Ukrainian War Quotes

Every war casts up certain small groups among ethnic populations: minorities too cowardly to fight openly, too insignificant to play any independent political part, but despicable enough to act as paid executioners to one of the fighting powers. In this war those people were the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Fascists.

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

Every Ukrainian photographer dreams to take a photo which will stop the war.

In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created new conditions and problems that none of the existing social, economic, and political models could cope with. Feudalism, monarchism, and traditional religions were not adapted to managing industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing nature of the modern economy. Consequently, humankind had to develop completely new models—liberal democracies, communist dictatorships, and fascist regimes—and it took more than a century of terrible wars and revolutions to experiment with these models, separate the wheat from the chaff, and implement the best solutions. Child labor in Dickensian coal mines, the First World War, and the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 constituted just a small part of the tuition fees humankind had to pay.

Stop calling it war, for war implies faults on both sides. It's an invasion, where the state of Russia is the aggressor and the people of Ukraine are the victim. And stop saying that your prayers are with the Ukrainian people, for prayers may give you comfort, but it does nothing to alleviate their suffering. Shred all hypocritical advocacy of human rights and be involved in a meaningful way that actually helps the victims of Russian imperialism.

Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Ask us for water, we won't let you go unfed, but do not mistake our gentleness as fear. If you so much as lay a finger on our home, we'll defend it with our blood, sweat 'n tears.

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war. —

Paradoxically, the timid rumors circulating in Washington in favor of arming Ukraine are creating an incentive for Moscow to escalate the war now, to attain the desired territorial gains before it becomes too costly. Once Ukrainian forces possess, for instance, anti-armor weapons, Russia’s advantages decrease and the costs of its intervention increase dramatically.

Mourning a place is even more difficult than mourning a person. Losing a loved one is a tragic but inevitable part of human experience, but war is not. Seeing our familiar landmarks sink into violence, we grieve for ourselves as we once were and we question what we have become.

Kyiv on May 31, the Russian president signed a treaty of friendship with his Ukrainian counterpart, pledging “mutual respect” for “territorial integrity” and the “inviolability of borders.”186

in response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule,

But within those numbers, there are other stories. For one, the statistics show a sharp and notable drop in life expectancy over 1932–4, across a wide range of groups. Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years. By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.6 These

At the outbreak of the war, the Ukrainian military leadership might have been taken aback by the American capabilities. But their surprise didn’t last long. Even before the invasion, Ukraine was known as one of the most tech-savvy nations in Eastern Europe.

The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.

The war had reached a decisive point, Churchill said—not in terms of determining ultimate victory but, rather, concerning whether the war would be short or very long. If Hitler were to attain control over Iraqi oil and Ukrainian wheat, “not all the staunchness ‘of our Plymouth brethren’ will shorten the ordeal.

The naval base of Sevastopol was widely considered by Russians to be the city of Russian glory since the Crimean War of 1854–55. It happened to be inside the Ukrainian SSR, after Crimea was transferred to the republic under Nikita Khrushchev. The city’s population, however, passionately believed in their Russian identity.

Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No

It is striking how much we all laugh during this horrible war. We may not do it that much in front of foreign reporters, who mostly expect to see Ukrainian women's despair or heroism. The truth is, sometimes, tired of crying or of being unable to cry, we laugh like crazy as if proving that here we are, Ukrainians, still alive.

The Ukraine war is great for the profits of international weapons suppliers.

A refugee saved is a world saved.

I pray and hope that those beloved Ukrainians may have the strength, courage, and faith to carry on.

Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three months of war. The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically: "You are under arrest!" Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could explain was, "Me? What for?" Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, across that quarantine line not event a sound dared penetrate, came the unthinkable magic words of the brigade commander: "Sholzhenitsyn. Come back here." "You have ..." he asked weightily, "a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?" I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood what direction to expect danger.

And, of course, they drew on their remarkable collaboration with the CIA, which, for years before the invasion, had been training Ukrainian operatives, including in the United States, in tradecraft and providing them with equipment. That investment proved critical once the war began, although the United States steered clear of the targeted killings of Russians that Ukraine was carrying out.

To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all.

Resistance, in the Western mind, is a mutating concept. While Ukrainian resistance is glorified for its guerrilla warfare tactics, Palestinian resistance—termed “terrorism”—is puzzling, perverted, and pathological. Mainstream media’s insistence on these framings is not due to any fundamental differences in the ways both peoples exercise violence. Nor is it solely because of Ukrainians’ skin color; one needs to look no further than the Irish Republican Army to see that whiteness alone is no golden ticket—at least not in a war against British colonialism. Rather, the tonal shift employed in media coverage is simply in service of the West’s strategic interests. While the Israeli settler-colonial regime is the United States’ most important ally in the Middle East, and practically an offshoot of Europe, created to protect Western imperialism, Russia represents an “existential” threat to the West.35

During the day we lived in the new place, and at night we lived at home - in our dreams." "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." "There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. 'Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!' Someone told her not to advertise that, no on will buy them. 'Don't worry!' she says. 'They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their bosses.

But people had grown soft. What else was the point of victory? They had Poles to dig their gardens and Ukrainians to sweep their streets, French chefs to cook their food and English maids to serve it. Having tasted the comforts of peace they had lost their appetite for war.

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

NATO itself funds think tanks because its messaging helps keep the alliance alive, by convincing the media, and policymakers, that it still has some sort of purpose. The U.S. State Department’s main motivation appears to be to provide “jobs for the boys,” given that so many former U.S. diplomats and government figures end up in the think tank racket after leaving the political fray. Meanwhile, other actors from oil-rich gulf dictatorships to Ukrainian oligarchs throw in money to obtain access to powerful people in Washington and other western capitals. Basically, the whole thing is a massive money racket, chasing ghosts to keep the cash spigot open.

Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion had good, solid, professional noncoms, and its troops had served together for a long time. It was a good rifle company and I was happy to get it. Captain Diduryk was twenty-seven years old, a native-born Ukrainian who had come to the United States with his family in 1950. He was an ROTC graduate of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was commissioned in July of 1960. He had completed paratrooper and Ranger training and had served tours in Germany and at Fort Benning. Diduryk was married and the father of two children. He was with his mortar platoon at Plei Me camp when he got the word by radio of his company’s new mission.

We are bleak mirrors that show not only the killing of our enemies but also keep witness of our souls diminishing; and we are bullets that fire at the enemies yet destroy ourselves within the fire - we have nothing left but grief inside our own hands that are washed empty of remorse by the blood of our own people and the innocent (on either lines).

To celebrate the Russian/Ukrainian partnership, in 1954 the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty was marked throughout the Soviet Union in an unusually grandiose manner. In addition to numerous festivities, myriad publications, and countless speeches, the Central Committee of the all-union party even issued thirteen "thesis", which argued the irreversibility of the "everlasting union" of the Ukrainians and the Russians: "The experience of history has shown that the way of fraternal union and alliance chosen by the Russians and Ukrainians was the only true way. The union of two great Slavic peoples multiplied their strength in the common struggle against all external foes, against serf owners and the bourgeoisie, again tsarism and capitalist slavery. The unshakeable friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has grown and strengthened in this struggle." To emphasize the point that the union with Moscow brought the Ukrainians great benefits, the Pereiaslav anniversary was crowned by the Russian republic's ceding of Crimea to Ukraine "as a token of friendship of the Russian people." But the "gift" of the Crimea was far less altruistic than it seemed. First, because the peninsula was the historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars whom Stalin had expelled during the Second World War, the Russians did not have the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it. Second, because of its proximity and economic dependence on Ukraine, the Crimea's links with Ukraine were naturally greater than with Russia. Finally, the annexation of the Crimea saddled Ukraine with economic and political problems. The deportation of the Tatars in 1944 had created economic chaos in the region and it was Kiev's budget that had to make up loses. More important was the fact that, according to the 1959 census, about 860,000 Russians and only 260,000 Ukrainians lived in the Crimea. Although Kiev attempted to bring more Ukrainians into the region after 1954, the Russians, many of whom were especially adamant in rejecting any form of Ukrainization, remained the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Crimean "gift" increased considerably the number of Russians in the Ukrainian republic. In this regard, it certainly was an appropriate way of marking the Pereiaslav Treaty.

The particular importance of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution is not, however, that it took place in such a large and important country in the former Soviet empire or that it inspired many countries still burdened with postcommunism, but in something perhaps even more significant: that revolution gave a clear answer to a still open question: where does one of the major spheres of civilization in the world today (the so-called West) end, and where does the other sphere (the so-called East, or rather Euro-Asia) begin? I recall — and I mentioned this during my meeting with Yuschenko — that an important American politician once asked me where Ukraine belongs. My impression is that it belongs to what we call the West. But that’s not what I said; I said that this was a matter for Ukraine to decide for itself.

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created new conditions and problems that none of the existing social, economic and political models could cope with. Feudalism, monarchism and traditional religions were not adapted to managing industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing nature of the modern economy. Consequently humankind had to develop completely new models – liberal democracies, communist dictatorships and fascist regimes – and it took more than a century of terrible wars and revolutions to experiment with these models, separate the wheat from the chaff, and implement the best solutions. Child labour in Dickensian coal mines, the First World War and the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3 constituted just a small part of the tuition fees humankind paid.

Pride in the heroes of Sevastopol, the ‘city of Russian glory’, remains an important source of national identity, although today it is situated in a foreign land – a result of the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 and the declaration of Ukrainian independence on the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the words of one Russian nationalist poet: On the ruins of our superpower There is a major paradox of history: Sevastopol – the city of Russian glory – Is … outside Russian territory.31 The loss of the Crimea has been a severe blow to the Russians, already suffering a loss of national pride after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Nationalists have actively campaigned for the Crimea to return to Russia, not least nationalists in Sevastopol itself, which remains an ethnic Russian town.

The painter’s Volhynia Experiment can be seen as an attempt to hold back the tide of time, to preserve the native Ukrainian-Polish-Jewish social order, while tolerating emerging modern national differences. It can also be understood as a kind of alternative modernity, a multiculturalism avant la lettre,in which state policies were designed not to build a single nation, but rather to accommodate the inevitable differences among several.

Edinolochniks [individual peasant farmers] are whitewashing their khatas [simple Ukrainian houses]. They look at us with a challenge in their eyes: ‘It’s Easter.’ The implication behind this strange remark in autumn was the hint that they were celebrating the arrival of the most joyful moment of the year. Some historians have suggested that the Germans, with black crosses on their vehicles, were seen as bringing Christian liberation to a population oppressed by Soviet atheism. Many Ukrainians did welcome the Germans with bread and salt, and many Ukrainian girls consorted cheerfully with German soldiers. It is hard to gauge the scale of this phenomenon in statistical terms, but it is significant that the Abwehr, the Germany Army intelligence department, recommended that an army of a million Ukrainians should be raised to fight the Red Army. This was firmly rejected by Hitler who was horrified at the suggestion of Slavs fighting in Wehrmacht uniform.

The pro-European revolution in Ukraine, which broke out a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, took a page from the Cold War fascination with the European West shared by the dissidents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries of the region, in some cases turning that fascination into a new national religion. The Revolution of Dignity and the war brought about a geopolitical reorientation of Ukrainian society. The proportion of those with positive attitudes toward Russia decreased from 80 percent in January 2014 to under 50 percent in September of the same year. In November 2014, 64 percent of those polled supported Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (that figure had stood at 39 percent in November 2013). In April 2014, only a third of Ukrainians had wanted their country to join NATO; in November 2014, more than half supported that course. There can be little doubt that the experience of war not only united most Ukrainians but also turned the country’s sympathies westward.

