MARCH BLOG 2022
Dear Reader,
March has always been a dark moth. Perhaps it is because in
the northern hemisphere it is the transition from winter to spring. In the
ancient Roman calendar, it was the time of settling debts and the assassination
of Julius Caesar which made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history.
March, then is symbolic, signifying a turning point of life
as we live it. Covid pandemic created a global turn everywhere and now the
Russian invasion of a democratic republic UKRAINE has made us all to reflect on
what is the next turning point. To make this blog more significant and bolder,
I am adding some reflections from people I know in Canada and add my own story
of surviving the Communist ‘horde’ that took over Ukraine and many other
countries after the WWII. I mention the HORDE as a name of ancient conquerors –
the MONGOLS that in the 12th century invaded huge areas of what is
now Middle East, Ukraine (Kyivan state) and northern China. Details of this
story is well written in the book THE HORDE by Marie Farreau.
My story is very much what today the children in Ukraine are
suffering and parents helping them to survive both mentally and physically. I remember
the hiding in cellars when bombs fell, and airplanes were flying over much of Europe
and all our family travelled by train to Slovakia and finally settled in
Canada. My father died in a gulag when the Russian army invaded Ukraine in
1942,
I am adding here a note from my friend and namesake Ihor
Popadynec MD as he reflects about the times in his life:
“I am a Canadian who was born during WWII who is very
concerned about the dire circumstance in which the land of my birth now finds
itself.
How unfortunate that America the Brave and President Biden,
descendants of the defenders of the Alamo short centuries ago, have for months
dodged the cry for help from a brave President and his loyal Ukrainian
nation. They, now hopelessly outnumbered
and outgunned, have turned to the Bastion of Freedom and Democracy, for
aid. The pleas fell largely unheard onto
the ears of a nation purporting herself to be the strongest on the globe and
answered with lame excuses that the mad leader of their prime antagonist Russia
has uttered insane threats regarding nuclear devices. Is America herself bereft of that technology?
Has the neutralizing doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction which has kept
humanity safe for decades of the cold war been relegated into obsolescence? The enslaved and fearful Russians are
awakening and will rise not allowing Putin's conflict to reach that level for
their own and Russia's sake, stopping and relegating Putin to an institution
for treatment he so badly needs.
The Russians have been injecting additional armour nonstop
into the battle fields. Re-supply of the
Ukrainians is now crucial to continue their battle for survival.
Supply convoys from
adjacent NATO countries could get through and do it if given air cover for
protection from the Russians.
It has to be done now !
Time is critical”
Here is a short story
for those who are not familiar about this event:
The significance of Russia’s missile attacks overnight and
invasion of Ukraine cannot be overstated: The world order has been completely
upended and another genocide unfolds. February 24, 2022, will go down in
history as a dark day, as was February 24, 1920, when the German Nazi Party was
founded. And the context matters: Putin's invasion is where his hero, Josef
Stalin, starved to death at least 3.5 million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933 for the
crime of refusing to give up their farms to move into his communist
collectives. Soldiers murdered farmers, village leaders, and priests then
confiscated all harvests and livestock. This is known as “The Holodomor”, or
mass extermination by starvation, and was declared by dozens of nations, the
Vatican, and the European Union as “genocide”, or the destruction of a group or
a nation. Putin’s unprovoked attack against a peaceful country, and denial of
its right to exist, is not war. This is another Russian despot bent on
destroying the Ukrainian people and eventually others.
Ukraine left the Soviet Union in 1991 but in 2014 Putin
recaptured Crimea and some portions of Luhansk and Donetsk in the eastern part
of the country. He said as attacks began, that he doesn’t want to occupy the
entire place, only to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” it — statements based on
two delusions: that the country is predatory and is “fascist, antisemitic, and
intolerant toward its Russian-speaking citizens”. But one need only look at
2019 when Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for their current President,
Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, was born in Eastern Ukraine and was raised
by Russian-speaking parents. On the night of his election, Zelensky, an
entertainer known throughout the Russian-speaking world, said: “To all the
peoples of the former Soviet Union. See what we’ve done here tonight. Anything
is possible.”
