I was born in a Jewish family in Leningrad – Russia and lived in Kharkiv – Ukraine for 30 years before emigrating to the United States 40 years ago. Back then, the war between Russia and Ukraine was unimaginable. Today, after hundreds of thousands on both sides are dead and memorable places of my youth have been reduced to rubble, I am trying to make sense of it and wonder how it is going to end.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine developed a desire to join the European Union rather than remain Russia’s little sister. The West and NATO saw it as an opportunity to strengthen its Eastern flank, which was the case with the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. However, Ukraine’s strong ethnic, cultural, economic, and historic ties to Russia made it more problematic. Watching the U.S. effort to convert Ukraine into an anti-Russian state through millions of dollars injected into Ukrainian politics by organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, Russia developed a strong mistrust of the U.S. intentions. Unfulfilled promises of the U.S. leaders that NATO would not be expanding to the East made Russians think that Ukraine was next on the list, and this was where Russia drew the red line.
The coup d’etat orchestrated in 2014 by Ukrainian nationalists with guidance from the Obama-Biden administration led to the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Russia was worried that with an anti-Russian government in Kyiv, Sevastopol – the home to the Russian Navy would become a NATO base. Crimea was crucial to Russia’s historic naval dominance in the Black Sea and its influence in the Middle East and Africa. From that time on, Russia’s relations with Ukraine and NATO countries went downhill. They were exacerbated by Ukraine’s effort to subdue militarily the Russian-speaking population of Donbas that refused to recognize the insurrectionist government in Kyiv. Following the 2014 coup d’etat, an estimated fourteen thousand people were killed in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Glorification of Nazi collaborators who fought against Russia in the Second World War, and the expulsion of Russian literature, music, and art from Ukrainian schools and cultural institutions deepened the divide between the two countries.
Meantime the U.S. and NATO began to openly pour weapons into Ukraine and train paramilitary units like the Azov battalion. These efforts were assisted by Ukrainian oligarchs who pocketed significant sums of Western money. In late 2021, Russia amassed troops on the Ukrainian border while Russian President Vladimir Putin desperately tried to obtain guarantees from U.S. President Joe Biden that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. Had Biden made that promise the war could have been avoided but the Russian request fell on deaf ears — the U.S. foreign policy doctrine was to weaken Russia, and listening to Putin’s concerns was not on the table. Russia was told it was up to Ukraine to decide whether to join NATO. I wonder what would happen if during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. President John F. Kennedy that it was up to Cuba to place Russian missiles on its territory. Wouldn’t the U.S. have invaded Cuba? Would it be considered unprovoked aggression? Isn’t that what happened in Ukraine? The result was death and destruction leading to the Russian annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces of Ukraine. One can only wonder what has happened to the wisdom that world leaders exercised in the 1960s.
Hellbound and Down 