WHO WERE THEY—RUSSIANS OR Soviets? No, they were Soviets—and Russians, and Belorussians, and Ukrainians, and Tajiks… Yet there was such a thing as Soviet people. I don’t think such people will ever exist again, and they themselves now understand that. Even we, their children, are different. We want to be like everybody else. Not like our parents, but like the rest of the world. To say nothing of the grandchildren… But I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag,* 4 but they also had the Victory. And they know that.

. . . in Ukraine, the Association Agreement was more than just a few hundred pieces of paper slowly making their way through the inscrutable EU bureaucracy. Alina Frolova, a public relations professional who joined the group of Ukrainians Kuleba rallied in his pro-Ukraine public relations campaign, tells me it was the first step on a pathway to Europe and a dream for which many Ukrainians were willing to risk their lives. The cold practicality with which Ukrainians are willing to endanger themselves in the face of a threat to their budding democracy is still something that shocks me, even after having lived and worked there.

I Am Ukraine (The Sonnet) Peace doesn't come through prayers, Peace comes through responsible action. When the invader stomps on innocent lives, Not choosing a side is a consent to oppression. Ask us for water, we won't let you go unfed, But do not mistake our gentleness as fear. If you so much as lay a finger on our home, We'll defend it with our blood, sweat 'n tears. We ain't no coward to selfishly seek security, When our land is being ransacked by raccoons. When the lives of our loved ones are at stake, We'll break but never bend to oligarchical buffoons. The love of our families is what keeps us breathing. To preserve their smiles, we shall happily die fighting.

Once again, the Empire of Russia has defeated the nation. It is important to recognize it now, when Russia is suffering a moral, military and, broadly speaking, civilizational defeat in Ukraine. The attack on Ukraine is a fiasco of the still-born idea of ‘the Russian world,’ russky mir, as one lot of Russian speakers bomb, torture and shoot other Russian speakers; as they burn Orthodox churches and demolish Russian-speaking cities of Mariupol and Kherson. This is not a war for Russia but for the re-establishment of the Empire, a war of revenge on Ukrainians (it is even crueller, because they are considered ‘one of us,’ ‘our brothers’) for daring to think that they could break away and follow their own path.

In a certain sense the country of ‘Russia’ as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of different peoples, ‘Russia’ had always been too big to be reduced to a single identity or common sense of purpose.14 During and after the Great Patriotic War the Soviet authorities had indeed played the Russian card, appealing to national pride and exalting the ‘victory of the Russian people’. But the Russian people had never been assigned ‘nationhood’ in the way that Kazakhs or Ukrainians or Armenians were officially ‘nations’ in Soviet parlance. There was not even a separate ‘Russian’ Communist Party. To be Russian was to be Soviet.

Dear Ukrainians,” Zelensky said in his inauguration address. “After my election win, my six-year-old son said: ‘Dad, they say on TV that Zelensky is the president…. So, it means that I am the President too?!’ At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true. Because each of us is the president. “From now on, each of us is responsible for the country that we leave to our children,” Zelensky said. “Each of us, in his place, can do everything for the prosperity of Ukraine.” He raised his first priority: a cease-fire in the Donbas where Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces had been fighting since Putin’s 2014 invasion. “I have been often asked: What price are you ready to pay for the cease-fire? It’s a strange question,” Zelensky said. “What price are you ready to pay for the lives of your loved ones? I can assure that I’m ready to pay any price to stop the deaths of our heroes. I’m definitely not afraid to make difficult decisions and I’m ready to lose my fame, my ratings, and if need be without any hesitation, my position to bring peace, as long as we do not give up our territories. “History is unfair,” Zelensky added. “We are not the ones who have started this war. But we are the ones who have to finish it. “I really do not want you to hang my portraits on your office walls. Because a president is not an icon and not an idol. A president is not a portrait. Hang pictures of your children. And before you make any decision, look into their eyes,” he said. “And finally,” Zelensky concluded, “all my life I tried to do all I could so that Ukrainians laughed. That was my mission. Now I will do all I can so that Ukrainians at least do not cry anymore.

As for Ukraine, its claim to independence has always had a European orientation, which is one consequence of Ukraine’s experience as a country located on the East-West divide between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, central European and Eurasian empires, and the political and social practices they brought with them. This location on the border of several cultural spaces helped make Ukraine a contact zone in which Ukrainians of different persuasions could learn to coexist. It also helped create regional divisions, which participants in the current conflict have exploited. Ukraine has always been known, and lately it has been much praised, for the cultural hybridity of its society, but how much hybridity a nation can bear and still remain united in the face of a “hybrid war” is one of the important questions now being decided in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The Soviet Union’s record before, during, and after the war isn’t pretty, so it’s easy to forget that in the early days of World War II, they were the underdog. The Third Reich regarded Russians and Ukrainians as racial undesirables fit only to be exterminated; Soviet soldiers were routinely slaughtered or starved if they were taken prisoner, unlike the more by-the-book treatment of French and English POWs. The Russians responded with equal savagery once the tide turned in their favor, but at the beginning of Germany’s terrifying and overwhelming invasion, all the under-equipped Red Army could do was mount a fighting retreat, letting the harsh terrain and Russian winter do to Hitler what it had done to Napoleon. That strategy came at a horrifying cost: millions of Soviets died wearing down the German advance. And many of those front-line lives at stake were women.

Despite its imperial roots, the current war is being waged in a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post–Cold War international order, and an unprecedented resurgence of populist nationalism, last seen in the 1930s, throughout the world. The war clearly indicates that Europe and the world have all but spent the peace dividend resulting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and are entering a new, as yet undetermined, era. A new world order, possibly replicating the bipolar world of the Cold War era, is being forged in the flames of the current war. At the time of writing that war is not over, and we do not yet know what its end will bring. But it is quite clear even today that the future of the world in which we and our children and grandchildren will be living depends greatly on its outcome.

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].