To Putin, this was a declaration of war, especially coming
from a celebrity. So was Ukraine’s refusal to accept the capture of Crimea and
Donbas. Everything began to shift and another famous observer, Garry Kasparov,
chess master and former Presidential candidate in Russia, recently noted.
“Don’t believe anything the government says but take Putin’s words seriously …
he’s sick. This is the end of the post-war WW2 order. We need to reconsider the
idea of international security infrastructure against Putin, not involving
him.”
This is an outrage against another one of history’s most
victimized groups. Putin questions Ukraine’s legitimacy but Ukrainians have
been there for centuries even after The Holodomor killed millions. In 1939,
they were once again decimated after Stalin joined forces with Adolph Hitler –
in the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – to partition Poland. Shortly after
they started their murderous spree, Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded
Ukraine to conquer Moscow. The result was that millions more Ukrainians died –
1.4 million soldiers; 7 million civilians; and 500,000 Ukrainian Jews. Putin
likes to tell the world that Russia lost the most people in World War II, but
the brunt was borne by its colonies. Belarus lost 25 percent of its population;
Ukraine roughly 17 percent of its population, and Latvia and Lithuania lost 14
or 15 percent respectively.
Now Belarus has been recaptured by Russia and an assault is
underway in Ukraine, and possibly beyond. Bombing raids last week began the
onslaught, designed to knock out military infrastructure across the country and
demoralize the populace in order to bring about a speedy surrender. There is
panic already and estimates are that full engagement with Ukraine’s force of
250,000 combat troops could result in horrendous casualties. Putin has a “hit
list” of leaders, journalists, and activists who will be assassinated or sent
to gulags after occupation. The country’s economy — and Russia’s — are
cratering. Sanctions and diplomacy are now pointless on the long run.
The world will now watch, in real-time, the destruction of
an innocent, democratic nation, abandoned by the West as a result of 30 years
of appeasement and collaboration with Russia by Europeans. And once Ukraine’s
government caves, Putin will hold Europe hostage by stopping natural gas
supplies, that now flow through Ukraine’s pipeline system. He will demand that
his NordStream 2 pipeline be put into operation; that NATO withdraws from
Eastern Europe and that the West drop all sanctions against Russia and its
elite.
Putin’s playbook - British Defense Ministry:
Slow-motion carnage will unfold on television if there is no
quick surrender. Bombs will rain down on beautiful cities, apartment blocks,
schools, hospitals, churches, and squares. Footage will once more show European
families fleeing, children orphaned, defenceless elderly people, and a culture
torn asunder. Casualties could be catastrophic and it’s more likely that 10
million, not 5 million, Ukrainians will flee to Europe, creating a humanitarian
disaster lasting years.
The world has permanently changed. Markets crash. The United
Nations, with Russia as a member with a veto, is no longer functional if it
ever was. The European Union without an army and cohesion cannot last, nor can
NATO. An America without strong alliances is unsustainable and a nuclear Russia
run by Putin — hellbent to destroy ethnic groups and nations and the
international order — represents the greatest threat in the history of the
world.
Diane Francis – (Stanford University) states:
“Vladimir Putin has launched a massive military assault on
Ukraine, with the stated purpose of overthrowing the democratically-elected
regime there and replacing it with one subservient to Moscow. Russian forces
have arrived in the suburbs of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Ukraine is a country I know well. My center at Stanford University has run a series of leadership
training programs for mid-career Ukrainian activists and officials who are
trying to reform their country, and I have visited to teach there many times.
Ukraine suffers from high levels of corruption, but my personal experience has
convinced me that there is a rising new generation of Ukrainians imbued with
democratic values, and who want to join Europe rather than a kleptocratic
Russia. I take the invasion very personally: many of my friends—human rights
activists, journalists, anti-corruption campaigners—would be the first targets
of a pro-Moscow regime were it to come to power.
Prior to the invasion, many observers believed that Putin
was bluffing, and that the Biden administration was hyping the threat. The
Russian troop build-up and Russian propaganda revived the long-standing
discussion in Europe and the US of how NATO expansion threatened Russia, and
that the United States was in part responsible for the present situation. There
were calls from many “realists” to grant Russia a sphere of influence over the
territory of the former USSR, and to negotiate the neutralization of Ukraine.
