Reflections on the Ukraine War: Another Point of View

My response to Harry Targ and Peace Action of Wisconsin

According to your article in the May-June 2023 Mobilizer, most accounts of the Ukraine “crisis” ignore “NATO expansion” of the 1990s and the “2014 coup”. Well, first of all, it’s not a crisis — it’s a war. And second, far from being ignored, the talking points of “coup” and “NATO” are repeated constantly, especially on the left.

What has been ignored are the actual historical events that help to put the Ukraine War into context:

1. The Ukraine referendum of 1991 after the fall of Soviet Union, in which an overwhelming majority voted for independence.
2. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine voluntarily gave up its nukes in return for border security guarantees.
3. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, which overturned the fraudulent election of pro-Russian autocrat Viktor Yanukovych.
4. The Maidan Revolution of Dignity of 2014, which again forced the ouster of Yanukovych after he backed out of an association agreement with the EU. 
5. Russia’s illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, which violated the UN Charter.

Here are your takeaways about the war (and my comments):

1. Russia has fallen into a trap. (A trap of its own making — it invaded Ukraine illegally, in violation of the UN Charter. The best way to get out of a trap is to admit your "mistake" and leave.)
2. The invasion gives fuel to anti-China cold war rhetoric. (China has a choice to make — to support the Putin regime in its illegal war of aggression, either overtly or covertly, or to respect international law and work toward a complete Russian withdrawal. It remains to be seen what impact its proposed peace plan will have.)
3. The war is a plus for the military-industrial complex. (Well, sure — maybe Russia should have thought about the consequences before it launched an illegal war of aggression.)
4. The Ukraine “story” transforms the narrative from North vs Global South to authoritarians vs democracies. (Maybe that’s because Russia is fighting a colonial war in Ukraine, while aiding and abetting a rising far-right fascist movement in Europe and the US, using immigrants from the Global South as scapegoats.)
5. The impacts on progressive forces in the US are devastating. (So that’s your big concern? Maybe you should mention the way more devastating impact on Ukraine, which has withstood a brutal invasion and occupation for more than a year. In contrast, the harm to progressive forces is self-inflicted, the result of being on the wrong side of history.)

Then you double down and say that the Russian invasion and the mainstream media coverage is a setback for “us”. Wow, again no mention of Ukraine. You say the corporate media care only about profits — well, that’s a news flash. So I guess RT and the Grayzone are more credible? Where does their money come from?

You endorse Code Pink’s demands that “all parties cease fighting and negotiate all outstanding issues”. Well, okay. But then you link Russian withdrawal to a NATO pullback from Eastern Europe and its replacement with — what? Uh, you might want to consult with Ukraine and Eastern Europe on this issue. 

And then you (and Code Pink) switch to the both-sides argument that equates (and justifies) the Russian invasion with NATO expansion and “events in Ukraine since 2014”. Meaning the “coup” I presume. Now you’re just using euphemisms for euphemisms.

Finally, you talk about “historical memory” for Russians, which includes 27 million killed in WWII. You acknowledge that much of the fighting took place in Ukraine, but again fail to acknowledge the impact on Ukrainians. Another glaring omission. In fact, of the 27 million killed, seven million were Ukrainian, and an additional six million were from other nationalities within the Soviet Union. Ukraine lost 14% of its population in the war, by far the highest percentage of any Soviet republic. Their sacrifice deserves to be recognized and honored.

Now let’s turn the “historical memory” machine back a few years before 1945. After all, it’s an inconvenient historical fact that WWII started in 1939, not 1941, as Russia would have us believe. 

That’s the year the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (also called the Hitler-Stalin Pact) was signed, which enabled the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to divide up Eastern Europe. In 1939, they jointly invaded and partitioned Poland, with Stalin using concern for ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians as a pretext. (Sound familiar?) So Russia accusing Ukrainians of collaborating with Nazis is just a tad hypocritical. In 1940, the Soviet Union went on to annex Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Finland and Romania. 

If we go farther back, we see that for centuries, Ukrainians suffered oppression under the Russian Empire, starting with the conquest and annexation of Crimea by Catherine the Great in 1783, and the rest of Ukraine by 1793. This included ethnic cleansing, forced deportation, banning of the Ukrainian language, cultural destruction, religious persecution, and brutal repression — policies which intensified in the Soviet era, culminating in the 1932-33 Holodomor famine, which killed nearly four million Ukrainians.

Consider the example of the Tatars, the indigenous Turkic-Muslim people of Crimea, who suffered repression under the Russian Empire, were forcibly deported to Uzbekistan by Stalin in 1944, were allowed to return only after 1991, and have been denied representation and targeted for arbitrary detention and forced conscription since 2014 when Putin annexed the peninsula. It’s no wonder Ukrainians don’t trust the Russians.

In conclusion, it’s time to stop putting Ukraine down the “historical memory” hole, and to start acknowledging its right to independence, self-determination, and secure borders. It's also time to stop making excuses for Russia, and to start demanding that all its troops leave Ukraine, that its leadership be prosecuted for war crimes, and that war reparations be paid.

Maybe then the peace movement can come back together in the fight for human rights and progressive values.