Any objective reading of Eastern European history will show Russian attempts to subjugate the Ukrainian people over the years.
For over 500 years, the indomitable Russians have been making efforts to remove any cultural distinctions that may exist between Russia and Ukraine. The Kremlin argues strenuously to this day that Ukrainians are Russians.
Language, religion, education, architecture, arts and other cultural sign-posts have been a battleground for half a millennia, ebbing and flowing, flowing and ebbing.
Today, Russia is engaged in a tragic adventure, invading a neighbour once again. This time, as in other times, it’s to save Russians, or Russian-speakers, from the “Nazis” that have taken up residence in Kiev.
Of course the term Nazi resonates in a viscerally negative way owing to the brutal Nazi German invasion of Russia in 1941-43.
For most Russians, this is the time of their parents and grandparents, bravely throwing the Germans back, ultimately prevailing in the Great Patriotic War, their name for World War II.
I suppose losing some 21 million people in the conflict has something to do with that, although a lot of those casualties occurred in what is now Ukraine and Belarus.
Also, just to be clear, the Russians are full-square responsible, under Joseph Stalin, for causing the deaths of between 3-5 million of their “own people,” meaning Ukrainians, in the years immediately leading up to the war.
In the historical event known as the Holodomor, the Russians engaged in systematic acts of genocide that led to a death count rivaling any other in history.
Collectivized farms meant that agricultural products produced by Ukrainians were seized for distribution and sale elsewhere, leaving the Ukrainians to starve despite their fertile lands. Millions died as a result.
The NKVD, Russia’s feared security police, combed Ukrainian towns and villages looking for “undesirables,” or anyone critical of the regime. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were arrested and banished to gulags in remote Siberia, gruesome work camps that worked and/or starved prisoners to death.
And then the children. Russia gathered up Ukraine’s young, just as they’re doing now, and re-located them into the Russian interior, to be adopted by Russian families, to be turned into Russians after scraping away any trace of being Ukrainian.
After months of this, the eastern part of modern-day Ukraine, particularly in the area known as the Donbas, was a human wasteland, literally bereft of population. So in flowed hundreds of thousands of Russians to occupy the fertile land, the current Russian-speaking population of the Donbas being their descendants. It’s this population shift that Russia points to as the de-facto ownership of Ukraine by Russia, especially in the east, where a significant portion of Russian-speakers are being used by the Kremlin as the reason for today’s invasion. These are the people being saved from the Nazis.
The people of Ukraine are both resilient and resistant. They gained their independence back in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart. They read and speak their own language. They study from their own textbooks. They have their own poets and musicians. Their own church. They are Ukrainian, not Russian. And Russia saying otherwise doesn’t make that fact any different.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 