When they claim it's all about ancient hatred...

When Russia first invaded Ukraine, I spent every spare minute helping a scrappy group of aid workers evacuate Ukrainian refugees from the war. At the same time, I was juggling my intensive work with my kids with special needs, including mountains of paperwork.

A family member would take my kids for an hour or so, and I’d shoot out a message on the encrypted chat saying that I had a few minutes to help. I was immediately sent the coordinates of and basic information about a small group or family of refugees and the border crossing they hoped to get to. My job was to use Ukrainian Cyrillic maps, my knowledge of the region and a steady stream of military reports to plot a safe course for the refugees across hundreds of miles of hot territory.

The situation in war changes minute by minute and while some roads were better than others for a while, there were no actual safe zones. I had to keep up with the incident reports of the war. More than once, I was about to route refugees down a well-used road or over a bridge, only to have it bombed and have to call them back at the last minute.

Creative /Commons image by vasenka photography

It was always a race against time, no matter when I logged on. Once we had foreign drivers headed for a children’s home to evacuate orphaned babies and they couldn’t find the street address in the identified town, because in accordance with Eastern European custom, the address was listed as being in the town, when it was actually in one of the outlying villages. Knowing this, I found it just in time and the drivers were redirected.

Then something started to raise my hackles.

More and more of the people I worked with in the international organization expressed animosity toward Russians. By this I mean toward ordinary people. We always hated Putin and the oligarchs and the military. But increasingly there were vicious jokes and fantasies about killing Russians in informal comments.

At first, I said nothing. They had reason. It was stressful work and they were letting off steam. From what I could tell, the Ukrainians among us would have no part of it. They had more reason, but they were more reticent to start with the talk of hate and killing. Maybe it was too real to them. Eventually, I mentioned that hate wasn’t what we were about, and several of my colleagues became irate.

Didn’t I want the Ukrainians to win? Clearly, the Russians are the aggressors here.

And despite levels of complexity I am aware of in the conflict that some of my colleagues were not, yes, I agreed on general principle.

BUT that doesn’t change the issue. How many times have Americans been the aggressors in a war or invasion? If being a citizen of an aggressor nation made one worthy of death, then I and most of the volunteers would be sentenced too.

And I know well what it is like to disagree with a powerful military machine in one’s own country. When I was involved with international organizations against the US invasion of Iraq, alongside Iraqi dissidents, no one talked about wanting to kill Americans. Thank goodness.

Beyond even that though, I strongly dislike fueling the narrative of hatred in this war. It isn’t good in any war, but in this case, it makes even less sense than usual. I’ve yet to see a war that wasn’t utterly senseless and stupid, but this one takes the cake.

I know some reasons why our Ukrainian colleagues may have been silent that many of the Americans and Europeans in the group might not. One reason is that Ukrainian citizens are about a third Russian and there is no clear dividing line. Families are mixed. Friends are intertwined. No one made much of it until recently.

This has, of course, made the shock and terror of this war even worse for the people most closely effected. In the first days of the war, I noted that many of the refugees speaking to journalists as they crossed into Poland were actually speaking Russian, not Ukrainian. Of course, the fighting was heaviest in the eastern part of Ukraine, where most of the people speak Russian and have strong ties to Russia. In the first days, the war was not just a war of Russia against Ukraine, but also a war of Russian power holders against people they saw as their somewhat disloyal serfs.

Still, there has been some real tension between Ukrainians and Russians for years, though most of that was among the political elites and those involved in nationalist groups. Ordinary people, especially in Eastern Ukraine where the conflict has centered, have been so intermingled that few can say they are one-hundred percent Ukrainian or one-hundred percent Russian.

Twenty years ago, some of my closest friends in Prague were a group of artists from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv who called themselves the Tender Russian Painters, though their last names—Boyko, Chernenko and so on—named them more as Ukrainian than Russian.

Though Russian was the language they spoke most often, they were eclectic artists, mostly not even painters. They also weren’t particularly tender.

They set up a safe house for refugees from the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Belarus without any official backing and took no crap. I entered their world as a journalist but soon became an honorary member. The safehouse often had its electricity cut for lack of funds and we’d talk by candlelight with groups of dissidents who had to flee their homes due to incredibly minor disagreements with the Russian and Belarusian regimes. I’d bring a giant pot of potato and cabbage soup and listen to their stories.

None of these people ever made much of their various ethnicities. Ukrainian, Russian, Rusyn and Belarusian flew around in a swirl of eastern Slavic words that I certainly couldn’t untangle as the lone American in the bunch. Soon they adopted a German and a Nepali migrant worker as well. There was little room in that atmosphere for nationalism or ideology.

