‘I Can’t Believe Russia Lied to Me’

On the night of August 20, 1968, some 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks, led by Russia, then called Soviet Russia or the USSR, invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring” – the Czecho-Slovak people’s short-lived period of liberalization, democracy and distancing itself from Moscow’s captivity. The Kremlin justified its invasion of Czecho-Slovakia with the recently proclaimed Brezhnev Doctrine, enunciated by General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, which gave Moscow the red light to invade any captive nation that sought to deviate from the Soviet Russian prison of nations. Czecho-Slovaks protested the invasion with public demonstrations and at least one young hero self-immolated, but in the end they were no match for the Russian tanks. The historic, liberal reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubcek were revoked and a so-called “normalization” and re-subjugation began under his successor Gustav Husak.

What was strange about this invasion was that none of the intelligence services, analysts, spies and satellites of USA and the other free world countries even caught a glimpse of Russia’s mass aggression – or suspected it.

Forty-six years later, on February 28, 2014, a few days after the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Russian troops invaded Ukraine by way of Crimea and ultimately staged fabricated elections and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. The number troops and armor did not equal the army that invaded Czecho-Slovakia but still none of the intelligence services, analysts, spies and satellites of USA and the other free world countries even caught a glimpse of Russia’s latest aggression against a former captive nation – or suspected it.

The dangerous trend that I am alluding to is not Russia’s invasion of neighboring countries in the persistent imperial belief that once a Russian captive nation, always a Russian captive nation, and its imperial messianic vision of itself. The pattern that I’m referring to is the absence of any intelligence about Russia’s belligerent intentions that would have saved the captive nations from bloodshed and shielded free world leaders’ from foolish admissions that the West was caught totally off guard by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

How can that be? While, to quote Winston Churchill, Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma for many in the free world, there have been volumes of practical and anecdotal evidence of Moscow’s threatening activities and plans. Since being allowed by western powers to seize Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, Russia continued in the ensuing decades to demonstrate its penchant for building and preserving its empire. It quashed freedom uprisings in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia. National, human and religious activists in the USSR and East Europe waged peaceful and not-so-peaceful opposition against Russia while it arrested and incarcerated them in psychiatric asylums, prisons and concentration camps.

Shouldn’t this have sent a compelling signal to the free world leaders that something amiss is brewing in Russia’s captive nations and it is compelling the Kremlin to counterattack against peaceful civil activists? The West should have then applied multilateral pressure and sanctions on Moscow to cease and desist persecuting and oppressing them rather than open trade with the Russian dictatorship.

Leaders of the captive nations’ liberation movements have also publicly warned that Russia cannot be trusted and even if it undergoes political and social transformations – like from tsarism to communism to federal presidency – its imperial nature will not diminish.

Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who was assassinated by a Russian agent on October 15, 1959, wrote in his Perspectives of a Ukrainian Revolution: “There is only one Russia – imperialist. It will be so until Russian imperialism will be totally obliterated and the Russian people will recover from it by understanding that Russia’s imperialism it the source of its greatest disaster – victims, anguish and decline. This is still a long way off.”

Bandera also said as if writing about today’s Russian war against Ukraine:

“If bolshevism is replaced tomorrow by another form of Russian imperialism, it will first of all turn against the independence of Ukraine, turn to enslaving it. This is clearly proven by state political thought and attitude of the Russian masses, all of Russian media, communist and anti-bolshevik alike. All of them are extremely hostile toward the idea of a ​​separate, sovereign state of Ukraine.”

“The idea of ​​dignity and respect for people, the free development of their own initiative, creative and worthy self-inclusion into a harmonious collective of national and social life is diametrically opposed to bolshevik tyranny, its enslavement and exploitation of people, its trampling of their dignity and ruining freedom. "

The free world cannot hide behind the excuse that it never heard of Bandera and the aspirations to freedom of the captive nations because the post-war intelligence services of the US, Britain and other countries solicited their knowledge, ideas and analyses. So what happened to the archives?

