
June 20, 2014
Newsmaking images that caught our eye.
Newsmaking images that caught our eye.
Russia's invasion has created a stark global divide: them and us. On one side are the countries refusing to condemn Moscow, with the West on the other. It's a dangerous split that could have repercussions far into the future.
Protesters against the war in Ukraine demonstrate in front of the Russian embassy in London
-Analysis-
PARIS — "The West and the Rest of Us." That's the title of a 1975 essay written by Nigerian essayist and critic Chinweizu Ibekwe. I've been thinking about his words as the war in Ukraine both reveals and accelerates divisions of the world that I believe are ultimately "emotional" in nature.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.With war returning to Europe and the risk of escalation, there is a gap between the Western view and that of the "others," a distinct "us and them." This gap cannot be explained in strictly geographical, political, and economic terms.
Of course, the Finns and Swedes feel as though they are in the Russian bear's sights, and see no other choice than to join NATO. Putin will thus have transformed the Baltic Sea into an Atlantic security lake. But beyond the objective realities, there is an emotional impact.
If the British are the ones in Europe who feel the closest to Ukraine, it is perhaps because the images of the Kyiv subway remind them of the images of people sheltering in the London subway during World War II. In the British collective memory, the resistance of the Ukrainians against an enemy more powerful than them, brings them back more than 80 years to the glory of their "finest hour."
This revival of the past, while glorious for the British, is also unsettling for the European subconscious. Did we not see "never again" as the key to European identity, the most spectacular example being the Franco-German reconciliation? The war was for the "others." This was only fair after the fall of Europe between 1914 and 1945. History chose other targets who were elsewhere, far from us.
Of course, beyond illiberal Hungary, the European far-right and far-left have some sympathy for Putin's Russia through a mixture of anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-capitalism. But essentially, Russia stands very much isolated in the Western world.
To the extent that, according to a confession made by someone close to the master of the Kremlin to a BBC journalist in Moscow, "Putin himself regrets the escalation since Feb. 24.”
Yet, Russia is not completely isolated. The 40 or so countries that refused to condemn Moscow's actions during the vote at the United Nations General Assembly represent around 53% of the world's population.
When in Brazil, former president Lula, candidate for the next presidential election, made sweeping statements denouncing the primary responsibility of the United States in the Ukrainian crisis. "The U.S. and the E.U. could have avoided the invasion by stating that Ukraine would not join NATO," he said, expressing a view widely shared in a continent that still has resentment towards "gringos".
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra, Pope Francis, also Argentine, expressed a very similar view.
On the African continent, some people “understand” Russia. A position that is mainly due to the perception and denunciation of the selective nature of the emotions of the "white man."
Distinction between attacker and attacked in Ukraine is very nice, but who ever cared about Africa?
The war that has been tearing Ethiopia apart for a year and a half has caused many more victims, led to the forced displacements of populations, and created famines that cannot be compared to what is happening in Ukraine. But the fate of the Ethiopians has left a majority of Europeans and even more Americans indifferent.
The African continent wants us to understand that it is also ready to bring out the scars and resentments of the colonial era.
Of course, most African countries do not necessarily support the Russian invasion. But they are not ready to go against their economic or military interests to defend international law in Europe. Everything happens as if Africa wanted to convey that this distinction between attacker and attacked in Ukraine is all very nice; but who cares, because who has ever cared about the African people for themselves and not for economic or strategic reasons?
In the Middle East, the situation is different because it is a region where Russia — protector of Orthodox holy places — has been involved for centuries. Caution towards Moscow has a less emotional side, even if the tragic humanitarian situation in Yemen, widely ignored by the Western world, again evokes double standards.
Beyond Bashar al-Assad's Syria, many countries in the region are "playing" with Russia or simply counting on its weaponry or diplomatic support to balance or compensate for America's gradual withdrawal. Israel's position seems intentionally ambiguous.
In Asia, apart from the two giants China and India, both supporting Moscow in their own way, not clearly condemning Russia means reaffirming its distance from America and the Western world as a whole. Japan, the Asian West, is almost a special case (besides Australia and New Zealand) in its unwavering support for Ukraine.
Russia, unlike the USSR, cannot claim it has a project to improve the world. In any case, authoritarian regimes, whether in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East or Asia, know that Moscow will not blame them for their human rights practices. And hasn't America, from Iraq to Afghanistan, proved that it is possible to commit countless crimes in the name of democracy?
The paradox of this world' s emotional divorce is that the countries that are going to suffer the most, especially in terms of food, are the ones being most understanding towards Moscow. A major challenge, like global warming, should bring us all together. But on the emotional level, it is more than ever "us and them" and "them and us."
Russia's invasion has created a stark global divide: them and us. On one side are the countries refusing to condemn Moscow, with the West on the other. It's a dangerous split that could have repercussions far into the future.
A member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces writes his account of the new dynamic of targeting, and being targeted by, the invading Russian troops, as drones circle above and trenches get left behind.
While Russia is accusing Ukraine of carrying out attacks on its territory, the U.S. is set to send rocket launchers that could fire into Russian territory. But Washington is also warning Kyiv of the high risks of escalation.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.