I had left off on my last post shortly before I left on a quick business trip in Gilbert, AZ. Before the war started.
I cannot begin to explain the long history of relations between Ukraine and Russia, except to say that it is long and fraught. One can make a fairly strong case for Kyiv being the spiritual home of the Russian civilization, as it has been known over the last millennium. It was in the Dnipro river that many of Kievan Rus were baptized and accepted Christianity around 1000 AD. Mongolians sacked Kiev around 1240 AD, and Moscow rose in importance to the Russian people afterward. Ukraine briefly fought for independence from Russia before falling in with the Soviet Union. USSR policies led to widespread famine, known as the Holodomor, where about 13% of Ukrainians died. Nazi Germany occupied the country during WWII, slaughtering the significant number of Jews that lived there. Ukrainians, supporting the Soviet army, liberated their territory at great expense. The country was quick to declare its independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Yet somehow, Putin, in extreme COVID quarantine, surrounded by sycophants and Wormtongues, arrived at the conclusion that Ukrainians have become too "un-Russian" and therefore...Nazis. He considers the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation an anomaly. He also plays the fear of NATO encroachment to rally internal support for anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Russia. Offended that his preferred puppet president was rejected once in 2004 (when I first arrived in Ukraine on my mission) and removed from power in 2014, Putin set out to find every reason to delegitimize and erode Ukrainian sovereignty. He funded separatists in the eastern part of the country and moved his army into Crimea following the 2014 revolution. There he staged a phony referendum and claimed that 89% of Crimeans wished to be annexed into Russia. At last, in late February of 2022, he decided that he needed to save all the Russian speakers from the "narcotic-addled" and "Nazi" leaders of Ukraine. He set out to do this by firing missiles and artillery shells into Ukrainian cities.
Cities that I had called home, while serving my mission. My stated purpose for being in the country suddenly has become immaterial to me. Someone I knew as an awkward teenager in Chernihiv feared for his mother's life as Russian artillery proceeded to denazify Prospekt Miru. A friend from Kyiv only narrowly managed to evacuate her mother from the city. My beloved Odesa coastline is littered with naval mines, with sandbags on Deribavska and anti-tank hedgehogs in front of the opera theater, just down the street from the LDS meetinghouse. Every grouchy taxi driver I encountered, every malchik who begged for me to teach them English, every devushka in Bila Tserkva who laughed at me as a kid raised in the American south fell on his butt constantly on the icy footpaths...they are trying to stay alive. Some are fighting the occupants. Some, in all likelihood, have died. Especially vulnerable are the people in the celo, outside of the fortified borders of major cities. Places where you could be instantly transported back over 100 years of history, to literal horse and buggy, where the people have tilled the land for generations. Many of these people are now in mass graves, having been executed, tortured, and raped, having been cleansed of the sin of being Ukrainian.
Perhaps even more disturbing, Putin has framed this "special military operation" as a corrective against the West's erosion of "traditional family values." He claims Ukraine is led not only by Nazis, but also drug addicts. He supported legislation passed in Russia in 2013 that several US states now enthusiastically have taken up, that forbid even the mere discussion of a nonheteronormative relationship. In the same breath, he also put in place legislation that illegalized "blasphemy," severely curtailing the ability of anyone who holds beliefs besides Russian Orthodox Christians. And Ukraine was yet another example of a people destroying traditional family values. Leaders of my own faith enthusiastically support Russian-funded "traditional family values" organizations like the World Congress of Families. It's OK...except for the bad parts...like where being tolerant of different beliefs becomes casus belli. As comforting as it may be to sanitize and dissociate any similarities between the butcher Putin and "traditional" conservative organizations and political parties, the lines between the authoritarian and illiberal Russian leader and right-wing America are impossible to ignore. The war on Ukraine is a war on "wokeness" and to a lot of people...that feels good.
Nothing about this war is good, except for Ukraine's valiant defense. She has not succumbed to the fiery Iskanderi of the adversary. Many free nations of the planet have banded together in support, although all fear the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet state. Nevertheless, Ukraine has bloodied the Russian bear's nose with its own hardware and the donated equipment of NATO nations. I can give nothing less than my full-throated support to my former host nation in her defense against the brutal authoritarian regime of Putin's Russian Federation. May Ukraine survive still.