But even if that happened, Jake Sullivan was quick to point out, Ukraine would be under constant threat for years, maybe decades—a threat so omnipresent that it would need to be able to deter Russia from another invasion, whenever Putin rebuilt his sorry force. Meeting that challenge would require an increase in aid and support on a scale that NATO, that Congress, and that even the Ukrainians had never thought about before. “When you think about what we provided in 2021, it was more than we had provided ever before,” Sullivan pointed out much later, looking back at the early days of the war. “It was less than a billion dollars.” That amount was tiny compared to the kind of numbers now kicking around the Pentagon. For Ukraine to survive over the long term, its military would need to be completely overhauled. It needed to become like Israel, said one former military official who was now serving in the Biden administration. It would have to go from a force that was dependent on decrepit Soviet-era leftovers to modern, Western arms—all while fighting a brutal war in real time on its own territory. It might not be a member of NATO for a long, long time. But it needed to be armed like one. —

Zelensky wanted—he needed—air defenses. F-16 fighter jets, to maintain air supremacy against the far larger Russian Air Force. A no-fly zone. Tanks. Advanced drones. Most important, long-range missile launchers. There was one in particular that the Pentagon, with its penchant for completely unintelligible acronyms, called the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). Zelensky wanted to arm these launchers with one of the crown jewels of the U.S. Army, a missile known as ATACMS that could strike targets nearly two hundred miles away with precision accuracy. That, of course, would give him the capability to fire right into command-and-control centers deep inside Russian territory—exactly Biden’s worst fear. In time, Zelensky added to his list of requests another weapon that raised enormous moral issues: He sought “cluster munitions,” a weapon many of the arms control advocates in the Biden administration had spent decades trying to limit or ban. Cluster bombs are devastating weapons that release scores of tiny bomblets, ripping apart people and personnel carriers and power lines and often mowing through civilians unlucky enough to be living in the area where they are dropped. Worse yet, unexploded bomblets can remain on the ground for years; from past American battlefields—from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq—there were stories of children killed or maimed after picking one up years later. Blinken told colleagues he had spent much of his professional life getting weapons like this banned. Yet the Pentagon stored them across Europe because they were cruelly effective in wiping out an advancing army. And anyway, they said, the Russians were using cluster munitions in Ukraine. With each proposal it was Biden who was most reluctant: F-16s were simply too provocative, he told his staff, because they could strike deep into Russia. The cluster munitions were simply too dangerous to civilians. Conversations with Zelensky were heated. “The first few calls they had turned pretty tense,” one senior administration official told me. Part of the issue was style. Zelensky, in Biden’s view, was simply not grateful for the aid he was getting—a cardinal sin in Biden’s world. By mid-May 2022, his administration had poured nearly $4 billion to the Ukrainian defenses, including some fifty million rounds of small ammunition, tens of thousands of artillery rounds, major antiaircraft and anti-tank systems, intelligence, medical equipment, and more. Zelensky had offered at best perfunctory thanks before pushing for more.

The Soviets were content to give Hitler the green light for an assault on Poland because they saw ways of capitalizing on it. German forces invaded Poland on September 1, and as expected, Britain and France issued an ultimatum that two days later led them to declare war on Germany.17 The Kremlin had wanted to coordinate with Berlin regarding plans for the attack on Poland, but given the shocking speed of the German advance, it had no time. Poland was already in the throes of defeat on September 17 when the Red Army ignobly invaded from the east. Stalin relished finally getting into Poland, for the initial Bolshevik crusade to bring revolution to Berlin, Paris, and beyond had ended at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. At that time Polish forces had stopped and encircled the Red Army, taken more than 100,000 prisoners, and begun driving out the invaders until an armistice was reached in October. Poland celebrated the great battle as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” but now in 1939 the Red Army was back. Poland, Stalin said in early September, had “enslaved” Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and other Slavs, and when it fell, the world would have “one less bourgeois fascist state. Would it be so bad,” he asked his cronies rhetorically, “if we, through the destruction of Poland, extended the socialist system to new territories and nations?”18

Over the next year, a pattern emerged. Ukraine’s request for a specific type of arms would at first get a frosty reception in Washington, perhaps an outright no, a one-word answer Biden delivered himself to reporters who asked about sending the F-16s, which could strike Moscow. After saying absolutely not, the Biden White House would then say it was “studying” each request, trying to line up Ukraine’s capabilities with weapons that could do the job. Situation Room meetings would be devoted to the question of whether a specific weapon was truly “escalatory.” Leaks to the press assured that the debate played out in public, creating new pressures. And then, as Biden discovered that Russia’s “red lines” were not as bright as first feared, he would relent, noting that Ukraine’s defense demands had changed—from defending Kyiv to defending vast sections of Ukraine’s industrial east. Eventually, a commitment to deliver weapons previously off-limits would follow. At one point, Zelensky’s representatives argued that the cycle from “no” to “studying it” to “yes” was so well trod that the United States could save itself a lot of time and money by just saying yes from the get-go—or at least begin training Ukrainians on how to fly an F-16 or drive an Abrams tank months before actually agreeing to send the weapons. It would save time, the advisor said to me, “and maybe scare the shit out of the Russians.

Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries. A 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army colonels suggests that militarily, technologically and economically weaker states can use unorthodox forms of warfare to defeat a materially superior enemy – and clearly they had the United States and NATO in mind. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, the weaker state might succeed against the dominant opponent by shifting the arena of conflict into economic, terrorist and even legal avenues as leverage to be used to undercut more traditional means of warfare. The subtitle of their book, Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization, notes a core truth of the early twenty-first century: an increasingly globalized world deepens reliance upon, and the interdependence of, nations, which in turn can be used as leverage to exploit, undermine and sabotage a dominant power. The two colonels might not be happy with the lesson their book teaches Westerners, which is that no superpower can afford to be isolationist. One way to keep America great, therefore, is to stay firmly plugged into – and leading – the international system, as it has generally done impressively in leading the Western world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine. The siren voices of American isolationism inevitably lead to a weaker United States.

