Ukraine vs. Darkness. Olexander Scherba
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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