Later, when I worked in Ukraine there were ethnic tensions only among fringe elements of society. Most Ukrainians and Russians in eastern Ukraine had plenty of both in their family trees.

When issues did crop up, they were more political than ethnic. There were those who were nationalist and wanted monolithic state languages to stand undiluted. There were also more liberal or cosmopolitan opinions, not just among smaller minority groups but among both Russians and Ukrainians as well.

Recently, reports in the news have revealed the activities of both Russian and Ukrainian extremist and paramilitary groups—precisely the type of rogue combatants who were responsible for the most heinous atrocities in the Balkan wars.

The development of such groups was inevitable, I suppose, even given the scarcity of actual neighborly hatred between ordinary Russians and Ukrainians. A population can only take so much war before some elements crack and become vicious.

Now there are pundits on the region who mutter about “ancient ethnic hatreds.” That’s what they said about Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia too. But when I went and walked the streets with the people in those places, I found bewilderment more often than extremism.

“We were neighbors! We were friends.”

“We worked at the same factory. We went to the same school.”

“I didn’t even know what side I was supposed to belong to.”

That is the reality for the people in the towns and villages of eastern Ukraine as well. Yes, there were Russian activists and hot heads who took money from Putin’s stooges to stir up controversy and make an appearance of widespread grievances among the Russian minority. But the actual concern for locals was limited to wanting to use their native language at school or wanting more investment from the Ukrainian capital, not less.

And on the other side, yes, many Ukrainians felt the oppressive weight of Russia as a foreign superpower glowering over them for years. That was why many Ukrainians voted for measures to require that all citizens of the country learn Ukrainian as well as any minority language they might speak. But that was about as far as the tensions went for most people.

Both Russia and the US meddled in this. Russian interests funded Russian nationalist groups and the US funded Ukrainian nationalist groups, including most unfortunately some with ties to neo-Nazi associations. Both superpowers attempted to interfere in Ukrainian elections for at least twenty years.

The fact is that Russia felt the diminishing of its national power and influence as Ukraine became a separate country, and the US wanted anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine to increase for geo-political purposes. The extremist groups were the only ones either major power could get to raise their concerns locally.

The fact that I point out these uncomfortable issues does not make me an apologist for Russian aggression. There is no excuse for the kind of illegal and idiotic imperialism that Putin and the Russian military have unleashed on Ukraine. Ukrainians have a right to self-determination. Even if US involvement was, in this case, less brutal and bloody, it was also an infringement of that right, which then handed Putin an unfortunate propaganda bludgeon in this war.

The fact remains that this is not a war based on “ethnic hatred.” Most Ukrainians and most Russians have been dragged into the conflict kicking and screaming. This is instead a war of geo-politics.

But wars do create hatred and deeply held enmity. These militarized nationalist groups won’t disappear even if a ceasefire is signed or certain powerful leaders die or undergo regime change. Both governments are likely to deny responsibility for ongoing violence by the paramilitaries they created.

Why does this matter now? Why discuss it if there is nothing we can do?

Because talk of hatred will inevitably lead to a withdrawal of empathy, not just for those we see as the enemy but even for those we think of as the victims. When we in countries that have not recently fought a war at home dismiss the conflicts of others as the product of some implacable “ancient ethnic hatred,” we tell ourselves that this is something that happens only in such barbaric places and we set ourselves apart from the kind of backward people who engage in “ethnic hatred.”

In reality, the US shares responsibility for part of this mess. The US supported extremist groups that have morphed into the kind of paramilitaries that escalate communities toward hatred.

Ordinary Ukrainians and Russians were about as ready to go to war with each other as Oregonians and Idahoans (which if you live in Eastern Oregon, you’ll get that analogy even more explicitly). Yes, there were differences. Yes, some even rallied to secede and join their eastern neighbor. But it was geopolitics that made it erupt in war, not hatred among people.

It is crucial that we do not use such easy explanations to dismiss and distance ourselves from people suffering war on the other side of the world. They are more like us than is comfortable.

Who we are supposed to hate

First, let me tell you a story, a real-life adventure in the “Wild East” of the early 2000s.

I was backpacking through Ukraine during a frigid March with American freelance photographer Kirt Vinion on the trail of a rumor about illegal coal mining operations in the Donetsk region. We’d been on the rails and the cold streets for three weeks and my stamina was wearing decidedly thin. A contact of a contact of a contact finally led us to the apartment of a woman named Svetlana in a mid-sized, out-of-work coal-mining town.

