Odesa rejects Russia: Putin’s Ukraine War turns old allies into bitter enemies: and I saw this in person. Invited to Odessa nearly 20 years ago

Nearly 20 years ago, I was invited by a friend of mine, Michael Werby, and his wife to see Odessa, Ukraine, and I saw in person the at the time strong linkages the local population had with Russia. i.e. the population considered itself in many ways to be RUSSIAN

Today, what has happened is no surprise to me. It is similar to the battered wife syndrome, as to how a spouse turn into a fearsome opponent due to being nearly killed by abuse

And it will be the same all over Southern Ukraine as to the population getting the brunt of Putin's genocidal war

We need to be clear as to what is going on

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The ideological foundations for today’s genocide were first laid in the wake of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. This Ukrainian pro-democracy uprising was a watershed moment for the entire post-Soviet region. It was viewed with horror by many in Moscow, who saw it as the next stage in a Russian imperial retreat that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Putin’s response was to enter into increasingly open confrontation with the West while seeking to reassert Russian authority throughout the post-Soviet region. In the years following the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin developed the concept of the “Russkiy Mir” (“Russian World”), meaning a community of people beyond the borders of modern Russia bound by common ties of language, culture and religion who owe their allegiance to Moscow.?

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The problem is that Putin thinks he has a right to murder all those whom object in Ukraine. And he will not stop until forced out

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Odesans are now under no illusion that they face a fight for survival. Other predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities with similarly strong historical links to Russia have been shown no mercy. Instead, they have been subjected to brutal bombardment and in many cases wiped off the face of the earth. Ukraine’s second-largest seaport after Odesa, Mariupol, has been almost completely destroyed with more than twenty thousand civilians feared dead. Many of the victims were ethnic Russians. Few doubt that Odesa will suffer a similar fate if Russian troops are able to advance on the city.

The genocidal savagery of Putin’s invasion has had a profound impact on Odesan attitudes toward Russia while also dramatically strengthening Ukrainian identity in the city. A?survey?conducted in June 2022 by Ukrainian pollster SOCIS captured the historic shifts taking place in Odesa. It found that 78% of Odesa residents expressed pride in Ukrainian identity. At the same time, 88% noted a major deterioration in their assessment of Russia’s leaders and 80% cited a sharp decline in feelings toward Russians in general. Odesa’s dramatic turn away from Russia over the past four months has been mirrored throughout Ukraine’s most traditionally pro-Kremlin regions.?

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We need to be clear as to what this represents. An end to voluntary association with the Putin regime

Help Ukraine fight back and end this horror

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Putin’s Ukraine genocide is rooted in Russian impunity for Soviet crimes

By?Alexander Khara

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In summer 1941, as the outside world first began to learn of the mass murders accompanying the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill memorably declared, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

This is no longer the case. In 1948, the United Nations adopted the?Genocide Convention?based in large part on the visionary efforts of Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer born in modern-day Ukraine who coined the term “genocide.” Lemkin was driven by the idea that crimes committed on the national scale must not go unpunished. He warned that impunity would be seen as an invitation for further atrocities. Unless crimes against humanity were punished, they would be repeated.?

When seeking to define genocide, Lemkin highlighted the crimes committed by the Soviet regime in Ukraine. He saw the Kremlin’s systematic efforts to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a “classic example of Soviet genocide.” The central event of the Soviet Union’s genocidal campaign in Ukraine was the murder of over four million Ukrainians through artificial famine in the early 1930s.

The Soviet authorities experienced almost no negative consequences as a result of this unparalleled slaughter. Indeed, just months after the peak of the famine, the United States granted the USSR official recognition. The outside world simply refused to listen to the handful of courageous voices such as British journalist Gareth Jones who attempted to shed light on the apocalyptic reality of the famine.

Instead of being celebrated for his revelations, Jones was shamefully attacked by his fellow international correspondents. The loudest voice was that of Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. It says much about how little has been learned that this disgraced genocide accomplice still holds a Pulitzer Prize despite calls for him to be posthumously stripped of the award.

Since regaining independence in 1991, Ukrainians have thrown off the shackles of Soviet censorship and chronicled the full extent of the Holodomor (“Death by Hunger”), as the famine is known in Ukraine. During the post-Soviet era, growing awareness of the Holodomor has been instrumental in bringing about a broader re-evaluation of the country’s totalitarian past.

The same cannot be said for modern Russia. Far from acknowledging the famine as an act of genocide, Moscow continues to downplay or deny Soviet crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to rehabilitate the entire Soviet era and has built modern Russian national identity around a cult-like veneration of the USSR’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Attempts to condemn the mass murders of the Soviet regime are now routinely dismissed as unpatriotic and anti-Russian, while Stalin himself is once again openly celebrated as a great leader.

Given the complete failure to hold Russia accountable for the crimes of the past, it is hardly surprising that these crimes are now being repeated. As Lemkin feared, impunity has set the stage for a new era of atrocities.

