Putin warns outsiders over Ukraine

May 24, 2009, 11:37 PM CEST / Source: The Associated Press

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned the West on Sunday not to meddle in relations between Russia
and Ukraine, according to remarks cited by state-run news agencies.

After laying a wreath at the grave of Anton Denikin, who fought against the Red Army after the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution and is now cast by the Kremlin as a patriot, Putin urged journalists to read
Denikin's diaries, RIA-Novosti and ITAR-Tass reported.

"He has a discussion there about Big Russia and Little Russia — Ukraine," they quoted Putin as saying.
"He says that nobody should be permitted to interfere in relations between us, they have always been
the business of Russia itself."

Portions of present-day Ukraine were part of pre-Revolutionary Russia and were sometimes called
"Little Russia" or "Lesser Russia," while the bulk of the country was known as "Great Russia." Many
Ukrainians find the terms offensive and misleading.

Putin's remarks came as the dominant Russian Orthodox Church called for Slavic unity amid
celebrations honoring Saints Cyril and Methodius, considered founding fathers of a common Slavic
culture.

Comments could anger Ukrainians

But the comments could anger Ukrainians and increase their wariness about Moscow's intentions
toward the former Soviet republic.

Ukraine has been independent since 1991, when the Russian-dominated Soviet Union collapsed. But
Putin's remarks seemed to suggest that.

Moscow's close historical ties with Ukraine means gives it a measure of influence that other countries
cannot claim.

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The remarks come amid competition between Russia and the West for influence in Ukraine.

Russian officials have said they are determined to keep Ukraine out of NATO. For some Ukrainians,
Russia's war last year against pro-Western Georgia was a chilling suggestion of how far Moscow is
willing to go.

Russian nationalists want to regain the Crimean Peninsula, which was made part of Ukrainian Soviet
Republic by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. There is tension between Russia and Ukraine
over Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which Ukrainian leaders have said they will evict from the Crimean port
of Sevastopol when the current lease runs out in 2017.

Denikin, who died in exile in the United States in 1947, was reburied in 2005 in the cemetery Moscow's
historic Donskoy Monastery.

Putin's visit to his grave was a reflection of how the prime minister, a longtime KGB officer who was
president from 2000-2008, has celebrated individuals and images from both the Soviet era and czarist
times in a drive to instill pride in Russians.