words of the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Dmitry Kuleba, who called the “Russian world” monotonous and said that Russia would not be able to introduce it in Ukraine by soft power.
According to Panina, it is significant that the Ukrainian official made this statement after the closure of opposition television channels and against the background of the destruction of education in Russian, Hungarian and other national languages.
“In fact, it is the multinational Russian world that is strong in its diversity, it has many shades and nuances. But modern Ukraine every year more and more resembles a backward authoritarian state, where even the very word” federalism “is prohibited, and” freedom to be yourself “exists only for neo-fascists marching with portraits of Bandera and Shukhevych. For everyone else, Ukraine is a space of instability, fear and degradation, “Panina said.
The deputy recalled that during the Soviet era, Ukraine “was at the forefront of progress”, a republic with advanced industry, science, and high culture.
“Where is all this now? Ukraine is increasingly reminiscent of the African Zaire of Mobutu’s time, where the pro-Western dictatorship combined cave nationalism with transcendental corruption,” she concluded.
Mobutu Sese Seko is a Congolese dictator, President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which he renamed Zaire in 1971. The founder of the ideology of personal cult – “mobutism”. Mobutu unsuccessfully tried to diversify the economy, the basis of which was the export of raw materials and minerals, but since the mid-1970s the country plunged into a deep socio-economic crisis, complicated by frequent changes in government and army leadership and periodic repression. After 32 years in power, Mobutu left a country with a ruined economy.