As I write this piece, my immediate family (my mother, my sister, and her school-age children) are hiding out in Kyiv, Ukraine, hearing low flying Russian military planes dropping bombs. Ukraine — an independent democratic nation — is being brutally assaulted while the world watches and wishes them well. No one wishes a war. Certainly no Ukrainian wished for this war to come to them. Yet here the war is waged to destroy and occupy a country of over 40 million people, which by land mass is the largest country in Europe.
Putin’s bizarre rationales that Ukraine has never existed as a nation and was created by Lenin or that he (Putin) is coming to “liberate Russian speaking” people (which includes many of us in Ukraine since we were forcefully Russified under the Russian Soviet rule and have tried to reclaim our language and culture over the past 30 years) are stunning in their brazen falsity. What his claims should remind people who know actual history is that Hitler used the same rationales of supposedly protecting and liberating Germanic peoples when his Nazi army began their invasions. I encourage the reader to go on to the official U.S. Department of State website to learn how to separate Kremlin fabricated fictions from facts: https://www.state.gov/fact-vs-fiction-russian-disinformation-on-ukraine/
Standing by while one nation wages a brutal murderous war against another nation — wishing Ukrainians well, reminding ourselves that since Putin is not going to stop NATO we must prepare for attacks on NATO territories — is not enough.