THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Aside from my academic credentials as a student of Russian literature, culture, and history, I have a personal set of credentials to examine the current Ukrainian situation. First, my mom was born in Ukraine and my dad was born in Russia. Second, having been bombed out of our apartment building in Belgrade at age three in 1941 and running from bombs until the end of World War II, I can boast a lasting and visceral experience of war. Third, this has caused me to become a life-long peace activist.

In the 80s, when the nuclear arms race between us and The Evil Empire was in all the headlines, I decided that a mother’s job (I had given birth to my two American kids) was in peace work as much as over a hot stove. And because of my fluency in Russian, I went to several people-to-people peace initiatives (some of them organized by President Eisenhower’s granddaughter) and this took me, from 1983 to 20010, to trips to the Soviet Union, Georgia, Azerbaijan, then the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Crimea.

In short, I am not someone who would applaud war. However, having become exposed to many different sources of information, I am not likely to be easily persuaded by the one-sided narratives of the mainstream media.  

First, a few words on Russian-Ukrainian history. As I mentioned earlier, my Ukrainian-born mother and my Russian-born father were not an exceptional case at all, but this situation is extremely common. However, tensions between Ukraine and Russia are also historical. Let me put it this way: Ukraine is something like Texas in U.S. history. Remember the Alamo? Well, Texas was part of Mexico at some point, claimed independence for a brief period, and later during the Civil War, its plan was to secede from the North.  

To be sure, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has a much longer history. The word Ukraine literally means “borderland,” and has been a passageway to waves upon waves of nomadic tribes, culminating in the sacking of Kiev (Kyiv) in 1241 by the Mongols. Subsequently, the river Dnepr (Dnipro) has been a tentative border between the two contending states of Russia and Poland. But to bring events closer to our own time, let us consider events during World War II: Stepan Bandera and other nationalist Ukrainian leaders welcomed the German invaders as liberators and proceeded to the brutal cleansing of Jews, Poles, and Communists.

But the S.U. was victorious, and these extreme nationalists found refuge, among other places, in Canada and the U.S.  The CIA financed the Ukrainian Institute in New York, and this Ukrainian lobby was very helpful during the Cold War.

Now we seem to have a Cold War 2 situation. Basically, after the successful neo-liberal regime change in Moscow in the 90s, instead of “another, but sober Yeltsin,” as President Clinton put it, we got the little beady-eyed street fighter Putin. He had the gall not only to ride horses bare-chested, but to reintegrate important Russian resources into national ownership, thus frustrating the multinational carpetbaggers who had been having a field day looting the goods – particularly oil and gas. So, following other “killers” like Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, and Qaddafi, and Assad, Putin became eligible for the No. 1 killer position.

But is he not being a “killer” in Ukraine as we speak? Yes, there is a war going on in Ukraine, primarily a civil war – a war we did everything to trigger. We promoted the Orange Revolution in 2003, but it petered out. We promoted the Maidan putsch in 2014 – as always, in the name of democracy, and this time we succeeded. Aside from neocon Victoria Nuland distributing cookies on the Maidan Square, we had taken the trouble to train “freedom fighters” in Texas. Together with other groupings like the “Right Sector,” the AZOV battalion is an openly NAZI outfit. They are proud to wear swastikas on their uniforms, like to demolish WW2 memorials and have raised a statue to Stepan Bandera, the same guy who had collaborated with the NAZIS in WWII.

Why on earth would we be involved in such dirty business? Because, basically, we can. Here the issue of NATO needs to be briefly addressed. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan’s Secretary of State had an agreement. The S.U. would get out of Eastern Germany with the understanding that NATO would not move “an inch” past the German border. We honored the agreement by moving NATO into the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, the Baltic States…

Russians had enough to deal with the falling apart of the S.U. – and only complained from time to time. But when the new government of Ukraine started making moves to join NATO as well, Putin’s Russia felt recovered enough to call for a stop to what they defined as an “existential threat.” They had counted on the two Minsk agreements, sponsored by France and Germany, which the Kyiv government ignored.

Finally, the Russians proposed a renegotiation of the EU security system based on NATO in December of 2021. Their proposals were simply ignored. By sending arms and training “freedom fighters,” we had been turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO country all along. Its “sovereign nation” status can be exemplified by the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma Board of Directors.  When it became clear that the Ukrainian forces were about to launch a massive attack on the Donbass region, the Russian government declared their support of Donbass’ autonomy and started their military operation on February 24, 2022.

Were Russian concerns not understandable? But reason has little to do in this situation. Apparently, we think of the Russian Federation as an enemy, and the intended geopolitical move was to give Russia another Afghanistan. We were counting on the proxy war in Ukraine, the massive sanctions, and the “liberal opposition” in Russia which we have been financing for years, to cause the long- awaited demise of Putin.

 Where does this leave Ukraine and the Ukrainians? Do we give a hoot about them? Did the media keep us aware of the 8-year shelling of the eastern territory of Ukraine because they resisted the 2014 regime change in Kiev, particularly the banning of the Russian language in schools, government, hospitals, etc. Nor did we hear that between 1 to 2 million Ukrainian refugees crossed the border into Russia during that time.

Instead, we are force-fed non-stop stories of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Like with the earlier “humanitarian intervention” in Former Yugoslavia, when similar “atrocity” stories have since been debunked, some of the “evidence” in Ukraine has already been recognized as Psy-Op creations. Of course, there is turmoil and suffering in Ukraine, and Russian soldiers are dying as well. But the vilification of Putin and the hero standing of Zelensky are theater. It’s a great excuse to vote 40 billion “aid” mostly to our own military-industrial complex.