And it was big enough that organized crime was split two separate ways. The west of the city was run by Ukrainians. The east was run by Albanians. The demarcation line between them was gerrymandered as tight as a congressional district. Nominally it followed Center Street, which ran north to south and divided the city in half, but it zigged and zagged and ducked in and out to include or exclude specific blocks and parts of specific neighborhoods, wherever it was felt historic precedents justified special circumstances. Negotiations had been tense. There had been minor turf wars. There had been some unpleasantness. But eventually an agreement had been reached. The arrangement seemed to work. Each side kept out of the other’s way. For a long time there had been no significant contact between them

The only outcome I foresee with Ukraine is the bulk of their men are going to die in war and Russia is going to take the country at that point.

After the war ends, Ukraine will be a predominantly female country for a long time.

Are you humans or what' works. The farther west you go, the better it works. The desire to be human, or rather, a good human, makes some people do stupid things, and others do a lot of good.

By the standards of war, Maria was a useless human being. They didn’t need bookkeepers or painters of pimpled faces at the front. Sometimes Maria would convince herself that making people beautiful for their burial was something, but what burials will there be if nuclear winter destroys everyone made-up or not very? How will anyone be buried if the whole Earth becomes one mass grave, and beauty is forgotten, an impossibility?

fixation on Ukraine no doubt includes economic jealousy of its position as a lucrative pipeline route to Europe and its access to warm-water ports. But foreign policy analysts argued that Putin wasn’t necessarily seeking to somehow reintegrate his Little Russia into the Kremlin’s empire. Instead, he hoped to create a “frozen conflict”: By taking enough Ukrainian territory to lock it into a permanent war, Russia sought to prevent the country from being welcomed into the European Union or NATO, instead pinning it in place as a strategic buffer between Moscow and the West.

The foreign workers became what amounted to chattel slaves. Most were Poles, Ukrainians, French, and Russians, though virtually every European nationality was represented. The Nazi government effectively owned these workers and leased them out to private industry for war production or agricultural labor.

We stand with Ukraine until it becomes ‘Inconvenient’.

Хлопці питають, коли я опублікую цей матеріал. Відповідаю: мабуть, у травні. І один з Андріїв, перед тим як розвернутися в бік авто з іншими бійцями, на прощання каже: - Думаю, мене вже не буде в травні.

These are stories from the past, but they are still echoing now, in the present. As I write this, Russian forces are using rape as a weapon of war against Ukrainian women; deported mothers are being separated from their children in the US; border walls are being built and fortified at an unprecedented rate across the globe (there are currently seventy-four in existence). But this much is clear: when walls are built, people will find a way over or under them; when families are separated, they do everything in their power to be reunited; and when women are victims, they find the courage to speak up, to band together, to survive.

I think the future of Ukraine is female Ukrainians mating with Western European and USA males, as they will be there in significant numbers in the future during the recovery phase of the war. It will likely become a predominantly mixed race country.

Political aims: Ukrainian state; federation of Baltic states; White Russia. . . .

Most damaging in the recordingd in which [Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European intgration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).

Most damaging in the recordings in which [President Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European integration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).

Завжди буде якийсь ворог, міняється лиш ім'я.

Брехню легше стерпіти, коли починаєш обманювати себе, а правду легко ігнорувати, поки вона не постукає у двері.

А ще їжа куди краще за щоденник викликає яскраві спогади. Навіть через багато років. Щоденники такої яскравості позбавлені.

Сказали брати із собою тільки найнеобхідніше, та більшість принесли чи не все, що мали. Та хіба можна їх винуватити? Адже пакуючи усе своє життя на возика, що хочеш забрати, а що - залишити? Вибір занадто складний.

The former president buzzes in. “The biggest problem we have is that America just doesn’t win anymore. Whether it’s trade deals or military actions. As your president, I’ll get America winning again. We’ll soon be back and banging beautiful broads like we used to.” “That’s uglyaphobic, and unfair to attractively challenged Americans. I go back to Thomas Jefferson, ‘All men are created equal,’ and…while you know…you know the deal.” “Even now, people stop me on the street and say what an awesome peacemaker I am. On day one, the Ukrainian war ends. I’ll get both leaders in a room. There’ll be tough negotiations, but they’ll be fair. There’ll be diplomatic sleepovers in Moscow and Kyiv, where no fighting will be tolerated except a robust pillow fight. Pretty soon I’ll be considered the greatest peacemaker of all time, bigger than Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. Maybe not as great as Christ, but a close second.

