The Daily Hampshire Gazette deserves credit for encouraging a lively debate on the war that is currently raging in Ukraine. In the back and forth, some commentators have encouraged accommodating Russia’s occupation of large parts of eastern Ukraine, have spoken against military aid, and complained that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rebuffed Russian invitations to negotiate and accused Ukraine’s government of allying with neo-Nazis to suppress Russian sympathizers. Others have maintained the U.S. should end sanctions on the Russian economy that are designed to punish that country’s aggression.
There are sound reasons to disagree. Foremost among the arguments for continuing military aid are: Russia’s 2014 seizing of Crimea and the Donbas region; its February invasion of Ukraine; and the death and destruction it now is visiting on that country, which we will examine below.
These all are egregious violations of international laws and U.N. Charter Article2(4), which prohibits member states using force against other states. These outrages, we feel, provide ample justification for the U.S. and NATO nations backing Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid, and for maintaining economic sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin, his oligarch allies and his government.
What of Zelenskyy’s alleged reluctance to negotiate with his opponents? Among its demands for a peace deal, Russia wants Ukraine to agree to remain militarily neutral, permanently cede Crimea to Russia and grant regional autonomy to the Donbas, which is on the Russian border. While the Ukrainian leader has indicated his government would accept neutrality, he refuses to trade away vital parts of its sovereign territory to Russia in return for Putin’s pledge of peace.
Based on the Russian president’s broken promises to the Ukrainian government leading up to and during the war — such as his assertion Russia had no intension of invading — that decision is well taken. Prior to World War II, Hitler made a similar pledge in the Munich Agreement of 1938. In the negotiations leading up to the agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain attempted to avoid war with Germany by accepting the Nazi occupation of the Czech Sudetenland in exchange for peace. We know how that turned out.
It’s now 84 years later. As we have grown comfortable with a rules-based order that was established in Europe after WWII, it is hard for most of us to truly comprehend what it meant to live in Nazi-occupied Europe and suffer Hitler’s murderous assaults. However, it’s easy for Ukrainian civilians to envision that kind of reality, as they endure Russia’s bombing of their cities and many of the humanitarian evacuation corridors it agreed to honor.
Putin’s army also has conducted wholesale murder and the starvation of civilians, shelled hospitals and schools and driven millions to flee the country. We can add to those war crimes the Russian military’s use of mass-scale rape as a weapon to terrorize civilians, a fact verified by Ukrainian and international organizations. If Russia’s military is not committing what technically is described as genocide, it seems to be striving to do so.
Echoing Putin’s war propaganda about “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, some U.S. commentators complain there are neo-fascist elements in that country’s society and its military. They charge that military aid supports far-right forces. The fact that extremists exist in Ukraine, however, does not define it any more than the neo-fascist elements active here define the U.S. and its military.
Other critics of military aid have accused President Zelenskyy of using militaristic propaganda to foment his military and Ukraine’s civilians into a hateful fury toward Russia, almost as though he was at fault for the invasion. The truth is the people of Ukraine don’t need to be whipped up to oppose Russian aggression. From the soldiers on the front lines to the territorial defense forces to the thousands of civilian men and women volunteering to assist the military, Ukrainians are fighting for their survival and for their country’s freedom.
As the war in Ukraine plays out, European countries such as Moldova, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania, which were once part of the Soviet Union or Cold War allies with it, worry they might be a future target for Putin’s expansionism. To the north, neutral-leaning Sweden and Finland are so concerned that they, as widely reported, likely will apply for NATO membership. It is no surprise that these nations believe they might be next if Russia’s military succeeds in Ukraine.
Time and time again, Putin has demonstrated he is committed to controlling or destroying countries that he presumes should be within Russia’s geographic sphere of influence. We should not stick our heads in the sand as Neville Chamberlain did when Nazi Germany invaded a European neighbor. Ukraine deserves our undivided support during its darkest hour.
Glenn Ruga is the Executive Director of the Social Documentary Network and the former Director of the Center for Balkan Development. Rob Wilson is a retired nonprofit director. He has worked as a volunteer on humanitarian aid projects in the U.S. and abroad. Michael Kane is a retired economic development specialist. He has been active in numerous efforts to bring about peace as well as social, racial and economic justice and is member of the Valley Syrian Relief Committee. Deborah Shriver is a retired water resource consultant. She now volunteers with organizations that provide humanitarian aid and pursue peacebuilding, social and environmental justice and is a member of the Valley Syrian Relief Committee.