Ukraine vs. Darkness

On the other hand, no matter where you draw the line and how high or low you put the new plank of “international rules” in the post-Crimea reality, in every case, Ukraine is the West’s indispensable partner in the region, its “Israel” in the post-Soviet space. So, don’t look away when Ukraine gets assaulted. Don’t buy into Putin’s narrative that Ukraine and Russia are the same. They are not.

As Putin has shown in the last two decades, it’s not only about how wealthy, successful, and militarily advanced you are in today’s world, but also the sheer cunning and audacity of your plans and actions. In his case, it was the audacity of the destruction of the collective West. The destruction was his plan from the moment he entered the Kremlin in 2000. He took his sweet time. Stashing the necessary funds while the oil price was soaring during his first two presidential terms, crushing any dissent, making Russian oligarchs a mere extension of the FSB-controlled government, taking Russian media under full control during the 2000s—and only then coming down to the business of putting the ex-captive nations back into Russia’s captivity. The months after the Sochi Olympics were supposed to be a kind of a “D-Day”, after which Putin’s FSB/KGB would go on the offensive in erecting a USSR 2.0. Ukraine’s resistance slowed them down but didn’t swart this plan altogether.

If the West wants to stop the Russia-induced decay of the free world, it must summon the courage to stand up for what it believes in. But … what is that exactly?

I can’t get rid of the feeling that at some point between the 1990s and the 2010s, the West lost something important: faith. When a Ukrainian soldier fulfills his duty in Donbas and looks death in the eye, he fights for his freedom, and he believes in what he does. When a Russian invader takes him in a crosshair of his sniper rifle—he believes in his mad cocktail of propaganda lies, too. Like the Bible says, “the demons also believe and shudder”. But what is it that the West believes in?

In the last five years, I kept telling, writing, tweeting out the story of Albert Pavenko, Ruvim Pavenko, Viktor Bradarskiy, and Volodymyr Velychko—the four Ukrainian evangelicals, sadistically murdered by the militants from “Russian Orthodox Army” in Donbas in 2014 for merely going to a “wrong” church. I rang the bell. I contacted and met with religious leaders. I tagged religious organizations in my tweets and postings. Their public response was: silence.

These four young men, brethren of millions of evangelicals worldwide, were tortured and murdered for their faith. Thousands more were harassed and forced to flee—while the spiritual leaders of the West and their faithful followers … did what? Looked with admiration at Putin’s “conservative values”?

Years have passed since Albert, Ruvim, Viktor, and Volodymyr were kidnapped in front of their families as they were leaving their prayer house after the God Service. On a Sunday. On the Day of the Pentecost. It was the last time their kids and wives saw them. The burnt, tormented bodies of these modern days’ Christian martyrs were found in a collective grave when Ukraine liberated Slovyansk. Ever since, more and more churches have been shut in occupied Ukraine. The whole religious groups (like Jehovah Witnesses) were prohibited and outlawed. Where is the outrage? Where is the moral leadership? At a time when the evil has no shortage in leaders, it appears as if the good is utterly leaderless in today’s world.

What you fight for is what you believe in. And what you believe in is who you really are. No, it’s not about dragging America and the EU into yet another costly war. It’s about where your heart is. Where is it?

When freedom is outlawed in Ukraine’s occupied parts—it’s outlawed in Europe, in your world. As you sit in your comfortable cafes in Washington, Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, your world, the world of freedom is being eroded. One prayer house at a time. One human life at a time. One free mind at a time. Are you sure that eventually, the unfreedom won’t knock on your doors physically? I write “physically” because virtually it’s already there—as “Russia Today” in your television, as the growing volume of pro-Russia voices in your political discourse, as the hordes of the Russian trolls in your social media, as the hate that slowly, but surely fills your societies. I know you are convinced they will never come for you physically. “They won’t dare!”. Well, you are probably right at this moment, but who knows what comes next.

