Later this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will mark up S.Res.623, an initiative to designate the Russian Federation as a state sponsor of terrorism, and we are asking Congress and members of the public to support it.
Historically, Russia has been trying to control more than just Ukraine. Russia’s military involvement in Chechnya, Georgia, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Transnistria, Tajikistan and Syria had showcased Russian aspirations in colonialism and imperialism. When Russia asserts that it has never been a colonial power in Africa, remember Russia has been in the imperial business for over half a millennium. The brief period of nonassertive Russian foreign policy in the early ’90s was an anomaly, quickly reversed by the war in Chechnya. As we speak, Russia is trying to force neighboring Belarus to fight and die for Russia in Ukraine.
[image_caption]Maria Doan[/image_caption]You are probably aware of Russia’s genocide in Ukraine — there is no shortage of evidence that Russians not only support the war to wipe Ukrainians off the earth but are eagerly getting to the act. There have been multiple intercepted calls from Russian soldiers bragging about their looting and murder of civilians to mothers and wives. There have been numerous intercepted calls between Russian soldiers and their wives casually joking about “permission” to rape Ukrainian women and girls, suggestions to just “kill them all, even children.”
The Ukrainian identity is at stake — Mariupol filtration camps (a modern Russian take on concentration camps) and removal of civilians. The Russian state-controlled news agency Interfax reported, citing the Russian military, that more than 1.9 million Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to Russia since the start of the invasion, over 307,000 of them children.
All the evidence points to the fact that Russia wants to erase Ukraine. A recent article from the New York Times calls out Russian use of the prohibited cluster munitions (over 2,000) that can pose risk to civilians for several decades even after the end of the war.
Russia left Ukraine with a choice between obliteration and existence, using any cease-fire and humanitarian corridors it offers to further strengthen its positions to erode Ukraine’s sovereignty. However, Ukraine has a chance to win. With proper military aid, Ukraine would be able to prevent consolidation of Russian gains and liberate the rest of the territory. The only question is “at what cost?” Faster assistance is essential to reducing the number of lives it takes to preserve Ukraine’s independence.
History rarely gives us black and white choices, but this is truly one of them. The alternative to a world in which Ukraine is free and independent is a world with a dragged-out war, numerous lives lost and destroyed, ruined cities and infrastructure, and many more millions of refugees to host. Make no mistake: Given an opportunity, Russia will dig in and establish a military foothold in Ukraine directed at Europe and, more important, the ramifications will not be contained just in Europe.
Russia’s war is already blocking substantial wheat and corn exports from Ukraine and Russia, which particularly affects the African continent. Russia is not hiding that they are using famine across the poorest countries in the world as a bargaining chip. This is much bigger than the genocidal war in Ukraine, this is a war against the developing world and the basic values of the free democratic world. Just listen to the Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan:
“The famine will start now and they will lift the sanctions and be friends with us, because they will realize that it’s impossible not to be friends with us,” – said Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan during the Petersburg Economic Forum. #StopRussia pic.twitter.com/48f1dHnfaC
— UkraineWorld (@ukraine_world) June 20, 2022
All in all, this war is also about our values as humanity. Vladimir Putin’s victory would mean a world where dictators can redraw borders by force and states would need to justify their right to exist. Today, we are asking the United States to be on the right side of history and recognize the Russian state as sponsor of terror and help provide Ukrainian forces with all the necessary tools needed to win this war.
Maria Doan is a local activist of Stand with Ukraine MN.
This war could have been avoided. When the Biden regime refused to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO, and then doubled down when pressed on the issue by refusing to even discuss it with Russian troops on the border, it established Putin’s rationale – the perceived national security threat posed by a NATO nation on Russia’s immediate border.
Nevertheless, it’s hard not to empathize with the invasion of a sovereign nation. We recently celebrated Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn. Yet no amount of empathy justifies our involvement. Unfortunately, this is where we need to have wise, prudent and courageous political leaders. And of course, we have none of those.
We can only hope they have enough sense to not incinerate us all over Ukraine. I took an oath to die for a nation once. But that nation was not Ukraine, a country we have no obligation to die for.
I guess we know what your position would have been when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939!
And Putin the Terrible’s virtually endless streams of open Imperialism and yearning for the reassembling of the Russian Empire make nonsense of his claim (unthinkingly credited by you) that Ukraine’s refusal to permanently renounce NATO was the “cause” of Putin’s War. He doesn’t think Ukraine is a legitimate nation and is instead an “historic part” of Russia, dude, so no amount of temporizing or appeasing was going to stop his invasion.
American “conservatism” has taken some strange turns over the past 40 years, but none so strange as the devoted emulation of Putin the Terrible that today’s Trumpites profess. Yup, no danger to America’s interests here!
The enormous danger now is that if the nihilist Trumpite “conservatives” take control of either house of Congress, they will cease America’s supply of critical weapons and ammo to Ukraine. Numerous of the worst of this lot, such as the odious Matt Gaetz, have already admitted this. Indeed, a Repub House is now what Putin is relying upon to salvage his war and actually effect the genocide the author writes about here.
Are we the Arsenal of (actual) Democracy or not, “conservatives”?
Not only will the U.S. stop supporting Ukraine militarily when the republicans take over congress, which has drained our missile inventory by a third, for example, but we’ll find out via congressional investigations why Biden is so strangely protective of that country that most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
Yes indeed, and perhaps we’ll find out why all of Europe and many other nations not directly involved are also strongly supporting Ukraine! But keep glued to the endless conspiracy theories, that’s the main consumer product of the “conservatism” these days. Just like its John Birch Society origins.
As for foreign wars in countries that Americans can’t identify, that includes every one of the conservative movement’s Imperialist wars of the 21st Century. So our massive ignorance certainly doesn’t (and shouldn’t) affect our foreign policy.
And stop worrying about the missile supply, Dennis, we’ll make more. Where’s your JobsJobsJobs slogan now? That what Arsenal of Democracy means, anyway.