Our media and "experts" have literally pushed Ukraine into a conflict, denying it any negotiating option, but convincing it that Russia is an adversary, one that it is capable of defeating. They are the most detestable, and I hope this book will help make Ukrainians and Russians realize how dishonest they have been with them.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman founded an organization called OWK. He and Ostap made leaflets with their own hands, with the help of thick pencils, and distributed them all over the city, nailing them to doors and walls. When one of Afros' OGPO men stopped him on the street and asked about his actions, Roman replied, "I serve the revolution, comrade. And what are you doing?" The brothers were brought before Afros and Zhuk in the house they had confiscated in the village square. Zhuk asked if Roman wanted to be taken to Murmansk. Roman said no. He explained that apparently there were no kulaks left in Ispes after the concentrated purge six weeks ago. Therefore, Roman And Ostap decided to form an organization that anyone can join, and they are holding the first assembly next week. The organization is called OWK, the acronym for 'Organization without Kulaks'. "I even used the abominable Russian word, out of national solidarity with you and your friends, Comrade Zhuk," Roman said. "It is an organization of non-wealthy farmers, a definition that applies to the entire population that remained in Ispas. It is difficult to continue to maintain in Ukraine the class war between the successful farmer and the less successful farmer, in part because the classification changes from harvest to harvest. Kulak Mouser is the bane of the current harvest. And because the harvest was so bad and despite your laudable efforts, of course, there don't seem to be any kulaks left in our village. So we don't know exactly how to conduct the class war about which you spoke so eloquently a few weeks ago." Her novel to Jouk has a friendly smile. "We are deeply committed to purging the last of the anti-communist elements. And therefore - OW-K. "If you're serious, you'll participate in collectivization," said Jock. "I understand your point about the inefficiency of the small-scale farm, comrade," Roman said. "I am attentive to her. But listen to me until the end. The land of the Lazar family is far from the other farms, and it is impossible to connect it to them easily and create the collectivization, savings and cooperation that you strive for. So this is my proposal: my family and I will agree to meet your quota without collectivization. Let's show you how we work - with your help, maybe lend us a steel plow that expresses our new understanding and partnership? I'm sure it will work much better than our old wooden plows, and we'll do the rest. We will plow our land now, we will plant your wheat in August. We will work tirelessly for the cause and bring you the grain you demand. We will not give and we will not bargain.” "And in return?" "Nothing," Roman said. "In return we will continue to fatten horses and cows in peace." "You intend to pay other people to work in your wheat fields, Comrade Lazar?" asked Zhuk in a smooth voice. "Of course not," said Roman. "I know that even if I only have three horses, and I only pay two people to work for me, it means that I am a fat and lazy kulak, lower than a human pig. Then, as a founding member of OWK, I will have to destroy myself. So the answer is no. I will not pay anyone to work for me. Every person who passes through the fields will work for free, and that is the duty of all Ukrainians, right? As you told us we have to do to be counted for true patriots.

America grows increasingly desperate and violent. Politicians will guarantee to protect you every January 6th from nebulous, rampaging, red-hatted mobs that vow to Make America Great Again. Many Americans are willing to sacrifice their own family’s needs for those of their politicians and their families. With a defensive budget of almost 817 billion dollars, they were defeated by a mob that was led by a guy with a Water Buffalo hat. I want my money back. The same politicians, who couldn’t protect themselves from the Buffalo-hatted shaman, now need my support. They are the same politicians giving out gobs of my money, on television, like it’s Halloween and they’ve forgotten to buy a couple trillion fun-sized Snickers bars in case those nice Ukrainian children show up once more. It would be funny if it wasn’t so incredibly sad, and pathetic.

The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).

In the Russian Revolution, for example, we could expect to see mainly the reaction of the patriarchal feudal society to the challenges of modernization. However, the victory of the countryside and the peasant masses over the westernized city turned out to be a Pyrrhic one, since it threw the already backward country into the backwoods of civilization. Petlyura-style nationalism differs from European nationalism in that the latter aimed to strengthen the national state in the name of modernization and progress, while the Petlyura (and later Soviet) variety fulfilled directly opposite functions and had no constructive, civilizing content, being instead a particularly destructive phenomenon — the expression of a nation's frustration at having failed to come together. This failure, in Bulgakov's opinion, was also due to the fact that this nation did not exist (he saw nothing in it but comical rustic bandura players and petty bourgeois who suddenly "remembered" their Ukrainian-ness and began to speak in broken Ukrainian); or else because the nation was not ready for statehood (which offered nothing except bloody pogroms); or else because its aspirations to statehood were historically and politically unjustified. Ultimately, Kiev was for Bulgakov a Russian city. Historically, it was in fact the "mother of Russian cities," the cradle of Russian state-hood, and the capital of ancient Kievan Rus. Bulgakov's refusal to recognize the rights of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian aspirations in Kiev was even demographically justified: in 1917, more than half the population of Kiev was Russian, followed by Jews (about twenty per-cent), and only then Ukrainians (a little more than sixteen percent), with a significant Polish minority (almost a tenth of the population). But who remembers today that even Prague, for instance, was at that time a German-speaking city? In the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, many eastern and southern cities (among them such first-rate cultural and industrial centers as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Iuzovka, Ekaterinoslav, and Lugansk) had never been Ukrainian at all. One should also consider that western Ukraine (the primary base of present-day Ukrainian nationalism) was once part of Poland. All of this made the aspirations toward Ukrainian "independence" highly questionable. Ukraine began where the city ended, and Bulgakov considered the city the basis of culture and civilization. Ukraine in Bulgakov's world is "the steppe" — culturally barren, not creating anything, and capable only of barbarian destruction. The Ukrainian national elites understood this perfectly when, as early as the 1920s, they demanded that Stalin ban The Days of the Turbins because, ostensibly, "the Whites movement is praised" in it. But in fact it was because the attempt to create a Ukrainian "state" was depicted by Bulgakov as a bloody operetta.

In the White House, Director for Intelligence Programs Maher Bitar reviewed intel reports that Russia planned to stage an explosion in eastern Ukraine and claim Ukraine was responsible. Russia would say the Ukrainian government had killed ethnic Russians and then move into Ukraine under the false pretext of rescuing them. The Russian plot even talked about hiring actors who could play mourners at a funeral.

The psychological dynamic in play was that Zelensky did not want to signal that a full Russian invasion was going to happen because it would create a self-fulfilling prophecy of the Ukrainian economy and potentially the government collapsing.

This is genius,” Trump said during an interview on a conservative radio show the next day, February 22, at Mar-a-Lago, praising Putin’s move to declare certain Ukrainian regions independent.

the music of Israel’s national anthem, ha-Tikva, came from the Czech national musician, Smetana; much of the music used in nationalist Israeli songs originated in Russian folk-songs; even the term for an Israeli-born Jew free of all the ‘maladies and abnormalities of exile’ is in fact the Arabic word sabar, Hebraicised as (masculine and tough) tzabar or sabra (Bresheeth 1989: 131), the prickly pear grown in and around the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1948. Even the ‘national anthem of the Six Day War’, No’ami Shemer’s song ‘Jerusalem of Gold’, was a plagiarised copy of a Basque lullaby (Masalha 2007: 20, 39). Seeking to create an ‘authentic, nativised’ identity, the East European Jewish colonists claimed to represent an indigenous people returning to its homeland after 2000 years of absence; in fact Russian or Ukrainian nationals formed the hard core of Zionist activism.

