Everything You Never
Knew About Ukraine
Maybe Joe Biden can stop Russia from invading Ukraine by taking Vladimir Putin behind the gym and “beat the hell out of him,” like he famously offered to do to the bad hair guy during presidential primaries leading to Biden’s victory and the total defeat of trump.
It’s a good thing that trump isn’t president now as he would likely support Putin and an invasion of Ukraine and would downplay the massing of hundreds of thousands of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine as nothing to worry about because they are only there on training and then will enjoy swimming and sunbathing on the Black Sea coast before returning home for vodka and everyone knows that Putin never lies.
Imagine if trump was leading the country back in 1962 when Kruschev and Kennedy went nose to nose over Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kruschev would have denied it all and said its ships were only bringing plyushka, Sosiska v teste and other tasty snacks and vodka to comrades in Cuba and trump would have said, “makes sense to me.”
Before World War I, most people thought Serbia was a section of Brooklyn. And until a few weeks ago, most people thought Ukraine was a physical condition akin to a migraine.
So why did we always refer to it as The Ukraine and now we learn the right reference is as Ukraine? When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, some Soviets referred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as “the Ukraine.” However, since the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine has become a sovereign country and referring it to as “the Ukraine” is incorrect. Ukraine is the correct name of the country.
Ukraine’s name is thought to come from the Slavic word for borderland, so saying THE borderland makes sense. However, the use of the extra “the” irritates many Ukrainians because they think it makes them sound like they are a territory to another country and not a country themselves.
Many other countries are often referred to with the “the” article such as Congo, Netherlands and Philippines. However the U.S. Department of State notes that only two countries should officially be referred to using the “the” article: The Bahamas and The Gambia.
For a bit about Ukraine, unlike in most countries, Ukrainians wear wedding rings on the right hand, not the left. The Chernobyl disaster took place in Ukraine, not Russia. The world’s longest musical instrument, the trembita, originated in Ukraine. And the world’s first constitution was created in 1710 by Ukrainian Hetman Pylyp Orlyk.
While we may sympathize with Ukraine in its battle to remain independent, let’s not forget that the country has a history of raging, anti-Semitism. The Ukraine included much of the so-called Pale of Settlement, where large concentrations of Jews were restricted to live in poor and unhealthy conditions and were frequently targets for anti-Jewish pogroms. The Nazi Operation Barbarossa of 1941 combined much of Ukraine, Poland and other countries and under Nazi rule, the Jewish population of Ukraine was reduced from 870,000 to 17,000 and scholars say the annihilation could not have happened without the aid of Ukrainians.
The first independent Ukrainian state was the Ukrainian People’s Republic, created after the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and after internal civil war in Ukraine. The newly formed Ukrainian People’s Republic fought a war with the Soviets from 1917 to 1921 which ended when the Bolshevik Red Army established control in late 1919 and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was founded in 1922 as one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s, Stalin began a campaign to collectivize the farms in the Ukraine republic, resulting in forced famines and starvation of an estimated 6 million to 8 million people in what has become known as Holdomor, or “death by hunger,” in Ukrainian.
During World War II the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for Ukrainian independence against both Germany and the Soviet Union. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Ukraine expanded to the south with the transfer of Crimea from Russia. Ukraine regained independence when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
A state of civil war has formally existed between Ukraine and the Russian backed, Donbas rebel separatists, named after the Donbas region, since July 17, 2014, when the separatists were blamed with shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) while flying over eastern Ukraine en route to Kuala Lumpur. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed.
Artillery attacks have recently increased between Ukrainian forces and the pro-Russian separatists, while the leaders of the rebels’ self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics accused the Ukrainian government of planning an imminent attack. The rebel administrations in the two breakaway regions announced plans to evacuate thousands of civilians into neighboring Russia.
Western authorities dispute claims by the Russian government and Russian media of widespread popular support for separatism in all of eastern and southern Ukraine, including Crimea and Donbas, which have larger ethnic Russian populations and a history of separatism. Russian forces invaded and annexed Crimea in February 2014.
Western leaders say an escalation in the fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region could be part of Russian efforts to create a “false-flag” pretext to invade. Parallels have been made to the 1938 Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland in the former Czechoslovakia when Hitler claimed the many Germans in the region faced violent threats by non-Germans.
Whether they are called red herrings, false flags or just lies, they are not new to the world and in particular, U.S. history. As examples:
The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 after President Bush made the false claim that the west was in imminent danger because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found.
The major escalation of the Vietnam War came in 1964 after President Johnson claimed U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin had been engaged in an unprovoked attack by the North Vietnamese. Johnson had lied in order to create a false flag to ratchet up the war.
The U.S. had sought to force Spain out of Cuba and invaded in 1898, blaming the Spanish for the explosion that sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, killing 260 of the 400 American crew. After defeating Spain, the U.S. gained rule over two other Spanish colonies, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Spain investigated and found that the explosion had been inside the ship while a U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled that the ship was blown up by a mine, without directly placing the blame on Spain. Experts have never agreed on the likely cause of the blast.
The Mexican-American War, fought from April 1846 to February 1848, stemmed from the U.S. annexation of Texas. The U.S. won the war and seized more than 500,000 square miles from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. President James K. Polk blamed the war on Mexico because the Mexican government would not negotiate to dismember its country and relinquish its territories.