Death of Novorossia: Why Kremlin Abandoned Ukraine Separatist Projecthttp://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/death-of-novorossia-why-kremlin-abandoned-ukraine-separatist-project/522320.htmlStanding 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 Novorossia.
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-Kiev rebellion across the country's southeast — the same large region north of the Black Sea that became known as Novorossia after Russia conquered it during 18th-century wars with Turkey, and that became part of Ukraine after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
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, Novorossia was proclaimed by rebels as a separate entity with its own parliament, flag and news agency. Novorossia 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.
But last week, Alexander Kofman, foreign minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, announced that the Novorossia project had been put on hold.
"The Novorossia project is frozen until a new political elite emerges in all these regions that will be able to head the movement. We don't have the right to impose our opinion on [the Ukrainian cities of] Kharkiv, Zaporizhia and Odessa," Kofman told the Vechernyaya Makeyevka newspaper published in the Donetsk region.
His words echoed those of Novorossia parliament head Oleg Tsaryov, a former deputy of Ukraine's official parliament in Kiev. Last month, Tsaryov told the Kiev-based Vesti Reporter magazine that Novorossia's activities had been frozen because they did not fit into the Minsk cease-fire agreements signed in February by Putin, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko and the leaders of France and Germany. The official website of Novorossia's parliament is now offline.