...In 2008, when the United States recognized Kosovo´s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, [Vladimir] Putin was furious; the UN had promised to respect Serbia´s sovereign integrity. Putin argued that the US decision oi disregard what Russia saw as Serbia´s threatened to ¨blow apart the whole system of international relations."The United States and other states opting to recognize Kosovar independence, should understand that their decision was ¨a two-sided stick,¨ warned Putin, ¨and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.¨ That particular two-sided stick has already been deployed by the Russians in the context of Ukraine and Crimea, where Putin greeted US protestations about the importance of respecting Ukrainian sovereignty with little more than a cynical smirk. In Syria too, Putin has highlighted inconsistencies in US actions and legal arguments: if the United States can use military force inside Syria without the consent of the Syrian government, why should Russia be condemned for using force inside Ukraine? The legal precedents we are setting risk undermining the fragile norms of sovereignty and human rights that help keep our world stable. We should ask ourselves this: Do we want to live in a world in which every state considers itself to have a legal right to kill people in other states, secretly and with no public disclosure or due process, based on its own unilateral assertions of national security prerogatives?

Without Russia there wouldn’t have been a war in 2014. There would undoubtedly have been tension between the central government in Kiev and its predominantly Russian eastern regions—a political dispute about autonomy, devolved power, the multiple failures of the Ukrainian state, and the status of the Russian language. But Ukraine wouldn’t have fallen apart. Fewer people would have died.

As a form of neurosis, race-conscious nationalism almost always ignores logic and knowledge: In the East European civil wars between 1918 and 1920 Jews were slaughtered for a variety of contradictory reasons, as capitalists and as communists, as friends of the Ukrainians, as Polonophiles, as pro-German-just as it suited the circumstances.

In Moscow, the events in Ukraine were seen as a textbook example of the popular overthrow of a kleptocratic ruler that could be duplicated in Russia. The regime in Ukraine was almost identical to what had been created in Russia, with the sole difference being that Ukraine, with a nationalist west and center and a pro-Russian east, was more pluralistic. Under these circumstances, it was essential to the Russian leadership that the Ukrainian revolution be discredited. The regime chose the method traditionally used to distract the Russian population from their rulers’ abuses. They started a war.

These marches, which left surviving Jews in Germany itself, were the last of the Nazi atrocities. The Belarusian Front of the Red Army began to shell Berlin on 20 April 1945, Hitler’s birthday; by early May it had met the Ukrainian Front in the German capital. Berlin fell, and the war was over. Hitler had ordered subordinates to apply a scorched earth policy to Germany itself, but he was not obeyed. Although much young German life was wasted in the defense of Berlin, Hitler could effect no further policies of mass killing.71

The Ukrainian man told us that the Russians came in twice and took his farm, all of his grain that he grew, and that they did this to everyone. He was a boy the first time, in the 1920s, a teenager I think. His father argued with the official, and they shot him on the spot. Then they came again just a few years before the war, and again they took everything.

We knew that millions of Ukrainians died from starvation. Stalin wanted their food for the Russians, and the rest he sold for money internationally. Stalin needed currency. The Ukrainians and many others were arrested and sent to mines and labor camps. We Germans have a bad reputation because of the Jews, and that is deserved, I will admit. However, we never hear anything about the Soviets, their crimes, killing their own people, the gulags and mass murder, what they did to other Europeans during and after the war.

Revolution in nearby Georgia, his team came up with the color and the slogan for what they called the 2004 Orange Revolution. Everything was in orange—their banners, scarves, hats, and handouts. Yushchenko's campaign functioned like a Swiss watch, and he consistently led Yanukovych in the polls. He seemed the likely winner. Desperate, Yanukovych asked Putin for advice. The Russian president's PR people offered a few suggestions. First, favor close relations with Russia, not with the West. Second, make Russian the second official language of the country. And third, run as a proud Ukrainian nationalist, not as an American puppet. One poster quickly showed up on billboards: the faces of Yushchenko

he had betrayed the ideals of the Orange Revolution. Poroshenko kept his cool, dropping pellets of poison into the dialogue whenever it suited his purposes but otherwise standing on the sidelines, biding his time while trying to appear statesmanlike. As Yushchenko opened the second year of his presidency, he found himself in serious trouble. He had his chance to fight corruption and launch a major program of economic and political reform; after the Orange Revolution, he had even had his chance to rise above politics and become a Ukrainian Mandela. But, in almost every respect, he fell short. Moreover, hovering like

prevent the crowding of spectators during the mass executions’.[126] At Himmler’s insistence, the perpetrators were supplied with generous measures of alcohol, often available before and during the killing. Ukrainian auxiliaries were notorious for their drunken cruelty, allegedly throwing children in the air to be shot at like birds. After killing sprees, the men were encouraged to spend evenings together carousing and drinking. Following the mass execution of 33,000 Jews and Soviet prisoners in the ravines at Babi Yar near Kiev, the killers enjoyed a banquet to mark the occasion.

In personal and political terms, Trump was incapable of empathy. Dirt on his political opponents was “big stuff”; the American national interest, as well as the lives of Ukrainians at war, was not. There was no need for a more complicated explanation for the root of the scandal that would soon engulf the president.

Yovanovitch took the Russian threat very seriously. Speaking late in 2021 before the war on Ukraine, she said: “Russia is a historically expansionist empire. And Putin is a bully. And if we let him get away with it as we did in 2014, as we did in Georgia in 2008, as we did with Moldova, it’s just going to continue.” She also undertook, because it was US policy, to call out corruption and to encourage reforms from the Ukrainian government.

The volcano has not yet gone dormant; the wars of ethnic survival continue to break out. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and the Syrian, Kurdish, and Ukrainian conflicts of the following decades demonstrate that the old dynamics are still there.