That may be history, but statements by today’s former captive nations’ leaders also warn against Russian threats and aggression. Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaitė is a staunch support of lethal aid to Ukraine and is preparing her nation in case Russian armies cross its border. Poland, Latvia and Estonia are also increasing military training and expenditures.

Andrius Kubilius, former Prime Minister of Lithuania, was quoted as saying: “This is Putin’s war, which was initiated by him, which has been supported by him, which is being implemented by him, and which can only be stopped by him. Ukraine has shown clear signs that it no longer wants to support this post-imperial Russian entity, and Mr. Putin, along with the mainstream political class in Russia, is still living with a lot of nostalgia for the imperial past. Dismantling the Russian Empire has been a very painful and very difficult process. And the only way in which we can assist Russia in overcoming their psychologically painful situation is by helping Ukraine. The biggest mistake would be to allow ourselves to be threatened by statements about red lines.”

It is safe to say that if the free world leaders had paid attention to Bandera and the other liberation ideologues – past and present, the Russo-Ukraine War of 2014-15 would not have occurred or at least it would not have surprised, shocked and dismayed the US, Britain, Canada and the other democracies.

Thirteen months after Russia launched its war against Ukraine, western newspapers are filled with headlines that do not bode well for the competence of free world leaders. Here are a few that I have gleaned in the past three weeks:

Ukraine: UK and EU ‘badly misread’ Russia

Errors over Ukraine ‘catastrophic’: UK parliament report

Russia's Putin Took European States ‘By Surprise’ in Ukraine: Report

Britain ‘at mercy’ of Putin in a war against Russia, former defence chiefs warn

UK guilty of ‘catastrophic misreading’ of Ukraine crisis, Lords report claims

Russia ‘undermining’ global world order: US

Russian expansionism may pose existential threat, says NATO general

Russian tensions could escalate into all-out war, says NATO general

Ukraine: Kerry threatens further sanctions over ‘craven’ Russian actions

PARALYZED BY UKRAINE, DUMBFOUNDED BY RUSSIA

Kerry: Russia has lied about its activities in Ukraine

US furious over Russia’s ‘lies’ on Ukraine

And a few paragraphs from articles about what newspapers call the “Ukraine crisis.”

** “London (AFP) – Britain and the European Union are guilty of “sleepwalking” into a crisis in Ukraine, a scathing report from a British parliamentary committee said on Friday.”

** “LONDON — America’s European allies sleepwalked into the conflict with Russia in Ukraine and should now find ways to stop the relationship with Moscow from deteriorating further, according to a report by British lawmakers.”

** “Sir Michael Graydon, a former chief of the air staff, told The Times newspaper: “They have got us more or less at their mercy. We only have two bases where we have got Typhoons. One is in Scotland, one is in Lincolnshire. “The guys in Lincolnshire were having to go all the way down to Cornwall just to get anywhere near.”

** “The UK is guilty of sleepwalking into the crisis in Ukraine and has not been as active or visible as it should be, according to a damning report into the British and European approach to the crisis by the main House of Lords committee on foreign affairs.

“The report – the fullest evaluation of the Ukraine crisis to emerge from the British parliament – also finds that expertise within the Foreign Office towards Russia has diminished significantly, and according to the committee chairman, Lord Tugendhat, ‘led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.’”

** “Washington (AFP) – In some of its sharpest criticism to date, Washington accused Moscow on Friday of ‘undermining’ the global order by supporting rebels in eastern Ukraine.

“The sluggish disintegration of a weak peace deal in Ukraine has come as nothing less than a blessing for President Obama. It has helped mask his administration's inability to determine the best response to the crisis, and to Russia.

“But this respite will not last. Given the events on the ground, Obama will soon have to decide whether to send weapons and trainers to the Ukrainian government and risk turning what has been largely a border skirmish into a major conflict by proxy with serious implications for the United States, Europe, and American interests worldwide.”

** “WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that Russia has repeatedly lied to him about its activities in Ukraine where pro-Russian rebels are fighting national forces.

“‘Russia is engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I’ve seen since the very height of the Cold War,’” Kerry told a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee. ‘And they have been persisting in their misrepresentations — lies — whatever you want to call them about their activities there to my face, to the face of others on many different occasions.’”

