Vladimir Putin has misread the past and underestimated his opponents

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/02/2022 (935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 1991, Canada became the first Western nation to recognize Ukraine, a new country that had long existed as a historical nation.

At the time, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney understood its importance to our domestic diaspora — the world’s largest concentration of Ukrainian émigrés and their descendants outside of the former Soviet Union. They are everywhere in Canada.

Three decades later, Russia’s Vladimir Putin wants to rewrite the history, humanity and reality of Ukraine. To write Ukrainians out of history entirely.

But the Ukraine of today is not the country of 1991, when its people voted massively for independence — call it decolonization — from the former Soviet Union. Even as Russia goes back in time to reclaim its former colony, it is too late, for Ukraine has changed with the times.

The fledgling country that so quickly won international recognition was slow to find its way. Burdened by corruption and cronyism, weighed down by its complicated history and geography, Ukraine floundered at first.

Today’s Ukraine has grown far beyond its previous incarnations. Steeped in history, the country modernized its polity and revolutionized its economy.

While Russia retreated into superpower nostalgia and military adventurism, Ukraine remade itself into a pluralist democracy — not perfect, but a work in progress and increasingly progressive. Now, Ukrainians are role models for the rest of the world, standing apart from other embattled peoples because they resolved to stand and fight, just as their president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has vowed to stay and resist.

Russia’s dictator proclaimed his imminent conquest of a neighbouring democracy with vile rhetoric, imagining he’d be welcomed with open arms or downcast eyes. By his words of defiance, Ukraine’s elected president has inspired his country and the world.

Putin misread the past, misunderstood the present, and underestimated his opponents.

He long ago concluded that Western democracies are in decline, that they have lost their way at home and abroad. Many point to the Afghanistan debacle as evidence of the West’s weakness in maintaining the international order.

But Kyiv is not Kabul.

True, the hasty U.S. withdrawal was not President Joe Biden’s finest hour, but Afghanistan was not his country to rule. The sudden collapse of Kabul’s military and the flight of its president say more about the lack of political will in Afghanistan than in America — and speak nothing of Ukraine’s situation.

The West has allocated no troops to Kyiv, confining itself to financial sanctions and arms shipments for fear of nuclear confrontation. Ukraine is fighting its own battles, because its people and its president have the political will to live — and die.

While Ukrainians are motivated, the Russians are unmoored. When Putin called for the de-nazification and demilitarization of Ukraine, he only exposed the moral bankruptcy of his propaganda.

Far from being militarized, the country voluntarily denuclearized shortly after gaining independence, disposing of all warheads inherited under Soviet rule. Invoking the “Nazi” trope was a perversion and inversion of reality.

The world now knows that Zelenskyy is Ukraine’s first Jewish president.

“How can I be a Nazi?” the president retorted.

That he rose to the summit of Ukraine’s democracy is a testament to how far it had travelled since the dark days of the Second World War, when local strains of antisemitism made common cause with Nazi occupation (as in other countries, from Vichy France to fascist Italy). The genocide against the Jews in Ukraine was among the worst in the Holocaust — Zelenskyy himself has talked about how his own family members died.

I witnessed Ukraine’s recent reckoning with its past on my own trip in 2015, when invited to attend a memorial ceremony in Rava Ruska, the small border town in western Ukraine that was the birthplace of my late mother, Helen Edel. Her parents perished in the Holocaust after the town — then under Polish sovereignty, later under Nazi occupation, now part of Ukraine — was overrun.

In 2015, I arrived and left through the same train station in nearby Lviv that is now a staging point, in western Ukraine, for so many defenceless citizens fleeing for their lives from Kyiv. I cannot stop thinking of its desperately overcrowded platforms at this moment.

Nor can I forget a speech given in Lviv by the deputy speaker of the Ukrainian Rada (parliament), Oksana Syroyid on the eve of the memorial ceremony in my mother’s birthplace.

“It is very easy to admit glory,” Syroyid told the politicians, diplomats, dignitaries and survivors who had come back to Ukraine all those years later. “It is not that easy to admit that you caused pain. There is not a future for a country that cannot protect its own memory …. Part of Jewish history is part of Ukrainian history.”

It was a powerful speech by a Ukrainian politician talking about responsibility and history. Would that Russia’s rulers, so oblivious to those realities today, had heard it and heeded it.

Martin Regg Cohn is a Toronto-based columnist focusing on Ontario politics and international affairs for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @reggcohn