</title> <original_language_title>Символическая политика постсоветской Украины: конструирование легитимирующего нарратива</original_language_title> </titles> <contributors> <organization sequence='first' contributor_role='author'>Сибирский институт управления – филиал Российской академии народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте РФ</organization> <person_name sequence='first' contributor_role='author'> <given_name>Дмитрий&…

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War had been attended by expectations of a new era of reconciliation and healing in Europe. Instead, on the 25 anniversary of the dismantling of the dividing line across Germany and Europe, Ukraine announced plans to build a new wall along its 2,295 kilometre-long border with Russia. On 16 June 2014 the head of the National Security and Defence Council, Andrei Parubiy, stated that building the wall would ‘avoid any future provocations from the Russian side’. The Ukrainian prime minister, Arseny Yatsenyuk, on 5 September 2014 announced that a draft plan, imaginatively named ‘Wall’, had been adopted and construction of the fortifications began soon after. In the first instance there would be a four-metre wide and two-metre deep ditch equipped with electronic systems. This was an attempt physically to separate Ukraine from Russia, and reflected the deeper psychological and political gulf between the two countries. It also demonstrated that a new iron curtain threatened to divide Europe, no longer ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’, as Winston Churchill put it in his speech announcing the Cold War in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, but from Narva on the Baltic to Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. Defenders of the new wall argue that this one is different, designed no longer to oppress people within its confines, but like the Great Wall of China, to keep the barbarians out; or like the Separation Wall in Palestine, to defend civilians. Some 274 people died along the Berlin Wall between its construction in August 1961 to its dismantling in November 1989, whereas already thousands have died in Ukraine. Walls and war have returned to the continent. After more than a year of conflict, the causes of the Ukrainian crisis remain bitterly contested. As analysts and power brokers on both sides argue vehemently in favour of their interpretation of recent events, one essential point is often overlooked: the conflict is rooted in decisions made long before any fighting broke out. To fully understand what provoked the gravest geopolitical crisis of our time—a necessary first step if we hope to pull back from the brink of a profound disaster—we must regard it as an outgrowth of two events that helped shape the course of the twentieth century and continue to resonate today. The Yalta Conference of 4-11 February 1945, held in the Livadia palace on the peninsula’s south coast, and the Malta Summit of 2-3 December 1989, held on two ships off Marsaxlokk Harbour, are either long-forgotten or poorly understood by many in