Ukraine-Russia border
Behind the "European Rampart" along the Ukraine-Russia border, near Kharkiv (Eastern Ukraine).

Europe’s new wall

Published on 11 November 2014 at 08:42
Arseniy Yatsenyuk  | Behind the "European Rampart" along the Ukraine-Russia border, near Kharkiv (Eastern Ukraine).

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new physical and militarised border is under construction, fuelled by ideological and political divisions, and allegedly funded by the European Union.

The Daily Beast reports on a Ukraine government project to build a 2000-kilometre wall along its border with Russia —

that, theoretically at least, would keep Moscow out and secessionists in. The defences would include an actual steel wall, in addition to watchtowers, trenches for soldiers, and a barbed no-man’s land running contiguous to the countries’ massive shared border.

Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk calls the wall “the European Union eastern border”, arguing “no one will provide us the visa-free regime with the EU if there is no border,” reports Ukrainian news site Censor.net.

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The Daily Beast cites Yatsenyuk claiming “that the EU already has set aside $20m [€16m]” for the project and says Kiev mayor Vladimir Klitschko has gone so far as to ask —

for German help and expertise in building the wall while in Berlin earlier this month. His unusual request raised eyebrows in Germany, where dark memories of the Berlin Wall linger on.

The irony of the request was not lost on British playwright David Edgar, who, reflecting in The Guardian on European politics 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, argues that a —

new political fault line between a socially liberal, free market urban elite and an increasingly socially conservative but still welfarist working class was first drawn in Ukraine during the 2004 Orange Revolution against a rigged election “won” by Viktor Yanukovych. Earlier this year, the rerun of that uprising saw the fascist Svoboda and Right Sector parties enter the post-revolutionary government. Now, President Petro Poroshenko has announced plans to build a wall along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, costing more than 10 times the country’s current defence budget, to be built by the Germans.

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