These arguments were weak even before the invasion:
Ukrainian entry into NATO was purely theoretical; no one had pushed for this
since 2008, and the Ukrainian military was heavily overmatched by the 190,000
Russian troops gathering on their borders.
In the past week, the Russians have put forward a series of
increasingly ridiculous justifications for its actions: that Ukraine was a
fascist, neo-Nazi state, that it was committing genocide against the
Russian-speaking population of Donbas or was contemplating a huge military
operation against Russia. The invasion has made all of these claims utterly
hollow. It is crystal clear now that the threat runs only in one direction,
from Russia to Ukraine, and indeed, to every country that borders on Russia,
and beyond.
Putin’s motives are not hard to fathom since he has talked
at length about his worldview and strategic objectives. He stated some years
ago that the dissolution of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20th
century. In a long article last summer, and in the rambling speech he gave on
the eve of the invasion, he stated that Ukraine was not an independent nation
but an essential part of Russia, one that did not have the right to a separate
identity and existence. The demands made of NATO in the discussions that have
taken place in recent weeks indicate that Moscow cares not just about Ukraine,
but the entire European order created in the wake of the fall of the Berlin
Wall. It has demanded that NATO cease any military support not just for
Ukraine, but for all the countries that joined the organization from the 1990s
onwards. He wants, in other words, to restore as much of the former USSR as
possible, to neutralize Eastern Europe and turn it into a buffer zone, and to
undo the entire post-1991 settlement of a “Europe whole and free.”
A democratic Ukraine does in fact threaten Putin—not the
Russian people, but Putin’s view that democracy is not suitable for Slavic
peoples, who according to him naturally gravitate towards strong, centralized
leadership. The success of a democratic Ukraine and its desire to join Europe
suggests that something similar could happen in Russia as well, which would
spell the end of Putin and Putinism. Therefore, he would never have settled for
a neutral Ukraine that foreswore NATO membership—as long as it remained a
democracy, it would undermine his narrative and would need to be eliminated.
We are currently at a critical juncture in world history. If
Putin succeeds in overthrowing democracy in Ukraine and replacing it with a
puppet regime, he will have set a terrible precedent for the use of naked
force. China will take a cue from this, as it contemplates options for
re-incorporating Taiwan. The US and NATO will have been humiliated, and a
signal will go out across the world that American promises of support are
hollow and cooperation among democracies non-existent.
On the other hand, it is just possible that Putin has made a
blunder of monumental proportions. The invasion has triggered massive protests
in Russia itself; even propagandists and diplomats promoting the Russian line
have been taken aback by the fact that the invasion actually happened. It has
unified the Ukrainian people like nothing else, and they have shown incredible
willingness to fight back. In military terms, Putin does not have remotely
enough forces to control a country of nearly 40 million people, or even a city
like Kyiv with 2.8 million inhabitants. NATO has been unified in imposing stiff
sanctions, including German agreement to cancel the Nordstream II gas pipeline.
The Russian offensive may bog down in house-to-house fighting and produce
massive casualties among Ukrainians but will also lead to large numbers of
Russians returning home in body bags. Russians are already astonished that
their military investments are being used in the first instance to kill fellow
Slavs and destroy a country with which they feel close kinship.
The outcome of the war in Ukraine will also affect domestic
politics in the United States. Former President Trump has over the years
expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin, a pattern that has continued up to the
past week when he called Putin a “genius” for declaring the independence of
parts of Ukraine. Democracies do not decay out of an ideological choice for
authoritarian government, the way they might have affirmed Marxism-Leninism.
They decay because of an admiration for strength and strong men who can get
away with big actions outside the bounds of the checks and balances that exist
in rule-of-law countries. If Putin succeeds in his aggression in Ukraine and
the Republican Party follows Trump in his admiration for what he has done, then
it will be making a decisive break with fundamental American democratic values.
This will consolidate the authoritarian turn the party took by affirming the
January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Given the importance of the United States
to the maintenance of a liberal world order more broadly, this will be a very
bad development for the free world.
I am asking all readers to help Ukraine in any way you
can and reflect on how we all can STOP that madman from hurting all freedom
loving people.
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