Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has waged another misinformation campaign to justify his illegitimate invasion. But this time around, we can’t afford to buy in. The war will be won with weapons, but history will judge truth from falsehood.
I am the son of Ukrainian-Jewish refugees. My entire extended family lives in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, where they face artillery bombardment and threat of ground force invasion. Even worse, Russian president Vladimir Putin now threatens to prepare his nuclear arsenal.
My family are no strangers to bloodshed. My great grandparents perished in the Holocaust and on the battlefields of World War II, fighting over the same land as today. My parents escaped Soviet antisemitism from Russians and Ukrainians alike. But even they find Putin’s purported “denazification of Ukraine,” one of his primary justifications, laughable and insulting.
Most of modern-day Ukraine was part of the “Pale of Settlement,” where the Jews of the 19th and 20th century Russian Empire were confined to live, and where they faced many violent pogroms. It is true that these Jews became prime targets of the Nazi genocide, often aided in their atrocities by Ukrainian nationalists like Stepan Bandera. Their hatred of the Soviets, fueled by the millions who perished in the Holodomor, inspired Ukrainian nationalists to collaborate with Nazis.
It is also true that there still are far-right ultranationalist groups represented in the Ukrainian parliament today, as there are in most democratic countries. But that’s the thing—Ukraine is a democratic country. They’ve voted in a Jewish president, Volodomyr Zelenskyy, who hails from the same former shtetl as my grandparents. The Ukrainian people are able to choose their leaders, and they’ve voted for progress.
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Russia, on the other hand, is a totalitarian regime that has arrested over 5,500 of its citizens for peacefully protesting in the past few days. The Russian government considers identifying as LGBT in public a crime, and it has consistently attempted to silence and assassinate its critics, like Alexander Navalny, who, after surviving a Kremlin-sponsored poisoning attempt, is being tried in a Russian kangaroo court for more bogus charges. When you see a democracy helmed by a Jewish President being invaded by a homophobic dictator, which side would you call the fascists?
Similarly, Russia’s casus belli of the defending the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukraine is equally farcical. Following the 2014 ousting of pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (and possibly emboldened by their doping-fueled Olympic medal count), Russia invaded and took Crimea. They’ve also helped supply the separatists in Eastern Ukraine with the weapons they used to accidentally shoot down a passenger plane, murdering 298 civilians.
Since then, the war over these regions has simmered between Ukrainian forces and the Russian-backed separatists. A few days ago, as a prelude for the invasion, the Russian Duma voted to recognize the independence of the regions, giving the Russian military the charge to “keep the peace” against the Ukrainian forces. Notably, the borders they recognized for the separatist region were much further back than where the Ukrainian military had been fighting for the past years. In other words, all of a sudden, the Ukrainian army was now an aggressor in the eyes of the Russian government (without having moved an inch!), and Russia had its flimsy justification to launch the invasion they had been preparing for months.
Russia has, time and again, railed against Western Imperialism while slowly trying to expand its own empire. The “what-aboutism” and misinformation is from the same tired playbook that the Russians used to influence the 2016 election.
The US, Western Europe, NATO, Ukraine and democracy at large are not perfect. We have far-right, bigoted elements of our societies. My parents escaped Soviet antisemitism to see our local synagogue in Pittsburgh attacked. But at least we can vote, and by doing so, recognize our imperfections and work to correct them.
For instance, after our foolhardy wars in the Middle-East over the past decades, many Western powers have been understandably weary to get involved in Ukraine. We’ve slowly learned not to meddle in other country’s affairs-- meanwhile Putin has learned to do just that. Unaccountable to his people or to the truth, he has woven such a spindle of lies that he caught himself—delusionally calling on the Ukrainian military to rise up against its own government. And all the while, the GDP of his country has plummeted, and Russia is increasingly held together not by his popularity but by his totalitarian apparatus.
Unlike Ukraine’s democratic leadership, Putin is not accountable to his own people or even to basic international norms. If we do not speak out now and implement all the financial tools we have to deplete his apparatus and put an end to his regime, an unprecedented nuclear catastrophe may await us all.
Adam Barsouk is a medical student, cancer researcher, and writer whose work has appeared in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Read more at www.adambarsouk.com.
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