OP-ED: U.S. reversal of support for Ukraine bewildering
Over the past 20 years I have come to know many Ukrainians: friends I made during my visits to their country; journalists and professionals visiting the United States I helped to host; and the refugees I have been teaching as a volunteer tutor of English as a Second Language. I share with them their bewilderment, their disappointment, even their sense of betrayal concerning all that has happened to the relations of our countries over the past few months.
Our nation was, until the Trump administration reversed course, an unflinching defender of Ukraine’s right to defend its territory against the unprovoked invasion by Russia. Now, the president, vice president and secretary of state are offended by Ukraine’s unwillingness to cede any of its land, and in recent efforts to end the war, they are proposing a deal that is highly favorable to Russia.
Vladimir Putin wants to keep the 30% of Ukraine his military now holds, for Ukraine never to join NATO and to demilitarize its armed forces; in other words, pave the way for Russia to seize the rest of Ukraine as soon as possible.
For the Ukrainians I know, what is sickening to hear is our U.S. government officials parroting Kremlin propaganda and repeating distorted history. For example: “Ukraine has always been part of Russia.”
Nothing can be further from the truth. Civilization in Ukraine can be traced back thousands of years, and Russia’s and Soviet rule of it amounts to little more than an eye blink in recent history.
It is Ukraine’s strategic location – the gateway from Europe to the Middle East and India – that drew invaders and conquerors intent on controlling trade routes.
When Greek settlements were established north of the Black Sea around 750 B.C., the land was occupied by tribes who fought off invading Persians. Then came the others – the Romans, the Goths and Slavic tribes. But it was invaders from Scandinavia – the Vikings – who on their way to conquer Constantinople in the ninth century established Kyivan Rus, a polity that would thrive for hundreds of years until the invasion of the Mongols in 1240. It was in 1189 that a Kyivan chronicler first used the word “Ukraine” to describe the land.
Over the next five centuries, the armies from Poland, Lithuania, the Ottoman empire and Sweden would fight over this land, with imperial Russia gaining a tenuous hold in the late 18th century.
Ukraine became a World War I battleground between the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary and Germany. The collapse of the Russian monarchy would lead to independence for Ukraine in 1918, only to be lost in a war with powerful neighbors – Bolshevik Russia and the Polish Republic.
The Bolsheviks brought communism to Ukraine. Its collectivization and cultural revolution would greatly reduce agricultural productivity and lead to famine and misery that would persist for decades.
Ukraine produced most of the food supply for the U.S.S.R., and under orders from Josef Stalin, communist party cadres took all they could from the starving and dying peasantry. In his history of Ukraine, “The Gates of Europe,” Serhii Plokhy wrote: “The authorities punished those villages that failed to fulfill their quotas by cutting supplies of basic goods, including matches and kerosene, and confiscating not only grain but also livestock and anything else that could be used as food. The first deaths caused by the new famine were reported in December 1932; by March 1933, death from starvation was a mass phenomenon.”
One of my Ukrainian students related stories told by her grandmother of the horrors of the Great Famine, known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor, when her family resorted to eating grass and boiling their belts to make soup.
Altogether, close to 4 million people perished in Ukraine as a result of the famine.
The tribulations hardly ended there. Many Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds perished in Stalin’s Great Purge. According to Plokhy, the multiple waves of arrest, execution and exile that engulfed the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1940 took their greatest toll in 1937. As many as 270,000 people were arrested in Ukraine, and half of them were executed.
As World War II erupted, Ukraine’s rich territory was coveted by Adolph Hitler, and the land became a bloody battlefield on which an estimated 1.5 million German and Russian soldiers were killed.
And so, is it any wonder that in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Ukrainians would welcome independence with such enthusiasm as they exhibited at the polls?
After a thousand years of being overrun by foreign armies, after so many centuries of attempts to eradicate their culture, wouldn’t freedom from domination be welcome by Ukrainians?
The turnout for the vote for independence was 84%, with 90% voting in favor. Even in the Donetsk region – now occupied by Russia’s military and where the majority are Russian speakers – independence won 84% approval.
Ukraine has been fighting the Russian incursion now for 11 years, ever since the seizure of Crimea in 2014. And every day Russian artillery shells and bombs and missiles are striking targets throughout the country, with many of the targets civilian: hospitals, shopping centers, schools, apartment buildings.
There is only one side to blame for this war, and there is only one side to support.
Parker Burroughs is retired executive editor of the Observer-Reporter.