On Christmas holidays, “Father Frost” and “Snow Maiden” from “Matryoshka” and “CHANCE+” associations came to visit children in one of the shelters for Ukrainian immigrants in Lisbon. Pavlo Sadokha, the UWC Regional Vice-President and the head of the Union of Ukrainians in Portugal, comments that such associations are part of a machine that prepared the ideological basis for a military attack on Ukraine. These are not just some Russophile cultural organizations but are the leading promoters of the Russian world in Portugal.
“You should not take lightly Soviet organizations that invented stories about ‘Donbas victims’ and ‘Nazis from Galicia’ abroad, and now post pictures of cats and poems about peace in social networks, often with Ukrainian flags. There are many of them, and they are active,” says Sadokha.
The UWC Regional Vice-President divides such organizations into two types. The first type is “grantoids,” who take advantage of the significant funds that are currently being allocated for integrating Ukrainian immigrants. The second is organizations that directly carry out Putin’s plan for the genocide of Ukrainians. “Both of them cause great harm to Ukrainians and the Ukrainian state,” emphasizes the head of the Union of Ukrainians in Portugal. “The first ones divert resources from the goals needed to preserve the Ukrainian gene pool. Their projects have the character of assimilation or, even worse, the Russification character of ‘we are beyond politics.’” Others engage in disinformation under the guise of innocent Russian or Russian-speaking victims of Ukrainian nationalism.”
“For every article about the danger of the Russian world, I receive hundreds of negative comments from Portuguese supporters of Russia,” Sadoha writes. “The main message: ‘Don’t bring us your war here!’”
That’s why “you can’t take Soviet organizations with the mentality of the Russian world abroad lightly. In countries where society has a significant say in the authorities’ political decisions, the supply of weapons to Ukraine and the preservation of Ukrainians as a nation depend on this [the rhetoric of pro-Russian organizations],” concludes the UWC Regional Vice-President.