“They won’t dare!”—that’s what we Ukrainians kept telling ourselves till we saw: there is nothing Russia “won’t dare” if it sees an ample opportunity. Right now, Putin is busy taking control of Russia’s “near abroad”, i.e., the post-Soviet neighborhood, which also happens to be EU’s neighborhood, too. Once he is done with it, once his “lean, mean annexation machine” is up and running, once the Western societies are split up, weakened and hateful of each other—oh, it will be a different story then.

Barack Obama once said Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was one of his favorite books. Boy, was it a good time when the president of America actually read books! I hope though that President Obama had enough time to reread the novel. And most importantly—how do we get the collective West, the decision-makers of today, to reread Hemingway’s timeless classic? Because, sorry for the pathos, but—“Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls—it tolls for you”!

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post-American_World

2 https://cepa.org/wrong-map/

3 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html

4 Igor Girkin, Alexander Borodai—the Moscow-born founding fathers of “Ukrainian separatism”, who were instrumental in the occupation of Crimea and Donbas.

Reconfiguring Europe’s Mental Map

When I was starting my tenure in Vienna, the Russia-Ukraine war was one of the burning political topics in Europe—albeit in a conversation that Ukraine was often excluded from. To make things worse, Ukraine tended to be discussed not so much as a country, but rather as a “zone of influence”, a “buffer area”, a “bone of contention” etc. I was stunned to realize how many people didn’t see Ukraine as a part of Europe in the political and cultural senses of this word. Let alone a part of Europe inhabited by the same kind of people wanting the same things in life as the rest of the continent: peace, freedom, prosperity, democracy, justice, respect. It was the demonstrative neglect of these simple human desires by the Yanukovych government in 2013 that resulted in revolution, expulsion of the president, a change of government—and the hybrid war with Russia which has been burning ever since.

Russian propaganda has been doing its best to make sure that’s not the way things are seen in the West. RT, Sputnik, and a whole legion of (to borrow a Russian expression) “useful idiots” have been actively spreading the notion of Ukrainians as some kind of easily manipulated people, ready to take to the streets and fight to the death, just because their “puppet masters” in America wanted it that way. In short, an odd crowd doing things that are unfathomable to most Europeans. And yes, many consumers of propaganda in the West have happily lapped up this line.

Russian propaganda sold a lie to cover the truth. And the truth was that Ukraine’s revolution was nothing else but the continuation of the events that created the Europe of today in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ukraine breaking free from Russia’s shadow was United Europe reaching beyond the line that separated the conventional and unconventional vision of the future of the EU. It was too unexpected, too puzzling for many Europeans. Traditionally, they imagined the EU within Poland’s border to Ukraine. Not too many were capable of recognizing the simple fact that ideas sometimes tend to have a life of their own—and yes, sometimes they sprout unexpectedly through the thick layers of bad history, bad luck, and bad karma, like the European idea sprouted in 2004 and 2013–2014 in Ukraine—changing the run of history in a whole region. Maybe, even beyond.

To quote from a recent Edward Lucas article:

The idea of a prosperous, civilized western Europe contrasting with a barbaric and backward east was always insulting and ahistorical. But since 1989 it has become wholly out-of-date. One of the great achievements of the three decades since communism collapsed is that Europeans of all kinds have reconfigured their mental maps. For the ex-captive nations, London, Berlin, and Paris now seem a lot closer than Moscow. How long a country was under communist rule, and what it experienced, is like asking what happened during the Hundred Years War: interesting for historians, but largely irrelevant for the present day.1

Ukrainians are among the Europeans whose mental maps have been reconfigured fundamentally since as early as the 1990s. At the same time, many people in central Europe have experienced no change at all to their mental maps—for the simple reason that their personal reality stayed largely the same during Europe’s great turn of 1989–1990. They lived in freedom and prosperity before and they had even more freedom and prosperity after. The farther to the West from the so-called “Socialist block” and the “post-Soviet space”, the more conserved is this perception of the “European neighborhood”.

But even close to Ukraine’s borders it’s not much different. If I only had a nickel for every time someone told me in Vienna “Mister Ambassador, geographically Ukraine is closer to us than Switzerland, but it feels like so far away!”. Well, I understood what they meant. And it was largely a part of my job to change this state of affairs. Writing this book is supposed to serve this goal, too.

