Ukraine Fills the News Again

In 2014, as the Ukrainian people rose up and drove out their corrupt rulers, I posted a brief history of Ukraine in a blog here. Few Americans know much, if anything, about the history or contemporary affairs in Ukraine. I have studied that history and followed those affairs partly because one of my grandmothers was born in Ukraine and because her husband, my grandfather, was born in Odessa, which was then part of Russia but which was given to Ukraine in 1920 after the Bolshevik Revolution. I have also been to Ukraine, including a week's vacation in Crimea.

In 2019, Ukraine is back in the news as a major part of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Donald J. Trump. I doubt that mosts Americans have learned much about Ukraine since 2014. I doubt that they understand that the Ukrainian people have their own agenda which makes no concessions to the agendas of the USA or Russia. Thus, what happens in Ukraine cannot simply be understood as a product of great power rivalry. I doubt that they understand that Russia, the USA, and the UK guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity in a 1994 treaty in which Ukraine agreed to send all its nuclear weapons to Russia. Nobody seems to want to talk about that treaty. I doubt that most Americans understand how deep is the poverty and lack of opportunity for the vast majority of Ukrainians. I doubt that they appreciate how dysfunctional is the Ukrainian economy, which has not recovered from the division of production inherited from the Soviet Union and which, like Russia, is encumbered by the de facto theft of so many resources by the oligarchs who run that economy. I doubt that they understand how Putin looks with fear at the aspirations of the Ukrainian people which are remarkably similar to the aspirations of the Russian people.

I tell my Ukrainian friends that corruption goes much deeper in the USA even than in Ukraine because it goes to the heart of our political and economic systems. In Ukraine, bribing the police and stealing public money and property are typical forms of corruption, but those forms of corruption, though they cripple the hope of economic development, are petty compared to the kind of systemic corruption we live with in the USA.

Widespread American ignorance of Ukrainian reality fuels the ability of demagogues to spread lies and distortions about Ukraine. Those who discuss Ukraine owe it to themselves and the rest of us to educate themselves about this subject.