To the Editor:
Ukrainian officials are increasingly distancing themselves from the repeated, wild-eyed prognostications in the western press, including your newspaper, of the overwhelmingly likely Russian invasion.
President Zelensky pointedly noted: “We don’t need this panic. There is a feeling abroad that there is war here. That’s not the case.” Defense minister Reznikov went further: “The situation on the Ukrainian-Russian border at this time is no different from what it was in the spring of last year. Now, there are no significant actions or phenomena.” Completely contradicting the prevalent narrative, these pronouncements got almost zero coverage in the American media.
But they make perfect sense. Russia encompasses 11 time zones and needs more land like a centipede needs more legs. Seizing the Ukrainian economy is like staking a claim to a disaster zone. Since western Ukraine has been whipped into a frothy Russophobia, an intrusion would boomerang worse than did Afghanistan for both the Soviets and the US. Does anyone believe that Vladimer Putin is somehow unacquainted with these realities?
Emphatically, this is not to deny the very real danger of imminent war, only that it emanates from other considerations entirely. Nor does it legitimize the Kiev regime. Last week President Milanovic of NATO-member Croatia rightly refused to aid Ukraine, contending that its government was empowered by a “coup.” What else do you call it when in 2014 armed thugs, some adorned in swastikas, ousted, by physical force, the duly elected president? An exercise in participatory democracy? A church picnic?
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Some Ukrainians may now realize that their Western “defenders” are far more interested in throwing them at Russia than in improving their lives. Eight years of International Monetary Fund conditions have rendered their nation the poorest in Europe. Rampant corruption, imprisonment of dissidents and huge drops in population and production are now standard fare. Who could blame them for suspecting that they’ve been cast as sacrificial pawns in a geopolitical Great Game against Moscow?
When Ukraine’s leaders were seen as beating war drums, their every word was reported in the US-UK press as revealed truth. Now that some have changed their tune, they’ve suddenly become invisible.
Deanna Wieczorek, Mitchell