John Kerry’s bizzare admission is perhaps the most detrimental.

These headlines and sentences prove in retrospect at least that the free world understands that it has been duped by Moscow. But what actions will it take to rectify the situation?

Russia is a formidable enemy by itself. It devotes a great deal of attention and rubles to its armed forces and flaunts its vision of global imperialism. However, when you combine its saber rattling with free world’s naïve incompetence, then the western democracies are just leaving the door open to their own demise.

Without meaning to aggravate their calamitous mistakes, if Ukraine loses its war with Russia – and by loses I mean anything except a complete and unconditional withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine – then this generation of world leaders will certainly be inscribed in history as the one that lost Ukraine on its watch.

Russian Cynicism: Condemning Genocide

The speech wasn’t regarded as a major news story. It didn’t even warrant inclusion in the catchall “In the World” column in any newspaper. But a Russian official bemoaning the international community’s failure to eliminate genocide certainly caught my attention.

Vitaly Churkin, permanent representative of Russia to the United Nations, known as the permanent apologist for Russian crimes of aggression and a bald-faced liar in the UN Security Council, recently devoted 1,280 words to condemning past and present genocides of old and new terror-states without the slightest sense of remorse for Russia’s genocide against Ukrainians and other crimes against humanity.

Churkin was invited to speak at an ECOSOC conference titled “Why have we failed in preventing genocides and how to change that?” on January 21 of this year. While Russian cynicism is customary and even expected, ECOSOC’s naiveté in inviting a genocide perpetrator to speak at such a forum is appalling and does not speak well for that UN organ.

The conference dealt with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and Nazi Germany’s crimes against Jews and other nationalities. Churkin spoke eloquently about the Nazis and their reign of terror.

“Tragically, the shock and horror of that war did not prove enough to prevent another global calamity. A terrible force devoid of humanity, real machine of death emerged in the middle of the 20th century in the heart of Europe and struck with unimaginable ferocity. The continent that centuries earlier had passed through the fires of Inquisition to Enlightenment, rolled back to the theories of racial and ethnic superiority, the ideas of ‘liberation of living space’ at the expense of the territories of the so-called ‘inferior races.’ Millions of innocent people of various ethnicities fell victim of heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity which were committed by the Nazis. What is especially striking – that regime came to power through what looked like democratic elections,” he said.

Ironically, what he assigned to the Nazis, as true as it was, can also be assigned to Russia.

“According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide published in 1999 ‘a gross estimate of the results of Nazi genocide against the Slavs comes to somewhere between 15.5 and 19.5 million in the USSR, between 19.7 and 23.9 million when the Poles, Slovenes, Serbs and others are added in,’” he said.

“Around 100 thousand Poles were massacred in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in Nazi occupied Poland. Polish historians calculated that 135 sadistic methods were used to kill innocent people. Terrible mass execution happened in Khatyn, where entire population of that Byelorussian village was massacred thus becoming a symbol of all the towns and villages in Belarus burned down by the Nazis. Belarus lost a quarter of its population.”

Indeed, very true. But that encyclopedia and other verified sources also list Russian acts of genocide and crimes against humanity overlooked by Churkin and by association ECOSOC.

“Political and legal framework established after the Second World War, especially with the creation of the United Nations and the conclusions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, raised hopes that mankind has finally learned its lessons,” Churkin continued. “Nazi crimes including persecution on racial and religious grounds, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against civilian population were condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal… Following Nuremberg further vital instruments were developed, notably the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.”

He concluded with a warning to genocide perpetrators: “And just like in case with the Nazis, there cannot be good or bad terrorists. Double standards are deadly dangerous to our civilization. It is vital for the decision-makers all over the world to remember that attempts to achieve geopolitical goals by whatever means may lead to tragic consequences. No nation can be immune or afford to be indifferent.”

Hopefully, one day Russia, a terrorist state, will be hauled in front of an international tribunal for all of its acts of genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the Russo-Ukraine war of 2014-15.