She’d agreed to put us up for the night and get us connected to local people who knew about the mafia operations in the old mine tunnels. Kirt offered her money for her trouble, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Svetlana was educated and she knew a couple of foreign journalists, thread-bare as we might be, could be important in the struggle for a better future for her town and region.

The heat had been off for months and Svetlana kept all four burners of her range stove going, trying—mostly futilely—to heat her apartment. She said the future would be bleak unless the mafia could be brought under control. She took us to a local pub in search of food, and several rough-looking men surrounded us and loudly stated that they were going to kill us. Svetlana played cool, said her “Papa wouldn’t like that” and they melted away.

Creative Commons image by John Karwoski

“Everyone has connections,” she shrugged. “It’s how we survive.”

The next day a local writer friend of hers smuggled us out of town, lying down in the back of his hatchback. The “Papa” trick hadn’t quite worked well enough, they said. Vasya, the writer, dropped us off at the edge of a leafless woodlot as snow began to fall again and told us to walk down the track to the right for two kilometers, then turn left at the fork and we’d find “it.” He sped away before I could get clear on what “it” was.

There was no cell signal out in Eastern Ukraine in those days. This was all low tech, so we shouldered our packs and hiked. I could tell Kirt was uncomfortable and doubting my language interpretation skills. I was, however, much happier out in trees, away from too many people. Snow or no snow, this I could handle.

Sure enough, after some anxiety and floundering around, we came to a tiny, dilapidated village bordered by towering slag heaps. We stumbled out of the trees and a wirery old man came out of the nearest house, grinning from ear to ear with delight.

“Valeriy,” he told us his name was. He gave us hugs and double-cheeked Russian kisses and hustled us into the warmth of his “kitchen,” which was an open-sided shed in his garden enclosure. There he had a fire going and he started to fry up a small pile of potatoes. My hunger was almost overpowering. We hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a week and we hadn’t had anything to eat all day—with our escape from death threats and all.

When I thought I couldn’t stand it a second longer, Valeriy divided up the fried potatoes, sprinkled on salt and we fell to ravenously. “Yes,” we’d found the right place, he confirmed, bobbing his head up and down. “Yes,” someone had told him to expect us.

“Svetlana?”

Well, he didn’t know her exactly, but through someone else, a grape vine, one way or another, he knew about us and wanted to help.

“Tonight, you sleep!” Valeriy boomed heartily. “Tomorrow you will see the mines.”

“Will the mafia be upset that we’re here?”

“No, no, silly worries,” he guffawed. “Don’t worry. You’re safe here.”

The next day, true to his word, Valeriy introduced us to his relative-of-some-sort Vasily, who led us into the woods and introduced us to two different teams of illegal mine workers. One group was crawling in and out of a ventilation shaft in the a wooded draw half a mile outside the village.

While Kirt got outfitted to accompany the miners underground, I sat talking to the young women who made up a good part of the crew. They were in their late teens, little more than girls, but their faces were hard and black with coal dust. They showed me the hundred-pound sacks of coal they had drug up out of the shaft by hand without equipment beyond old helmets and headlamps.

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Of course it is, but there is no food here without money... The state controls all the farmland. If we don’t work, we don’t eat and neither do our children.”

Where were the older people? I asked. Mostly anyone over thirty was so sick with lung diseases from breathing the coal dust that they could no longer work. The crews got younger and younger every year, the girls told me.

The second shaft we visited went straight down like a well. There was a twelve-year-old working there, squirming into places the adults were too large to reach. “Yes,” they worried. The women in that group showed me the shrine for a group of colleagues who had died in a cave-in a month earlier. But here the same desperate explanation was repeated, and their gaunt faces and the fact that we could barely find food to buy despite our hard currency made it very believable.

We returned to Valeriy’s house exhausted that night but excited to have finally found what we had been looking for all those weeks. Valeriy had more planned for us the next day. He talked animatedly about how good this land had once been to his family. Showing me a portrait of Joseph Stalin, he kept in a place of honor in his living room, he explained that his parents had been resettled here from some place in northern Russia. They’d been hungry all the time and here the land was open.

“No one living on it,” he smiled, thinking back to his childhood. “The soil grew food as easily as weeds, and there was coal and good jobs for everyone.”

I was practiced at not showing my shock. I’d interviewed on both sides of grisly wars before and I knew how to keep an interested, open expression and just ask questions. But I picked at his memory a bit, tried to ferret out any concern over Stalin’s image in the rest of the world. Nope. Nada. If Valeriy had any clue that Stalin was not widely considered a working man’s hero, he was a better poker face than I.

We bedded down in the living room, covered in beautiful Russian wool carpets, paintings and antique furniture. Obviously this household had once known much better times.

