I am afraid that this blog will have an element of "I Told You So" because I have been arguing this point for eight years, but telling the truth is unavoidable and that is what I intend to do. Before I start, I want to make one observation. Ukraine has had absolutely no role in the eastward expansion of NATO; therefore, that can never be any part of an explanation, let alone a justification, for Putin's invasions of Ukraine. I am absolutely in favor of dissolving NATO, and its expansion is certainly a crime. But I repeat that Ukraine had nothing to do with it.
I want to begin by focusing on a Democracy Now! interview this morning (Feb. 25, 2022) with a Ukrainian journalist who has covered the Donbass from the Donbass. She made a statement which I am afraid will be ignored by many left pundits who have been spouting nonsense about Ukraine for the past 8 years. She said that Russia has been in the Donbass since 2014 even though they pretended not to be there. Russian citizens, Russian mercenaries, and Russian soldiers have been there since 2014. In other words the so-called Lukansk and Donetsk republics (LPR and DPR) are Russian creations, not the creation of Ukrainian citizens, though I am certain that some Ukrainian quislings have participated in them. There has been plenty of evidence of that, not least, the repatriation of dead uniformed Russian soldiers to Russia from Ukraine. In Russia, they were buried without fanfare or acknowledgment; This has been a Russian invasion since 2014.
It must be stated, however, that the Ukrainian government has played into this Russian ploy in a few ways which have alienated the Ukrainian people in the Donbass. First of all, their conduct of the war has endangered civilians, and that, of course, generates tremendous anger. I have a friend from the Donbass who was very supportive of the popular uprising in 2014, but now, she is so angry at the Ukrainian government that she has abandoned those views.
Second, it was simply idiotic to pass laws making Ukrainian the only official language when about half of Ukrainian citizens are Russian speakers, though many Ukrainians are, of course, bilingual. They haven't made it illegal to speak Russian, as some mistakenly charge, but all official documents are in Ukrainian only, and even movie theaters are no longer allowed to show films in Russian.
Third, Ukrainian citizens from the Russian-occupied Donbass have different identity papers from other Ukrainian citizens. When they present those, they are often greeted with hostility and a lack of cooperation. When you fight a foreign invasion, you must be very careful not to fight your own citizens.
The next point is the total swallowing by many on the left of the Russian propaganda about the influence of fascists in Ukraine. I heard a very interesting interview on KPFA this morning with an expert on Eastern Europe who debunked that fiction. He said that there were fascist elements in the Ukrainian military in 2014-15 but not since then. There are two fascist political parties in Ukraine, and they received a combined 3 percent of the vote in the 2015 presidential elections. Ukraine is not a fascist country, and its government, however inept it has been, is not a fascist government. Those who kept trumpeting false Russian propaganda about fascist Ukraine have a lot to answer for.
Next is the totally false characterization of the 2014 popular uprising as a US-supported coup. Yes, US officials tried their best to make use of the uprising, but they did not start it and it had overwhelming support in most of Ukraine because it was an uprising against massive corruption, oligarchs, and a dysfunctional economy much like the 2004 uprising. To call that uprising a "coup" is an insult to the Ukrainian people. To make this point clear, would you call the US revolution a coup? Would you call the French revolution a coup? What about the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions? Those were all popular uprisings which removed existing governments. In the case of Ukraine, President Yanukovich took the advice of Vladimir Putin and stationed snipers on rooftops from which they shot and killed protesters. He then fled the country and was replaced by the elected parliament. Those facts are not the facts of a coup. And let me add that the Ukrainian parliament unanimously impeached Yanukovich; does that constitute a coup?
In my view, there are many grounds for self-criticism about the conduct and statements of what I call the chauvinist left who swallowed blatant Russian propaganda hook, line, and sinker and spread it as widely as they could. Unfortunately, I doubt that they will be self-critical. I call them chauvinist because of their servile acceptance of even the most absurd Russian propaganda.
At the bottom of all this is their failure to perceive Ukraine as a country of people with legitimate aspirations independent of great power conflict over Ukraine. I heard one commentator, the publisher of the Nation, admit on the air that she knew nothing of what was going on inside Ukraine, which she demonstrated over and over again. I heard people talk about a "civil war" in Ukraine when there is no civil war, no east/west divide. In 2014, I heard one of the experts on Ukrainian history, Prof. Paul Robert Magocsi (I read his 700-page history of Ukraine when I was in Ukraine in 2010) debunk this on NPR. He said there was what he called a young/old divide, which accords more with the Ukraine I know and with Ukraine as reflected in public opinion polls.
I urged various people at KPFA and also Democracy Now! to interview Prof, Magocsi, who heads Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto. None of them did so. When I suggested that recently to Dennis Bernstein and criticized the misinformation and lies his guests were presenting, he responded very defensively by accusing me of name calling and attacking them rather than addressing any of the issues I raised. To be an expert on Russia is not necessarily to be an expert on Ukraine, and the commentators I have heard on these radio shows have demonstrated that over and over again.
My interest in Ukraine was kindled first by the fact that two of my grandparents were born in Ukraine (one was born in Odessa when it was a Russian city). Then I met Ukrainians and decided to visit the country in 2010, including a week's vacation in Crimea. I don't pretend that I am an expert on Ukraine, only that I know enough to be able to detect nonsense when I hear it. My primary expertise is on the Middle East (I was a founder and the first national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Committee in the 1980s) and southern Africa, and I visited socialist Yemen (a country which no longer exists) in 1979 and Palestine, Jordan, and Syria in 1986. In the 1970s, I also worked actively with the Gulf Committee, which supported progressive movements in Oman and Bahrain.
My goal is justice for Ukraine and Ukrainians and acknowledging their history and present accurately is a first step toward achieving that. Unfortunately, huge swathes of the US left have done the opposite,
