A Rich but Complicated History

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Today, there are between 40,000 to 100,000 individuals who identify as Jewish in Ukraine – numbers vary. Most of the country’s Jews, who are mainly Russian speakers, are secular.

They are braced for further conflict now that Russian troops have crossed the borders into the country.

Currently, Ukraine has the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe following France, Great Britain and Russia.

This is down considerably from 400,000 before the massive waves of Jewish emigration at the end of the 20th century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which Ukraine was a constituent republic. At its high point, Ukraine had more than a million Jews whose native language was nearly 100 per cent Yiddish.

They include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Eight decades ago, members of the Zelensky family were murdered during the Holocaust and others fought in the Red Army. But anti-Jewish rhetoric has not played a significant role in the current war.

Jews have a rich but complicated history with Ukraine, both when it was part of tsarist Russia and later when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, occupying all of Ukraine for a time.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine. Of the three million Jews who lived in the region, about 12 per cent of the overall population, more than 100,000 were massacred by various armies.

This preceded the “Holocaust by bullets,” as it is called, when over one million Jews were slaughtered by German forces aided by collaborators after 1941. Most were shot to death.

What happened to the Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War, then, has roots in what happened to the Jews in the same region only two decades earlier. As the demographer Jacob Lestschinsky noted on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the “heritage of atrocities” left by the events of 1918–1921 had “still not fully healed.”

Soviet Communists worked to destroy all religious expressions of Judaism in the USSR and control the nature of secular Jewish, mostly Yiddish, culture in their country. In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s policies of collectivization and political suppression led to the complete failure of the Ukrainian agricultural sector and led to millions of deaths by starvation.

During this period known as the Holodomor, Jews increasingly left their villages in Ukraine to look for food and work in the larger cities.

Given this history, some of today’s Jewish communities are alarmed, particularly in cities like Odessa, where successive waves of violence, from Jewish pogroms in the early 20th century to mass executions by the Nazis in World War II, have left indelible scars.

During World War II, Romanian troops allied with the Nazis occupied Odessa, and started a program of extermination. As many as a quarter of a million Jews in Odessa and the surrounding region perished.

At the end of the 19th century, Odessa had the third largest Jewish population in the world, after New York and Warsaw. There were Jewish universities and schools, Jewish-owned factories and theaters and about 40 synagogues.

Odessa is a potential target for Vladimir Putin. It is home to the country’s largest ports and is the headquarters of Ukraine’s Navy. It is flanked by Russian-occupied Crimea to its east and the Russian-backed separatist enclave of Transnistria, in Moldova, to its west, a region along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast that Putin has referred to using the tsarist-era name, Novorossiya, or New Russia.

As with other Jewish communities, the one in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, where about 20,000 Jews live, is focusing on making sure the elderly population and other vulnerable groups remain safe if traveling local roads becomes dangerous, she added.

The Israeli mission to Ukraine is now based in Lviv, in the west of the country. The Jewish state finds itself walking a tightrope in the war, as there is a large Jewish population in Russia as well.

Israel supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, the government said Feb. 23 in its first official statement on the crisis between Kyiv and Moscow. It is prepared to transfer immediate humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, the Foreign Ministry statement added.

The statement, however, did not address Russia by name, reflecting the complicated position Israel has found itself in over the crisis unfolding 3,000 kilometers away.

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Michael Brodsky told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that while the statement did not constitute an outright condemnation of Russia, it was “far stronger than our usual position.” 

Jerusalem also has to be cautious in its approach to the current crisis due to its position in the ongoing conflicts in its neighboring Arab states. Israeli officials wouldn’t agree to the transfer of Iron Dome missile batteries to Kyiv, fearing it would hurt its relations with Russia, especially in light of Moscow’s influence over Syria.

Vera Michlin-Shapir, a former official at Israel’s National Security Council and the author of “Fluid Russia,” a book about the country’s national identity, said that Israel’s regional security concerns were of greater interest than challenging Russia on its narrative.

“Russia can provide weapons systems to our worst enemies and therefore Israel is proceeding very cautiously -- you could say too cautiously -- because there is an issue here that is at the heart of Israel’s security,” she explained.

As Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has noted, “Our border with Syria is, for all intents and purposes, a border with Russia.”

 

What Was Putin Thinking When He Attacked Ukraine?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Vladimir Putin has now been compared to Hitler, Stalin, and a host of other tyrants throughout history. His aims, some say, are boundless – the reconquest of the entire former Soviet Union, maybe even the rest of eastern Europe, if not indeed the whole continent.

