"PARALLEL LIVES" (CYPRUS – UKRAINE)
In 1959, with the Zurich-London Treaty, three countries, Britain, Greece and Turkey, guaranteed the independence of the newly established state of Cyprus.
After 18 years, in 1974, one of the three guarantor countries, Turkey, intervened by sending military forces to Cyprus, occupying a large part of it, claiming that the island's fellow Turkish Cypriot population was in danger due to the overthrow of the legally elected President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, who eventually fled to Britain.
To date, this intervention by Turkey, despite the decisions of international organizations, has not only not solved the problem based on the rules of international law, but has also complicated it even further.
Something similar is happening today in Ukraine.
In 1994, with the Budapest Memorandum, three countries, the USA, Russia and Britain, again guaranteed Ukraine's borders in exchange for the latter giving up its nuclear weapons, which it had possessed since it was a member of the Soviet Union.
Today, 20 years after the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, one of the guarantor countries, Russia, under the pretext that Russian citizens were in danger, intervened militarily on Ukrainian territory, literally taking the international community by surprise.
This intervention does not solve the problem but opens the floodgates of Aeolus, creating new problems in Ukraine, since in the country there are large organized minorities of Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, Tatars, etc. with a strong presence in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country.
Of course, Russia's intervention did not come out of nowhere. It was preceded by the overthrow of the legally elected President Yanukovych by organized armed groups of suspicious social, political and ethnological origin, which were supported by foreign actors. Note that Yanukovych eventually fled to Russia, a country that had guaranteed Ukraine's borders, just as Makarios had fled to Britain.
In closing, I want to emphasize that in a large country like Ukraine with ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic differences, with organized armed groups seeking ethnic cleansing, in a country that is on the verge of economic collapse with the IMF knocking on its door and with a foreign occupying army, the future is dark and uncertain.
Any change in the current situation in Ukraine, a country that relatively recently gained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, will have serious international implications, because:
First, we will have a large wave of refugees in many countries in Europe, not excluding Greece and
Secondly, the neighboring countries Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Russia will seek to implement their old, national territorial claims, under the pretext of protecting fellow ethnic populations, which if this is "justified" by the international community, will then be exploited by other countries around the world, not excluding our neighbors.