In the meantime, it is historically and morally appropriate to juxtapose Churkin’s comments with those of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who immigrated to the United States in 1941 and coined the internationally recognized concept of genocide that has served as the foundation of the United Nations’ resolutions condemning this heinous crime. Lemkin also accused Russia of committing genocide against Ukrainians.

“The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism, it is not an innovation devised simply to bring uniformity out of the diversity of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Romanians — presently disappearing into the fringes of their empire. Instead, it has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin — one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia,” Lemkin wrote in a 1953 article “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.”

Then the Polish lawyer resoundingly declared: “What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”

Lemkin noted that Russia not only set its sights on liquidating the Ukrainian nation, but also all non-Russian peoples in its prison of nations: “Each is a case in the long-term policy of liquidation of non-Russian peoples by the removal of select parts.”

Among the acts of genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Russia Lemkin listed:

1. Tsarist crimes as the drowning of 10,000 Crimean Tatars by order of Catherine the Great, the mass murders of Ivan the Terrible’s ‘SS troops’ — the Oprichnina;

2. The extermination of National Polish leaders and Ukrainian Catholics by Nicholas I;

3. The series of Jewish pogroms that have stained Russian history periodically. And it has had its matches within the Soviet Union in the annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.

Lemkin pointed out that Russia’s acts of genocide are not 20th century Communist or Soviet crimes but they began during reign of Russian tsars.

But throughout, he noted: “The Ukrainian is not and has never been, a Russian.”

“The nation is too populous to be exterminated completely with any efficiency. However, its leadership, religious, intellectual, political, its select and determining parts, are quite small and therefore easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation,” he wrote.

Lemkin elaborated that Russia’s assault against the Ukrainian nation was targeted at four national segments.

The first blow was aimed at the intelligentsia, the “national brain” in order to paralyze the remainder of the national body. Then there was an attack on against the churches, priests and hierarchy, the ‘soul’ of Ukraine. The third area of the Soviet Russian plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The final, fourth step in the process consisted in the fragmenting the Ukrainian people by adding to the Ukraine of foreign peoples and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians throughout Eastern Europe.

“In 1920, 1926 and again in 1930–1933, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders, were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the /Ukrainian Quarterly/ of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 alone. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho–Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians.”

“Between 1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan Lypkivsky and 10,000 clergy were liquidated. In 1945, when the Soviets established themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar fate was meted out to the Ukrainian Catholic Church.”

“Only two weeks before the San Francisco conference (that established the United Nations), on 11 April 1945, a detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the St. George Cathedral in Lviv and arrested Metropolitan Slipyj, two bishops, two prelates and several priests. All the students in the city’s theological seminary were driven from the school, while their professors were told that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its Metropolitan was arrested and his place was to be taken by a Soviet-appointed bishop. These acts were repeated all over Western Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland.”

“The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all — starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death, an inhumanity which the 73rd Congress decried on 28 May 1934… As a Soviet politician Kosior declared in Izvestiia on 2 December 1933, ‘Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger’, and it was to eliminate that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet state that the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed. The method used in this part of the plan was not at all restricted to any particular group. All suffered — men, women and children.”

Lemkin also detailed that thousands have been executed, untold thousands have disappeared into the certain death of Siberian labor camps. He called the city of Vinnitsa the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there were buried the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. “Among the gravestones of real cemeteries, in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943,” he noted.

“This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation. If it were possible to do this even without suffering we would still be driven to condemn it, for the family of minds, the unity of ideas, of language and of customs that form what we call a nation that constitutes one of the most important of all our means of civilization and progress,” Lemkin wrote. “What then, apart from the very important question of human suffering and human rights that we find wrong with Soviet plans is the criminal waste of civilization and of culture. For the Soviet national unity is being created, not by any union of ideas and of cultures, but by the complete destruction of all cultures and of all ideas save one — the Soviet.”

Russia is the last country on earth that can address genocide and what should be done to eliminate it. It committed crimes against humanity in the past and continues to do us with its undeclared war against Ukraine. Putin, Lavrov and Churkin, as its leaders and spokesmen, must be brought to justice for their complicity in killing innocent civilians in Russia’s latest war.