How Russia Expresses Its Love for Those "Dearest to Us" (Ukraine)
The Holodomor and Chernobyl. History matters. Ukraine remembers
“I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. These are our comrades, those dearest to us – not only colleagues, friends and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood, by family ties.”
This was the opening salvo of Russian Thug Bully Dictator former KGB officer President Vladimir Putin’s most interesting speech on Monday after two “breakaway” regions of eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, were decreed “independent” states. Since the Obama Administration, the largely Russian-speaking areas have already been under Russian military control.
Missing from Putin’s speech was any mention of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster that occurred 81 miles north of Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, 12 miles south of the border of Belarus. It is but one event in modern history, along with the Holodomor, that explains why Ukraine might be more eager to ally with its western instead of eastern neighbor.
The point is not to justify more significant US or NATO military intervention in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But history explains a lot, and it’s important to “fact check” Putin’s revisionism that Ukraine has always been a colony of Russia and should not exist as a separate, sovereign nation. Lithuania and Poland may have more significant historical claims to Ukraine than Russia. Ukraine’s history is complicated.
While Ukraine has been under Russian domination off and on for three centuries, it has been free and independent, with its sovereignty and borders guaranteed by the US, the United Kingdom, and Russia for almost 30 years. In 1992, nearly 90 percent of Ukrainians voted to disgorge themselves from the Soviet Union.
It’s not hard to figure out why.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, had as much to do with the disposition of Russian nuclear weapons as Ukraine’s borders. Russia violated that eight years ago when it seized Crimea, which was originally gifted to Ukraine by Nikita Khruschev in 1954. It’s breaking it again, just as Putin’s Russia violated an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Treaties, agreements, and the truth don’t matter much to Putin. The New York Ledger explains the Budapest Memorandum:
When the Soviet Union fell apart, many of its nuclear weapons ended up scattered across newly independent states. Kyiv held the majority of the Soviet arsenal outside of Russia, including 1,900 strategic nuclear weapons designed to strike the US.
“When Ukraine became independent . . . it was not only born nuclear, it was born the third-biggest nuclear power in the world,” said Mary Elise Sarotte of Johns Hopkins University, author of Not One Inch, a history of Nato expansion in Europe.
A diplomatic push led to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and sent the warheads to Russia for destruction.
In return, the US, Britain, and Russia pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against [its] territorial integrity or political independence”. Moscow violated this pledge when it annexed Crimea.
The Russia-Ukraine relationship has been rocky ever since. But our two legacies over the past 90 years - the 1932 Holodomor and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster were not referenced in Putin’s speech. Let’s explore why.
The Holodomor
Ukraine became a “republic” of the Soviet Union in 1922. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin instituted “collectivism” as part of his communist plan to reorder Soviet agriculture. He increased quotas on Ukrainian farmers and punished those who failed to meet them or were perceived to be resisting.
The results were horrific. Holodomor translates from Ukrainian as “extermination by famine.” Estimates vary on how many died, and experts argue on whether it qualifies as genocide. Fourteen nations, including Canada and Mexico (but not the US), have officially deemed it genocide.
A US House Commission was established in 1988, chaired by US Rep. Dan Mica (D-FL), to investigate the Holodomor. A few of their 19 findings:
“There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-33 caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.”
“The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.”
“The Famine, as is often alleged, was not related to drought.”
“Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.”
“Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-33.”
From History.com:
The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.
“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and author of the 2018 book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”
This occurred 80 years ago. Ukrainians remember.
Chernobyl
The V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station’s fourth reactor blew up during routine maintenance in 1986. Let’s consult National Geographic from 2019:
On April 25 and 26, 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history unfolded in what is now northern Ukraine as a reactor at a nuclear power plant exploded and burned. Shrouded in secrecy, the incident was a watershed moment in both the Cold War and the history of nuclear power. More than 30 years on, scientists estimate the zone around the former plant will not be habitable for up to 20,000 years.
The disaster took place near the city of Chernobyl in the former USSR, which invested heavily in nuclear power after World War II. Starting in 1977, Soviet scientists installed four RBMK nuclear reactors at the power plant, which is located just south of what is now Ukraine’s border with Belarus.
Soon, the world realized that it was witnessing a historic event. Up to 30 percent of Chernobyl’s 190 metric tons of uranium was now in the atmosphere, and the Soviet Union eventually evacuated 335,000 people, establishing a 19-mile-wide “exclusion zone” around the reactor.
At least 28 people initially died as a result of the accident, while more than 100 were injured. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has reported that more than 6,000 children and adolescents developed thyroid cancer after being exposed to radiation from the incident, although some experts have challenged that claim.
International researchers have predicted that ultimately, around 4,000 people exposed to high levels of radiation could succumb to radiation-related cancer, while about 5,000 people exposed to lower levels of radiation may suffer the same fate. Yet the full consequences of the accident, including impacts on mental health and even subsequent generations, remain highly debated and under study.
What remains of the reactor is now inside a massive steel containment structure deployed in late 2016. Containment efforts and monitoring continue and cleanup is expected to last until at least 2065.
Chernobyl’s nuclear fuel was still smoldering as of May 2021. Perhaps you saw the award-winning HBO series entitled, “Chernobyl.”
This occurred just 36 years ago. The last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, attributed the enormous cost of the Chernobyl aftermath as the leading factor in the dissolution of the USSR. “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
It isn’t just Ukraine that remembers. So does Norway. As reported by Norway Today from 2016:
Three decades after the meltdown in reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, clean-up is still in progress.
Enormous amounts of radioactive particles leaked during the Chernobyl disaster on Friday night April 26, 1986. The wind spread the contamination across Europe.
At the time, no one knew it would be the all-time worst accident in terms of nuclear and radioactive emissions.
A long-term plan for the displaced population to move back to the affected areas still does not exist. The Ukrainian government aims for Chernobyl to be a safe place by 2065.
Even in Norway, the repercussions of the accident are still causing work.
“Animals that graze in central Norway may still be within the range of radioactivity from Chernobyl, and may continue to be so for a long time yet,” section manager Astrid Liland said to the news agency NTB.
“Spiritual space,” “family ties,” and “comrades,” indeed. Vladimir Putin may not reference these horrific events, but Ukraine remembers. As does the world.