The ideological foundations for today’s genocide were first laid in the wake of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. This Ukrainian pro-democracy uprising was a watershed moment for the entire post-Soviet region. It was viewed with horror by many in Moscow, who saw it as the next stage in a Russian imperial retreat that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Putin’s response was to enter into increasingly open confrontation with the West while seeking to reassert Russian authority throughout the post-Soviet region. In the years following the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin developed the concept of the “Russkiy Mir” (“Russian World”), meaning a community of people beyond the borders of modern Russia bound by common ties of language, culture and religion who owe their allegiance to Moscow.?

As the concept of the Russian World evolved, state officials and regime proxies in Moscow began to directly question the legitimacy of the Soviet collapse and challenge the verdict of 1991. It became increasingly common to hear prominent figures publicly deny the sovereignty and national identity of former Soviet republics or reject the entire notion of an independent Ukraine.

This unashamedly imperial agenda was actively promoted for over a decade throughout the Russian information space via everything from blockbuster movies and TV documentaries to opinion pieces and public holidays. Kremlin troll factories seeded social media with revisionist historical narratives justifying Russian expansionism, while an endless parade of Kremlin-curated political talk shows primed the Russian public for the coming genocide.

A major landmark in these efforts came in summer 2021 with the publication of Putin’s personal essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” This historically illiterate 5000-word treatise was widely interpreted as a declaration of war against Ukrainian statehood. The Russian dictator used the article to reiterate his frequently voiced conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” while also claiming that much of modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands. He concluded with a thinly veiled threat, declaring, “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”

Despite these very public preparations for genocide, few observers were prepared for the atrocities that would come in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, reports emerged of detailed Russian plans for mass detentions, concentration camps, and priority kill lists. These warnings were widely dismissed as inconceivable but were to prove all too accurate.?

The scale of Russia’s crimes over the past six months remains difficult to comprehend. Entire cities have been reduced to rubble. Thousands have been executed. Millions have been forcibly deported to Russia. The core infrastructure of the Ukrainian state has been methodically targeted for destruction, along with the country’s cultural heritage. In areas under Russian occupation, all national symbols and traces of Ukrainian identity are being eradicated. The entire world is witnessing a textbook example of genocide unfolding in real time on smartphone screens and social media threads.?

EURASIA CENTER EVENTS

A sense of shock over the magnitude of Russian atrocities is understandable. However, it is also important to note that recognizable elements of the current genocide have already been underway for an extended period in regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia since 2014. Over the past eight years, Crimea and eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region have become human rights black holes marked by the suppression of Ukrainian identity, language, and history along with the physical displacement of Ukrainians and arrival of Russian citizens. Once again, impunity has invited escalation.?

The world is slowly waking up to Russian genocide in Ukraine. Parliaments in countries including Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have all recognized the Russian invasion as an act of genocide. Others are expected to follow suit. At the same time, there is still considerable international reluctance to confront Putin’s Russia. Advocates of appeasement point to Moscow’s nuclear arsenal and highlight the need to maintain a dialogue with the Kremlin in order to address a range of global issues. Russia is simply too big and too important to isolate, they argue.

This emphasis on compromise over confrontation risks further eroding international security. If Moscow is able to evade justice for committing genocide in Ukraine, other authoritarian regimes will surely see this as a green light. China in particular is closely monitoring the democratic world’s response to Russia’s invasion and will draw the necessary conclusions for its own foreign policy.

It is now painfully clear that failure to hold the USSR accountable in 1991 was a major error. A Nuremburg-style trial exposing the crimes of the Soviet era could have helped facilitate the post-Soviet transition to democracy and prevented Russia’s return to authoritarianism under Putin.?

This makes it all the more imperative that Vladimir Putin and his accomplices now face justice. Even if they remain in power and beyond the reach of international law, there is nothing to stop the civilized world from holding a trial in absentia. Such an undertaking would send a clear message to the Russian people and to authoritarian regimes around the world that the age of impunity for crimes against humanity is over.?

Genocide is no longer a crime without a name. On the contrary, the global community officially recognizes genocide as the gravest of all crimes. Nevertheless, this has not prevented today’s Russia from plotting and conducting a genocidal invasion in plain sight. Moscow’s boldness owes much to the sense of impunity engendered by a complete lack of accountability for the crimes of the Soviet regime. The world cannot afford to make the same mistake again.

Alexander Khara is a fellow at the Centre for Defence Strategies.

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Whereas

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Odesa rejects Russia: Putin’s Ukraine War turns old allies into bitter enemies

By?Oleksiy Goncharenko

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Vladimir Putin has long claimed to be the champion of pro-Russian Ukrainians. However, it is now painfully apparent that the Ukrainian regions most closely associated with pro-Kremlin sentiment have also been hardest hit by the current invasion.

Since the war began four months ago, Putin’s invasion force has killed thousands of the Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian Ukrainians they claim to be protecting. The Russian military has also reduced multiple largely Russian-speaking Ukrainian towns and cities to rubble. Unsurprisingly, the unfolding carnage has forced a radical rethink of attitudes toward Russia and transformed many previously sympathetic Ukrainians into bitter opponents of the Kremlin. This historic shift is nowhere more immediately apparent than in Black Sea port city Odesa.

