2022-02-26 23:18:23
Why does Ukraine matter to all of us?
For those who have watched the movie Mr. Jones would know the manmade catastrophes inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Stalin of the then Soviet Union aka Russia now. Historians have termed the famines and mass deaths the Holodomor. Those who knew the history in the run-up of the second World War; may find what is now happening in Ukraine today reminiscent of Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39. Putin, however, is larger than Stalin and Hitler not in the narcissistic way he bares his chest but in his war aims. Ukrainians by ethnic lineage perhaps share much with the Russians; they are both Slavic people. A quick few clicks tell us the historic “entanglement” of the two countries:
The two countries’ shared heritage goes back more than a thousand years to a time when Kyiv, now Ukraine’s capital, was at the centre of the first Slavic state, Kyivan Rus, the birthplace of both Ukraine and Russia. In A.D. 988 Vladimir I, the pagan prince of Novgorod and grand prince of Kyiv, accepted the Orthodox Christian faith and was baptised in the Crimean city of Chersonesus. From that moment on, Russian leader Vladimir Putin recently declared, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole.”
There may be a loose thread of relevance from 1000 years ago in Putin’s claim but only if modern Ukrainian government and people share the same sentiment. The reverse is the truth. If we allow Putin to stretch the definition of sovereignty this way then, one day whoever drinks Vodka is a Russian and should be subject to Putin’s dictatorial whims. Let’s take a different vantage point, instead of zooming in into the relationship of the two countries; a broader assessment of the situation shows that each of them is a “proxy” of an ideological conflict. Putin, looms larger than Stalin and Hitler (perhaps the two combined) because his aims is not just territorial; or in Nigel Farage’s words acting out of fear; he wants to show that he is against democracy; he loathes western liberals; he sees them as invalid and weak. Historian Anne Applebaum, who has researched extensively and wrote the history of the Holodomor in Stalin’s Russia, summed up the intention of Putin:
In his mind, [in other words,] he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state. Whether he really believed that crowds in Moscow were taking orders from Hillary Clinton is unimportant. He certainly understood the power of democratic language, the ideas that made Russians want a fair political system, not a kleptocracy controlled by Putin and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the subsequent decade, he would take the fight against democracy to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where he would support extremist groups and movements in the hope of undermining European democracy. Russian state-controlled media would support the campaign for Brexit, on the grounds that it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which it has. Russian oligarchs would invest in key industries across Europe and around the world with the aim of gaining political traction, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian disinformation specialists would intervene in the 2016 American election.
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188 views百命藏麟, 20:18
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