Then, at five o’clock in the morning, as light was just breaking through the trees, Valeriy shook me awake. His face was drawn and ghostly white. His hands trembled and his voice rasped in a terrified whisper.

“Get up! You’ve got to get out now! Go! The FSB is coming for you! Someone snitched.” The FSB is supposed to be the Russian secret police, but colloquially that could mean anything from paramilitaries to mafia to rogue state actors.

Valeriy’s terror was all the more contagious because of his certainty of safety the day before. Kirt and I threw on our packs and ran through the trees on a trail behind Valeriy. We burst out of the woods along side a narrow highway and Valeriy flagged down a bus with letters spelling out Kyiv across the front.

“Don’t come back,” he called out as we swung aboard.

That was my experience in Eastern Ukraine in a nutshell. The most important theme across the whole week we were in the region was the incredible kindness of complete strangers, who—usually for no self-interest that I could discern—risked everything to help, shelter us, smuggle us from place to place or direct us to the next contact, all because they knew the medieval system of mafia-run, black-market coal mining that employed the labor of starving children was terrible and untenable.

The chain of good-hearted, brave people it took to get Kirt and me to that story was humbling. We published it in a major feature for the international newspaper The Christian Science Monitor. It inspired other researchers, but sadly it likely didn’t lead to any immediate improvements in the lives of the people of those desperate villages.

We tried, but the work of a journalist is to highlight one crisis after another. Usually, the follow up falls to others.

But today that story takes on new significance, and my knowledge of Eastern Ukraine—such as it is—is sought out due to the current war. I’m always hard pressed in these conversations to explain, “No, really these people were Russians. They spoke Russian… Yes, they helped us. They probably saved our lives a few times… Yes, they had portraits of Stalin… Yup, they were clueless… Yes, they literally shared their last remnants of food with us.”

And damn it! That is not a political statement. It is just a fact.

Yes, the Russian invasion is wrong, illegal and unwarranted. Yes, even in the East where there are a lot of “ethnic Russians,” it’s still wrong. Putin is a madman. So many Russians are duped by propaganda. Valeriy was. He thought Stalin saved his family. Heck, maybe Stalin did save his family, after he murdered a third of the Ukrainian population, which was why all that good farmland was empty and waiting for Russian resettlement back in the 1930s.

That doesn’t make it less of a fact that Svetlana, Vasya, Valeriy and Vasily risked their lives to help us, a couple of shoestring American journalists, get the word out about the excesses of their mafia overlords, That doesn’t erase their kindness and courage. And it does not mean I will ever hate all Russians or feel comfortable around the online vitriol and hate speech about ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

It’s understandable, and if your family or friends are under bombardment or held hostage in a blockade, you get some free passes to emote, in my book. But don’t ask me to go along and laugh at sick jokes about killing scared young recruits who don’t know where they are. I’ll work on planning routes for refugees and aid workers until I am sleep deprived and tottering, but hate has nothing to do with it.

I know there are Russians who do know the truth of the matter and they are horrified and ashamed at their state’s actions. They have my sympathy, not my hate. I’ll help them too, if I can.

And those who don’t know… Those who are taken in by the propaganda? I hope they’ll get out of that and force this war to stop. I’ll help there if I can too, and I know to be careful, because those guys who threatened to kill us in the pub, they were ordinary small town Russians too.

This isn’t naïveté. It’s just realism. People are people here or over there.

If given a chance, some people will go to extremes, grab all they can for themselves no matter who it hurts, hurt others just for kicks or a sense of power, scream hate and even kill. People here have that capacity, when they think they have the backing of those with power, as they did on January 6, 2021. And people there do too. The greater the feeling that violence is condoned, the greater the atrocities.

It isn’t a fundamental difference in humans. It’s just whether or not we let the bad wolves in our midst be in charge with guns or whether we insist on good wolves and the rule of law.

No matter the times or the conflict, there is always someone we’re supposed to hate. Most often, it seems like it’s right-wingers and rural “conservatives” preaching hate against this or that group, sometimes someone we’re at war with, sometimes someone coming to work the hard, dirty jobs they don’t want.

But the war in Ukraine has seemed to give educated, liberal folks a weird kind of license to hate. And the terms and jokes I’ve heard out of people I thought were level-headed and kind are sobering.

It’s one more reminder that no category really matters, not left or right, not ours or theirs. What matters—and it matters a great deal—is what kind of person an individual chooses to be right now in the moment, relating, thinking, talking. That line you cross when you let a little hate speech go because it feels good to release some of the pent up frustration, that’s the line that matters.