San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ukraine war is not an ethnic battle
Life under Putin is what really separates Russians, Ukrainians
Last summer, months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian law enforcement began laying the groundwork for an information war against its western neighbor. As part of that strategy, Russian authorities looked inward, launching criminal investigations against Russian journalists, including me and my colleagues at the independent news outlet, Proekt. They accused us of “defamation” of an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, and soon after, our media outlet was declared an “undesirable organization” — a status that allowed authorities to imprison anyone who collaborated or worked with it. For both “crimes,” I could have ended up in prison for a decade. And, I would have, had I not managed to leave the country before authorities could detain me.
Now living in the Bay Area, I am often asked by Americans whether the war in Ukraine is an ethnic conflict. Perhaps, they suggest, there might be some longstanding enmity between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Perhaps they are so different from each other that the situation was a powder keg, only in need of a megalomaniacal authoritarian ruler to light the match.
I understand why some people might think this. Major Western media outlets have hovered around the idea, and Russian President Putin justifies his invasion with false accusations of genocide. But it’s not true.
In English, the word “Russian” doesn’t distinguish between ethnic Russians, or Russkiye, and people from the Russia that once made up the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, or Rossiyane. The latter group includes many people that came under ethnic Russian control, including Ukrainians, Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Jews and many others. These ethnicities, while distinct, also blended. Particularly while under the control of the Soviet Union, they were forced into a single ethnocultural identity, and as a result, ethnicities mixed.
I am a quarter Ukrainian, and my Ukrainian friends in the U.S. speak Russian and many have Russian, Jewish and Tatar surnames. They grew up watching the same films and reading the same books I did. There are myriad ties like these between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.
The same holds true within Ukraine: Those who are now dying from bombings in Kyiv, Kharkov and other cities are descendants of all the ethnicities that once lived together under Soviet control and they are all considered Ukrainian. Right now, my relatives of RussianUkrainian-Greek origin are hiding in the besieged Ukrainian city of Nikolaev while my wife’s aunt, an ethnic Russian, hasn’t been in touch from the now surrounded city of Mariupol in over two weeks.
So if this isn’t an ethnic war, what is fueling it? What motivates Russian soldiers to pick up weapons against their family and friends across the border, people with whom they share so much linguistic and cultural connection?
As an independent Russian journalist, I’ve seen and experienced the slow strangle Putin has had on the free flow of information over the past 20 years. One by one, each independent media outlet I worked for was shut down by authorities or sold to businessmen loyal to the Kremlin, leaving Putin to craft whatever narrative he wanted for the Russian people. This month, the last remaining independent media outlets in Russia — like Dozhd TV and Ekho Moskvy radio — were shut down in conjunction with the start of the war. Russians were told that their country was taking on a “special military operation” to liberate its neighbor from fascism and would be welcomed with open arms. As Russian forces were met with fierce resistance, Putin’s propaganda machine changed the narrative, telling Russians that the Ukraine government was a puppet of the West, which was determined to humiliate them.
This extensive propaganda machine goes far deeper and is all-encompassing in ways that most Americans do not appreciate. The RT television channel, which is often the only Russian-controlled outlet foreigners know of, is only a small part in a media ecosystem built under Putin’s regime. Journalists are not just banned from working — they can actually be imprisoned for calling the war in Ukraine a “war.” All of this, coupled with the blocking of outside media and social networks like Facebook, means Russians have no easy way to find out the truth about what is happening in the world. But with more than 10 nationwide channels in the country, all subordinate to the Kremlin, there are plenty of sources to hear the government’s lies.
As much as Putin would like to tell Russians and the world that his is a just cause to end a supposed genocide or to liberate a people, the truth isn’t so noble.
Over the past several decades, Russia and Ukraine have become very different countries and not because of ethnicity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been six presidents in Ukraine, and most have held office for no longer than one term, giving way to rivals in democratic elections or losing power as a result of mass popular unrest. During the same time, there were only three presidents in Russia. The first simply transferred power to the second, appointing him as his “successor,” and the third was just a temporary puppet. But in reality, the second president controlled the government the entire time and has so for 23 years — Putin.
This is the difference between today’s Russia and Ukraine. Over the years, Ukrainians have been building a democratic state. Along the way, they have had setbacks and successes. Some of their democratic initiatives worked, others did not. But regardless of the outcome of any one measure or initiative, over time, the citizens of Ukraine learned to say “no” to the authorities — to argue with them, to defend their rights and twice to call their leader into account when those respective presidents tried to deceive them.
All this time, Putin has been attempting to do the exact opposite with the citizens of Russia — to accustom them to the irremovability of his power and to wean them from challenging the actions of the Kremlin. We are now seeing the result of his efforts — millions of Russians, intimidated by the authorities, deprived of access to accurate information and believing the propaganda, do not openly oppose the war.
And yet there is still hope. Because at the same time, many of those same Russians are secretly trying to contact their relatives hiding from bombs in Ukraine and inevitably will hear the truth from them.
Putin’s war is against anyone who has their own dignity and who values their rights. It does not matter whether they are Ukrainian or Russian, journalist or ordinary citizen. He may fight tooth and nail, but people inside and outside of Ukraine will do so, too. And in the end, Putin will lose.