Of course, if the idea of freedom isn’t strange to you, Ukraine shouldn’t be that far away from your world. After all, it was Ukraine who in 2013–2014 paid a higher price for freedom than any European nation in modern history. It’s still paying it, while many people who live in freedom and take it for granted prefer to look away. As an ambassador, I wanted to bring Ukrainian events into the context of Europe’s newest history, to make Ukraine’s sacrifice and dedication more visible for average Europeans.

Think of the fall of the Berlin wall, when Eastern Germans got sick and tired of living behind the barbed wire and daydreaming about joining the West. Think of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, where the nation led by dissidents and intelligentsia, with immense support in Europe, forced their government to open up the borders and resign peacefully. Doesn’t it remind you of the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the first two relatively peaceful months of the Euromaidan 2013–2014, before it turned violent? And didn’t the pictures of the 1989 revolution in Romania come to mind when looking at the bloody culmination of the Euromaidan in February 2014? Naturally, with the key difference that our Ukrainian “Ceausescu” was allowed to leave, and our “Securitate” wasn’t massacred as happened in Romania in 1989.

Of course, drawing historic parallels is a risky business. There are similarities and there are differences. On top of that, there are similarities real and there are similarities imagined. Yet, no matter how you approach the subject, clearly and undoubtedly the most striking difference between now and then is that the decision-maker in the Kremlin today is very different from the one who was calling the shots in 1989 and 1990. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, Vladimir Putin sees the expansion of the European idea as an infringement on the part of the world that, in his understanding, falls under Russia’s “jurisdiction”.

Putin has no scruples whatsoever in stopping it. Billions of dollars of economic loss, thousands of dead, millions of refugees, the destroyed perspectives of the Russian economy (let alone the economic pains of Russia’s partners in Europe because of the sanctions!)—he stops at nothing to make sure that Europe and democracy don’t expand further into the East. Putin and a considerable number of Russians seem to be still convinced that “Ukrainians and Russians are basically the same people”, and therefore Russia has a legitimate right to control this space.

No, we are not the same people. And no one has the right to infringe on Ukraine’s sovereignty. Sadly, the more Putin & Co persist in their misconception, the more they destroy all things positive that indeed once connected these two nations. However, Vladimir Putin and his KGB pals are okay with destroying things. It’s what they do professionally.

Russia wants the world to believe that the Ukrainian revolution was not a revolution, that the war is not the war, and that Europe has nothing to do with it. Billions of dollars were invested to fool and mislead the world. As stated before, surprisingly, very often it works. People get fooled because they want to get fooled—and because the post-2014 reality in Europe is so much scarier and so much harder to deal with than the lies of the Russian propaganda. After all, there are so many legitimate reasons to believe a lie: greed, arrogance, exhaustion, egoism, confusion, stupidity, obtuseness … And there is only one reason not to: because it’s a lie.

Words matter, especially amid Russia’s propaganda onslaught on the West. After decades of relative peace in Europe, people (understandably!) are extremely uncomfortable with letting the very word “war” back into their lives. Luckily, there are so many euphemisms to circumvent it. For instance, there is a whole menu of descriptions of Russia’s covert war on Ukraine: “the Ukraine crisis”, “the tensions in and around Ukraine”, “the ongoing bloodshed on Europe’s eastern border” etc. I once heard a political scientist (surely with tongue at least partly in cheek) use the term “the current lack of understanding between Russia and Ukraine”. In early 2016, I heard a university professor talk (in all earnestness!) about “tensions that can spill over into a full-blown war if Americans supply Ukraine with lethal weapons”. Apparently, by the measures of this professor, the lethal weapons in the hands of Russian soldiers and mercenaries were okay, and thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands on the run didn’t really qualify as a “full-blown war”.

The Euromaidan and Russia’s ensuing covert war on Ukraine are the two intertwined, co-dependent events of the 21st century that can’t be understood one without another. More than this, I think the whole last decade in this region can’t be really understood without a sober look at the events of 2013, the year that can be rightly seen as the watershed in the history of the post-Soviet space.

1 https://www.cepa.org/wrong-map

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