James Carden, former US State Department Russia Policy Adviser has faced criticism in certain circles over his otherwise underreported comments during a recent interview to Australian Sky News — especially for mentioning some hard truths about the ethnopolitics of Ukraine.

In that interview, Mr. Carden noted that, like HIMARS or F-16s, Tomahawks won’t be a gamechanger, and argued that Putin’s proposal — EU but not NATO membership — was a fair enough bargain. When the host replied that, in this case, that would involve land concessions as part of a land-for-peace deal, the former State Department Adviser argued that the land Kyiv would be ceding is a land that: “they themselves have been attacking since 2014. The Ukrainians are being a bit disingenuous here… They claim to want the land in the Donbass, Eastern Ukraine. But they don’t want the ethnic Russian citizens on that land. So they’ve been doing everything that they can to disenfranchise those people.”

These comments are not ill-informed or dishonest and they merit some attention. In fact, they are quite accurate.

For years, Kyiv’s policies have systematically sidelined a significant chunk of Ukraine’s population. According to the country’s last census in 2001 — the only one since independence in 1991 — “ethnic Russians” accounted for 17.3 percent of the populace, which is over 8 million people. The numbers don’t catch all the nuance here: Ukraine is, pure and simple, a deeply bilingual society, with Russian as the native language (in other surveys) for at least 29 percent nationwide, a percentage that gets........

© Blitz