RUSSIAN COMMENTATOR: BLACK SEA FLEET DEAL IS A SHAM.

Writing in the June 10 Segodnya, political commentator Mikhail Leontyev said that the Yeltsin-Kuchma agreement on the division of the Black Sea Fleet was a sham because it was based on the assumption that Russia and Ukraine are two different nations. Leontyev said that Russian leaders on the fifth anniversary of Russia’s declaration of sovereignty continue to combine a “forgivable civilized imperialism” with “forgivable pro-Western” attitudes and thus do not understand that they have split up a single Russian people. “There is no Black Sea Fleet problem,” Leontyev writes. “There is a problem of Russian Crimea, Russian areas of northern Kazakhstan, and Russian-culture Belarus.”

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