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.