While Putin believes he has an historic right to the whole of Ukraine, Odesa has always occupied a particularly special place in the Russian imagination. For much of the late czarist period, Odesa was known as the southern capital of the Russian Empire. It would remain deeply embedded in Russian national identity throughout the Soviet era. Odesa was celebrated across the USSR for its unique sense of humor and colorful criminal underworld. The city was renowned for its associations with giants of Russian history such as Grigory Potemkin and Russian literary legends ranging from Pushkin to Isaac Babel.???

Many in Odesa shared this sense of close cultural affinity with Russia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, pro-Russian sentiment remained strong in Odesa while notions of Ukrainian patriotism often struggled to take root. Pro-Kremlin parties tended to dominate the local political scene while Moscow-friendly initiatives such as recognizing Russian as Ukraine’s second state language enjoyed widespread public backing.

At the same time, there was relatively little appetite in Odesa for an actual Russian reunion. While a majority of Odesans favored strong ties between Ukraine and Russia and saw the two countries as closely related, only a minority of residents wanted to separate from Ukraine or become part of modern Russia. Instead, local identity tended to dominate over issues of citizenship, with many Odesa residents preferring to see their nationality as “Odesan” rather than Ukrainian or Russian. This typically whimsical take on the nationality debate captured the essence of identity politics in post-Soviet Odesa but proved too nuanced for the Kremlin.

During the buildup to the February 2022 invasion, Putin appears to have convinced himself that Odesa and other traditionally Russophile Ukrainian cities throughout the south and east of the country were secretly waiting for liberation and would welcome his army with cakes and flowers. This catastrophic miscalculation has sparked the largest European conflict since WWII and done much to shatter the generational ties that once bound Russia and Ukraine so closely together.

Prior to 2014, Odesans overwhelmingly expressed positive attitudes toward Russia. Meanwhile, surveys consistently identified majority backing for some form of customs union with Russia and other former Soviet states. Meanwhile, relatively few in the Black Sea port city favored EU membership. A?poll?conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in February 2014 during the climatic weeks of Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution found that 24% of Odesans wanted to see Ukraine join the Russian Federation, representing one of the highest percentages in the entire country.

Even as Russia waged a localized war in eastern Ukraine from spring 2014, positive perceptions of Odesa’s Russian heritage continued to translate into strong support for Moscow-leaning politicians. However, everything changed on February 24, 2022.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has devastated the country and caused untold suffering. Tens of thousands have been killed during the first four months of the war, with millions more forced to flee their homes. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has embarked on the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian economy. Factories, shopping centers and vital infrastructure have been targeted with airstrikes, while Odesa’s ports have been blockaded in order to cut off Ukraine’s economic lifeline to global markets.

Odesa has not yet found itself on the frontlines of the fighting but it has suffered numerous airstrikes. Since February, it has become a fortress city prepared to defend itself against Russian assault from both land and sea.

Odesans are now under no illusion that they face a fight for survival. Other predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities with similarly strong historical links to Russia have been shown no mercy. Instead, they have been subjected to brutal bombardment and in many cases wiped off the face of the earth. Ukraine’s second-largest seaport after Odesa, Mariupol, has been almost completely destroyed with more than twenty thousand civilians feared dead. Many of the victims were ethnic Russians. Few doubt that Odesa will suffer a similar fate if Russian troops are able to advance on the city.

The genocidal savagery of Putin’s invasion has had a profound impact on Odesan attitudes toward Russia while also dramatically strengthening Ukrainian identity in the city. A?survey?conducted in June 2022 by Ukrainian pollster SOCIS captured the historic shifts taking place in Odesa. It found that 78% of Odesa residents expressed pride in Ukrainian identity. At the same time, 88% noted a major deterioration in their assessment of Russia’s leaders and 80% cited a sharp decline in feelings toward Russians in general. Odesa’s dramatic turn away from Russia over the past four months has been mirrored throughout Ukraine’s most traditionally pro-Kremlin regions.?

Many observers argue that Putin’s invasion has unraveled on the battlefield. They typically point to Russia’s landmark defeat in the Battle for Kyiv and the failure to capture Kharkiv. These military setbacks should certainly not be underestimated. Nor should today’s modest Russian advances at great cost in eastern Ukraine be seen as repairing the damage done by the earlier failures of Putin’s invasion force. Nevertheless, the Russian dictator’s most meaningful defeat has surely come in the battle for hearts and minds.

By unleashing a war of annihilation, Putin has irreparably alienated millions of Ukrainians who were previously sympathetic to the idea of closer ties with Russia. This is a strategic catastrophe for the Russian nation that has reversed centuries of imperial expansion. It has transformed the geopolitical landscape entirely and destroyed any hope of a pro-Russian government emerging in Ukraine for decades to come.

Putin dreamed of securing his position in history as the founder of a new Russian Empire. Instead, he has doomed himself to a legacy of historic failure and a place in infamy as one of the worst war criminals of the twenty-first century.

Oleksiy Goncharenko is a Ukrainian member of parliament with the European Solidarity party.

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Andrew Beckwith, PhD