On March 3, the Olaf Messenger published an Op-Ed titled “Ukraine’s crisis: A cultural battleground” by Karen Larionova. I believe that the narrative presented was misleading, and in this letter I hope to explain why. To be clear, my concern is not whether anything in the editorial was strictly inaccurate. However, I believe that the way the facts were framed conveyed a dangerous apologist sentiment, one which undermined the need for political solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
Larionova’s article is organized around several key premises. She firstly points out that demonizing the Russian people for the actions of the Russian government is unfair, a sentiment I hope everyone can agree with. For evidence, the article mentions anti-war hashtags trending on Russian Twitter and Instagram to show that the Russian people are not blindly following Putin’s will. The one thing I do find suspect about this idea is the comparison of Russian state media to Fox News. It is an analogy likely to evoke empathy in Americans – “you know how awful it is to talk with that one relative who only watches Fox News? Imagine if that’s all there was!”
The purpose of this analogy seems clear: to make Americans hesitant to cast judgment, to say “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
While this beginning premise was simple enough, the article entered dangerous pitfalls from there, almost repainting Putin’s actions in a more sympathetic light. The author phrases that there’s a reasonable argument that Ukraine should be a part of Russia, on the basis that “Ukraine was a part of the former Soviet Union” and “the Western-most side of the country is composed of ethnic Russians.” While Ukraine does share a history with the USSR, ethnic Russians do not, in fact, hold a majority in Western Ukraine. Even then, assuming ethnicity has a causal relationship with national borders is a dangerous mistake. The phrasing of these ideas diminishes Ukrainian self-determination. History and subtle ethnic differences should be irrelevant because all people everywhere have a right to self-determination and sovereignty. When the Soviet Union collapsed, every region of Ukraine chose to be independent of Russia by a large margin, including those who self-identify as ethnically Russian. Even in the Crimean Peninsula, the most contested region, the vote was pro-independence by 10 percentage points, and every other region had much higher margins. It’s clear that this war is against the wishes of a majority of Ukrainians, ethnically Russian or not.
A violent invasion is no answer to a question of self-determination, and as we speak, all Ukrainians are suffering because of it.
Among many in our generation, the narrative of European imperialism and injustice is a powerful motivator, and the article taps into this narrative to paint Russia as the victim of said imperialist bigotry. While it is generally an oversimplification to speak of a country wanting something, it is true that at times in Russia’s history many of its monarchs have taken a great interest in Western Europe and tried to emulate it in the hopes of being accepted as an equal. It is also true that, at times, Russians have been the victims of the same racist science that categorized Jews, Southern, and Eastern Europeans as inferior to the people of Northern and Western Europe. To focus specifically on these two facts is to miss others which I feel are relevant.
Russia has been a power player in European politics for centuries. Poland and Lithuania, for example, both famously fell victim to Russian imperialist tendencies at the tail end of the eighteenth century. Russia and Germany have shared borders throughout recent history in shared bouts of imperialist tendencies. Russia’s expanse over vast swathes of territory in the East is a clear equivalent to American “manifest destiny,” with Russian influence steamrolling and claiming natural resources and rolling over native peoples and cultures along the way. Following the Russian Revolution and the rise of the USSR, the leadership didn’t want to “participate in Western culture” so much as reshape it. The only reason politicians in Moscow ever controlled the territory of Ukraine in the first place is Russian imperialism, not Ukrainian choice.
It is evident, I hope, that this is more than a crude whataboutism. Casting Russia as a victim of European Imperialism to garner sympathy is an immense disservice to the countries and peoples that were actually colonized, some of which are still under Russian rule. The Ukrainians might reasonably count themselves in that number.
Most people would agree that it is beneficial to understand the different perspectives at play in a global conflict. This article was intended to generate sympathy for Russia in a time when hatred against its people was at a high, but it falls victim to the most influential mistaken narratives of history that silence the Ukrainian perspective. Instead of encouraging readers to see Ukraine as an agent in making its own destiny, it enables viewing Ukraine as a set-piece in Russia’s own story. This is a dangerous mindset, the very same that enabled the Russian invasion in the first place.
Zack Light is from Norwood, Cal.
Their major is history.
