Some Thoughts Re: Russia vs. Ukraine
To the Editor,
The most recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia would have come as no surprise to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who declared in his brilliant prescient speech in 1946 in Fulton Missouri, in the aftermath of World War 2:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. …Whatever conclusions maybe drawn from these facts-and facts they are-this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”
”From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations charter, their influence for furthering these principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them. If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.”
But even before World War 2 Russia had committed an egregious act of terror against Ukraine in the form of Stalin’s policy of deliberately starving the country’s peasant population with his agricultural collectivization program, between 1931 and 1933. Of the five million people who perished from this sadistic deliberate policy, three million were Ukranians. A never-to-be forgotten Ukrainian Holocaust.
Since Mr. Churchill’s remarkable speech Russia has demonstrated a voracious appetite for European domination by military conquest, as indicated in 1956 with its suppression of the Hungarian Uprising with tanks and other means. The Hungarian Uprising started as a student protest, evolved into a broad-based revolution led by Imre Nagy pledging to establish free elections. The USSR intervened with its full military apparatus and overwhelmed the Uprising, killing 2,500 Hungarians in the process.
Then, in 2014 Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine by massive military force, without provocation.
The current unprovoked attack on Ukraine has killed vast numbers of innocent civilians, not surprisingly due to the intense indiscriminate missile attacks on densely populated population centers.
I was stationed in Germany for 3 years (1961-1964) during the Cold War, serving in the Air Force. I was on duty during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) when, for the only time in history, we armed our aircraft with nuclear warheads and stood on alert for the order to respond to a Soviet attack, a 15-minute flight from our base. Of course, we were the same distance from them, a sobering realization.
Millennials, European and American, have no memory of past conflicts which have lessons for today. The Ukraine crisis is the WW2 Sudetenland tragedy writ large, with a similar potential outcome if appeasement is the primary Western response to Russian aggression.
George Santayana’s dictum is as applicable as ever. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Thank you,
John Vitagliano