I’ve never seen a war where our media have done nothing but serve as cheerleaders for one side. They don’t make any attempt to present Russia’s view, which we should at least know about, regardless of whether it is credible.

So I’m writing this so people can at least understand, though they need not accept, what motivated Russia’s president.

Putin attacked Ukraine because he felt Russia was being pushed against a wall. This, for him, was a war of necessity, not choice. Why?

If Ukraine were allowed to join NATO – a military alliance, remember – Russia’s eastern boundary would be almost where Hitler’s armies stood in 1942, as they marched towards Stalingrad, on the Volga River. The name – North Atlantic Treaty Organization – hardly suits it now.

Not only would Ukraine be part of the new encirclement, but so might even Georgia, in the Caucasus. After all, U.S. Senator John McCain’s dream was only stopped after Moscow’s 2008 war with Tbilisi.

Russia may appear to be a giant compared to “plucky little” (actually, not so little) Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes it is now really fighting against an infinitely stronger opponent, comprising almost all of Europe and North America.

The 30-member NATO alliance outmatches and outguns Russia manyfold. The United Sates alone is stronger, and NATO comprises at least four other major powers – France, Germany, Great Britain and Turkey.

And it keeps growing: From the original 12 states in 1949, when it was a defensive alliance against Soviet aggression, to today’s 30, including many former Soviet client states and even three ex-USSR republics. And we know it is not averse to using its muscle, as it has shown in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 1990s, or Libya in 2011. On its side, Russia has only Belarus – hardly a major ally.

Not everyone thinks Kyiv has made the right choices in recent years. Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon against Russia.

Of course, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening, because for nearly two decades U.S. administrations have used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia.

Ukraine is situated between two greater powers, Russia and the European Union. That makes Ukraine a buffer state, both geographically, religiously and culturally.

In his most famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, Samuel Huntington predicted the crisis in Ukraine. His theory that nations would return to their historical and cultural roots had a natural corollary: nations that were divided between civilizations, so-called “cleft” countries, would most likely generate great-power conflict.

Ukraine is a severely cleft country, divided internally, with western Ukraine firmly in the European corner and eastern Ukraine and Crimea firmly in the orbit of Orthodox Russia. So any attempt to upset this equilibrium meant that Ukraine “could split along its fault line into two separate entities, the eastern of which would merge with Russia.”

Yet in 2014 the United States helped organize regime change in Kyiv – the Maidan Revolution -- to assemble a new Ukrainian government friendly to the United States and therefore hostile to Russia. Neo-conservatives such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain actively supported the protests. The Russians have complained bitterly about this.

While almost one third of Ukraine’s population has Russian as its first language, mainly in the east and southwest of the country, on the first day in power the new nationalist regime declared Russian no longer an official state language. Kyiv also refused to consider some form of autonomy for them. The secession of Donetsk and Luhansk are a direct result.

As for Crimea, with its majority Russian population, it had been part of Russia since 1783 until it was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Communist ruler Nikita Khrushchev, for no good reason. Its population, Russian from the 18^th century on, feared the new Ukrainian government.

By 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky had begun to shut down Russian media sites in Ukraine. He placed Viktor Medvedchuk, a close ally of Putin and chairman of the pro-Russian political faction Choice in the Ukrainian Parliament, under house arrest last May on suspicion of treason. He also banned three television stations owned by Medvedchuk.

NATO’s original remit was the worldwide battle against Communist ideological and military imperialism. But that all ended in 1991. “Real existing” Communism is a spent force.

There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that emerged at the end of the Cold War.

But instead of disbanding, or being replaced by lesser bilateral or multilateral arrangements, NATO just kept expanding, and a weakened post-1991 Russia was helpless to stop it. In 1997, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe – but that turned out to be a lie.

In 1962 the United States drew a red line saying the Soviet Union could not install missiles in Cuba. They threatened a world war to make this stand. The distance from Havana to Washington is far greater than that from Kyiv to Moscow.

Is Putin really a paranoid lunatic to think America and the European Union – the political analog to NATO and also economically far richer than Russia -- want to create a global world headed by the United States, one relegating Russia and even China to the status of “rogue states” refusing to accept the “rules-based international order,” as defined by Washington? 

Our own prime minister imposed the Emergencies Act because there was an alleged plot by a bunch of “pro-Trump” truckers to bring down the government of Canada. 

That’s certainly the view from Moscow, and just shouting at Putin and calling him names won’t change that.