Artificial countries with amalgams of people do not last. We have seen it so often in Africa and the Middle East, with countries designed by colonial tyrants. Designed by the colonial tyrant Stalin, the Ukraine is just another such country.

Today, gangs of Uniat and schismatic thugs, lawless right-wing extremists and radicals have seized power as a result of the US-financed and EU-supported coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government in Kiev. The weak, corrupt and incompetent President Yanukovich has fled, rightly fearing assassination. So Kiev is in chaos, much like Polish-occupied Moscow in 1612 or Western-occupied St Petersburg in 1917. Indeed, the leaders of the so-called ‘Opposition’ from the far western Galicia and meddling EU and US politicians have lost control of the mob, which they urged on and paid, will not even recognise their former leader Timoshenko, let alone the upstart Klichko, so favoured by the US and Germany, where he lives.

Meanwhile, in the Polish borderlands, Uniat Lviv has declared its independence. And so the solidly Orthodox Little Russian north, south and east of the country has therefore declared its independence. Kharkov could become the new capital of this restored Little Russia. And Carpatho-Russia continues to yearn for freedom from Kievan banditry. A landlocked far western Ukrainian rump, centred in Lviv, virtually without industry and dependent on Berlin and Warsaw (as in Nazi 1941) seems to be in formation amid the chaos. The division of the country seems inevitable and only idealists are talking about federalisation; if that were to have been successful, it should have happened 20 years ago. It is almost certainly too late for that now.

We can only hope and pray now that the division of the Ukraine will occur without civil war, without the mutual violence and hatred of recent weeks. May the Saints of Kiev and Pochaev save the faithful Orthodox people from Uniat and schismatic thuggery. The Last Judgement draws near.