Changing Western perception of Ukraine
Since the start of the Russian criminal incursion into Ukraine, there has been vocal and ardent gibbering about how Ukraine is herself no full-dress democracy, and how the overnight patriot, pulsing blue and yellow, would do well to remember the day before the war, when Ukraine was just another Eastern country with corruption problems, at best semi-liberal and only partly democratic.
We may instance the cocksure blustering of certain flappers of the right-wing, who have sacked any idea of an independent Ukraine by declaring the country an invention, and thus logical extension, of Russia proper—a smaller Matryoshka doll whose fate is to be gobbled up inside a larger. The logic behind such remarks is a fool’s one, the underlying sentiment frankly sinister: to forward the idea of a non-people and follow with roundabout justifications for the erasure of what one perceives never to have existed in the first place, has quite enough precedents in history.
Ukraine has the unenvious situation between a liberal, democratic Europe to the west, and an illiberal, Soviet-nostalgic Russia to the east
Let us posit, correctly, that Ukraine has got to undergo social and governmental (particularly, judicial) reforms; let us unfurl the world freedom index and show that the country tallies less than magnificently on that slate. Do the facts of imperfection mitigate to any degree, or ought they to distract from the vehement assault on her national sovereignty? Enlisting on the side of the wronged or injured party in a fight does not by default mean you embrace or sanction the full gamut of your man’s personal characteristics. I’m sure those taking this line of argument don’t really intend to imply that imperfect governments, such as Ukraine, deserve to have her borders erased by fascistic ones. Which conveys us to a better comparison: Ukraine may be an approximation of democracy compared to the most advanced democratic nations of Earth; yet placed on an East European index, and when compared to the juggernaut of authoritarian illiberalism that is the Russian state, Ukraine is a liberal bulwark and democratic preserve. This is what ought to concern us: the ostensible vanguards and champions of democratic liberalism.
There have been in Ukraine, as there have been by Russian emigres, popular groundswells and pantings for a more Western-style configuration. And while protestors in Russia are swiftly disappeared, or publicly put away (or poisoned), since 2014 Ukraine has responded to her protestors and set about making the reforms necessary for acceptance into NATO.
Geopolitically, Ukraine has the unenvious situation between a liberal, democratic Europe to the west, and an illiberal, Soviet-nostalgic Russia to the east. This western-eastern tug has, perhaps inevitably, turned into one of war.
Putin had initially assumed Ukraine susceptible to his usual successful pattern: the overwhelming of a country with a military shock, the pageantry of a mock referendum, the subsequent puppetry of a newfangled government. In this explicit manner, or by subtler means of underhandedness, the callous cacique in the Kremlin has installed a series of Quislings in former Soviet satellites. The shock, however, went the other way. Since the raid on Kyiv and its repulse, the Ukrainians have shown themselves able to put up an admirable and mulish resistance.
But “Putin has his reasons.” I never thought he didn’t. He also has his means. These include the infiltration of sovereign borders, terrorizing of civilians, use of blackmail, extortion, and fear. And I have my reasons, too, very good and practical ones, I reckon, for virulently opposing his machinations.
The argument against the Russian apologists is not a matter of simply red-tagging or reductio ad Stalinum. That much of this piffle comes from the [political] right ought to concern those who identify as such, or better still, make one reassess how much meaning these uber broad political bifurcations have. (Consider CPAC’s recent twat of a tweet, patriotically accompanied by a Russian flag, announcing Putin’s occupation and annexation of “Ukrainian-occupied” Russian-occupied territory. Vide, likewise, the conflation made by certain Republicans between the problems on America’s southern border, and Ukraine’s.)
Whether Putin is on some noble campaign of denazification, or whether his usurpations are driven by a meritorious yen to relieve Russian speakers in Donbas, I remit it to the wiser reader to determine. (We are obliged here to give a hard glare at the mercenary roles filled by Ukrainians and Poles in making murderous heaps of Jews during WWII and acknowledge and route any residual anti-Semitic toxin poisoning their cultural wells.)
Other forms of apology are more pathetic, imbecilic. The “Ukrainians speak Russian” bit was never very informative—scarcely surprising for a country that was not long ago under the Soviet imperium. (In the same manner, I am composing this is English, but you wouldn’t think to question my Yankee bona fides.) Ukrainians also speak Ukrainian, by and by. Nor do Russians speak Ukrainian, a language similar yet distinct enough to be incomprehensible to those of a “pure” tongue. The Ukrainians, and the prismatic culture which informs them, are likewise distinct. They may have Russian relatives; they are bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian: the trade in language and culture between neighboring states, particularly when one state was once the satrap of the other, is natural and unilluminating. They are Soviet no longer. This last point I emphasize for the history fishers, who delve into the mix of national and cultural histories to extract from it their case that in fact/ in theory/ actually, Ukrainians are essentially Russian. I little care if they were essentially Russian yesterday. Today they are nothing but proud Ukrainians, factually. Lay your etymology and your histories and your theories and your political interpretations aside. Here we have a mass of people who self-identify as a certain and distinct group. That their culture is sui generis, that they speak a distinct language, that they have a variety of idiosyncratic features—even these facts are secondary considerations to the essential point: which is that a group of people adamantly express their own uniqueness in themselves, as opposed to another group, and adamantly desire this distinction and difference recognized, as well as complete political separation. With a certain place, a distinct culture, a particular flag representing particular values, we have what is called a nation. If it is a new nation, if it is an arbitrary nation, or whatever type of diluted nation your politics will attempt to describe it as, it is a nation nonetheless. The people of which it is comprised deem it so.
This rush to rationalize Russia doesn’t only come from the Kremlin’s claque of underlings and sycophants, or the larger swap of impressionable, Soviet-minded drudges living in the Russian hinterlands, but from a “formally educated” and “politically informed” Western commentariat. (How often do the two qualities placed in inverted commas combined lead to their opposites of imbecility and ignorance.) In the warped atmosphere of Putin’s Russia, an atmosphere in which information is distorted and opinion regimented, we might expect a concomitant warping in the minds of Russian proles. These are the permanent thiasoi of this cultish figure, those for whom any demonstration of force, however unjustified, amounts to strength, and therefore boosts the Russian state. But the “learned” opinion of many a western commentator has less excuse for it. Their commentary does not of course amount to huzzahs for Russia, but it cheapens their overtures of expressed disagreement with the war when it is followed by an “understandable” case made for it. That a fascistic demagogue would want to place a neighboring western-leaning country securely under his auspices is indeed understandable—from the view of a fascistic demagogue. From the contrary view of a Western denizen and liberal, it is not to be endured. That certain political commentators make it their business to ape the agitprop which bleats out from Russian-controlled media is their choice and prerogative in a Western nation, but they ought to remember that in the country they seek to rationalize it is not an option to question or even to think otherwise.
The military war may be swinging in our favor, but the information war continues.
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For the past five years, The New Voice of Ukraine has been working tirelessly to push back against Russian narratives and defend democracy. But we cannot do it alone.
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