Sorry I haven’t written for a while. I have been fantastically busy with work and even though I’ve had ideas for articles here and there, I just haven’t had the time to complete them. Yes, it is a poor excuse. However, I just had to write this one, because it is a problem that has been bugging me for a while.
Why do so many on this site seem to support Russia over Ukraine?
For context, I have an old university friend (from Britain) who had been living and working in Kiev for the last 15 years. Incidentally, he is gay. We also have friends who came to New Zealand from Russia in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. So we do have a little bit of insight from both sides of this war. This does not make me an expert, but it does shine a slightly different light on things from a distant perspective.
My university friend is currently living in the Netherlands, having closed up his apartment in Kiev, expecting to be able to return before long. Now he has no idea if he will ever return. He says the invasion of Eastern Ukraine was unexpected. Yes, Putin had been sabre rattling for a while, but no one really expected him to invade. How wrong can you be…
Our Russian friend fully supports Vladimir Putin. His mantra is akin to Jacinda’s catch cry – “They are Us”. He views Ukrainians as Russians. He cannot see the problem. He has lived and worked here for more than 30 years.
My issue is a simple one. It is the question of sovereignty. Ukraine is a sovereign state. It has the right to protect its borders and its people from invasion. Don’t we conservatives support that idea – of freedom to be what you want to be?
Some of you say that Russia is protecting its own people – ethnic Russians living in Ukraine – by invading Ukraine. But presumably, those ethnic Russians live in Ukraine by choice. There is nothing stopping them from moving to Russia if they feel under threat. In fact, prior to this war, ethnic Russian family and friends used to travel to see each other, in the same way that they do between New Zealand and Australia. There was nothing wrong with that.
When I raised the issue of sovereignty as a comment on an article on Friday, the reaction was surprising. Suddenly, sovereignty matters, was the somewhat ironic response. If the implication in that was that the Americans didn’t care about sovereignty when they invaded Iraq, I agree. I am not comparing the two events. It is not a tit-for-tat; because the USA acted as it did in Iraq, does not give Russia the right to invade Ukraine. Ukraine is a sovereign state, and is entitled to defend its borders from invasion. They are totally unrelated events.
Let us not even talk about Afghanistan. American-led sanctions against the Taliban leadership are causing Afghani citizens to starve in the streets. For God’s sake, something needs to be done to stop the carnage. But again, this is nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine.
Some of you are supporting Putin’s disdain with the West’s attitude to trans rights and particularly the sexualisation of children. I am with you on this. We seem to be in a downward spiral of obscenity and degradation which may cause the end of our civilisation, similar to the collapse of the Roman Empire. But that is not an acceptable reason to invade a sovereign country. For those who think like that – do you want Putin to take over the entire West, one country at a time and save us from ourselves? You can agree with Putin on one thing and yet bitterly disagree with him on another. It is called freedom of opinion – something that we still enjoy in the West… for the most part.
Ukraine was or is corrupt. Yes, possibly. Their election was rigged. Maybe. I don’t really know. But stop for a moment and think about the recent referenda held in four annexed states in eastern Ukraine. Were they free and fair? When people are forced to go and vote by armed soldiers, the result is not likely to be a genuine one. Everyone knew what the results were going to be before the referenda were even held. It was nothing more than a joke.
Does that give justification to invading a sovereign country?
Decades of peace in our countries has turned us all complacent. Our children and grandchildren see the Second World War as an ancient historic event. They are probably unaware that it started because of Adolf Hitler doing exactly what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Was that justified? Should we have just let Hitler take over all of Europe? I don’t think so.
I could go on and on, but I think you see what I am saying. In the end, to me, it comes down to this. Many Russians protested against the invasion back last February. They did so at great personal risk, as many ended up in jail or on the front line of the invasion. Lately, we have seen long queues at the Georgian border, as Russians tried to leave the country to avoid the draft into the army. So, it seems that many Russians do not want this war.
And clearly, the people of Ukraine do not want to be invaded by Russia. Their memories are perhaps a little clearer than ours. In 1932-33, the policies of forced collectivisation of the Ukrainian population by Stalin caused a devastating famine. According to the All-Union census of 1926-37, the rural population in the North Caucasus decreased by 24 per cent because of this.
Then there was Babi Yar. The massacre was the largest mass-murder under the auspices of the Nazi regime and its collaborators during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust” to that particular date. (It is only surpassed overall by the later Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941… also in Ukraine.) All of this makes Putin’s claims of Nazis in Ukraine a little questionable, but whatever is the case, the Ukrainians suffered massively at the hands of both Russia and Nazi Germany. They know they are likely to face starvation and deprivation if Russia is successful in its campaign. Russia has already tried to steal Ukraine’s wheat and is threatening to renege on its current arrangement for shipments of wheat from Ukraine to other countries.
In the end, the Ukrainians don’t want to be part of Russia. They want to live as a free country, just like we do. Why exactly do many conservatives not agree and support that view? Is this not what we all stand up for?