Edzia recalled being “very happy to get away from the Ukrainians” when they left for the West in late 1945, “because they had pogroms after the war. They were killing Jews.” To her mind, “they were worse than the Germans. . . . I think my family was mostly killed . . . by Ukrainians who were our friends.”16 Jacob Heiss, also born in 1930, remembered how the Germans arriving to carry out roundups would call out merrily, “Spielzeit für die Kameraden” (Playtime for the comrades), and the next day “you would get up in the morning and see hundreds of dead people every place you walked.

Russians in Kiev never expected the Ukrainian forces to put up much of a fight. Deliberately ignoring the reality of Ukrainian culture and history, they had taken Ukrainian patriotism as little more than a joke.

An informative tale, told with buoyancy, poignancy, anger, and love - Kirkus Reviews Kochan offers reflections on life in the Old Country and the upheaval of World War II that led to his 1948 immigration to Canada. This posthumously published memoir, compiled and edited by his daughter, Christine Kochan Foster, and collaborator Mark Collins Jenkins, is both a personal tale and a story of generations of Ukrainians longing for national independence. The author was born in 1923 in the small village of Tudorkovychi, then part of eastern Poland; nearly all the roughly 1,200 inhabitants were Ukrainians. To the east was Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. During his early years, Kochan was raised by his paternal grandparents; he later learned that his parents had divorced. His father lived in another town and was a member of the Polish Parliament; his mother had returned to her parents’ farm, close to Kochan’s home. In the fall of 1930, the then-7-year-old author witnessed his first example of the endemic ethnic and political conflicts in Eastern Europe: Polish troops marched through his village hunting for members of the more violent of two Ukrainian Separatist groups. The narrative is packed with lavish imagery of the Ukrainian countryside and is encyclopedic in its detailing of local culinary, social, and religious customs. It’s also a tale of the author’s hair-raising adventures as he moved from town to town, and country to country, trying to continue his education as Europe moved closer to war. Overall, this is not only an engaging portrait of World War II from the perspective of European civilians caught in its midst, but also a timely one; in 2015, when Russia annexed Crimea, Kochan’s daughter asked her elderly father whether he thought Russia would stop with that acquisition: “They’ll be back,” he replied, presciently. “They always come back.

arrested Ukrainian leaders, teachers, and priests. Polish veterans of WW1 were given prime land in Volhynia in a colonial attempt to strengthen the Polish grip there. In return, Ukrainian nationalists assassinated Polish leaders and attacked Polish landowners. Poland then opened what is now recognized as a concentration camp, Bereza Kartuska, where Ukrainian nationalists were imprisoned without trial and tortured and abused. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany started World War II by invading Poland and dividing the country between them. In the east, the Soviets occupied Volhynia until 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union. Under German occupation, Volhynia became a part of the newly formed Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Both regimes devastated Ukraine and Poland, destroying villages and cities and arresting, deporting and murdering millions. During this upheaval, the historic tensions between the Poles and Ukrainians erupted in a series of violent clashes and brutal massacres of innocent civilians. Whole villages were decimated and the sheer brutality of these deaths—often executed with farm implements—contrasted directly with generations

Is Volodymyr Zelensky a puppet of the west?

There are many Ukrainians that are okay with Russia taking control of the country, as it used to be a Russian state.

Ukraine is an independent former Russian country that is not part of the European Union or NATO.

If you think there is a war in the European Union, you are using incorrect borders.

The Ukraine war is Russia fighting the independent former Russian country of Ukraine.

Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe.

Ukraine has massive corruption issues.

Over four million people left Ukraine when Russia invaded the country.

Most Ukrainians are Christians.

It is strange how governments can legalize mass murder by calling it ‘war’.

Propaganda is prevalent during times of war.

In July 2023, approximately 600,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed or wounded in the Ukraine war. There were reports that these numbers may be far higher, perhaps in the millions for the total number of military and civilians combined.

It is common for governments to report fake war death and wounded tolls that are far lower than reality.

You cannot rely on information coming out of a war zone.

The Ukraine war has facilitated hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to meet God.

Ukraine is not part of the European Union, it is an independent eastern European country.

Ukraine was one of the world’s largest grain exporters before the war with Russia.

Ukraine is known as the ‘bread basket of Europe’.

The largest cities in Ukraine are Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa.

All it would take to make me vote Republican in the next election is a promise to stop USA funding of the Ukraine war.

Ukraine war = Evil.

How do you take over a country? Feed them with free weapons and let them destroy themselves in a futile war.

I do not like the Republican party, but I would vote for them in the next election if they promise to stop funding the Ukraine war.

The Ukrainian and Russian death and injured tolls are high in the Ukraine war due to western supplied weaponry.

To the modern mind, which views national sovereignty as a natural condition (although the concept did not gain wide currency until after the French Revolution of 1789), the question arises of why Khmelnytsky did not declare independence for Ukraine. During the uprising there were, in fact, rumors to the effect that he wished to reestablish the "old Rus' principality," and even that he planned to form a separate "Cossack principality." Although such ideas may have been considered, it would have been impossible under the circumstances to realize them. As the interminable wars demonstrated, the Cossacks, although able to administer severe defeats to the Poles, were incapable of permanently preventing the szlachta from launching repeated efforts to regain Ukraine. To assure themselves of a lasting victory over the Poles, Khmelnytsky needed the continuing and reliable support of a major foreign power. The usual price of such aid was acceptance of the overlordship of the ruler who provided it. In the view of the masses, the main thrust of the uprising was to redress socioeconomic ills, and to many in Ukraine the question of whether these problems were to be resolved under their own or under foreign rule was of secondary importance. Finally, in 17th-century Eastern Europe, sovereignty rested not in the people, but in the person of a legitimate (that is, generally recognized) monarch. Because Khmelnytsky, despite his popularity and power, did not possess such legitimacy, he had to find for Ukraine an overlord who did. At issue was not self-rule for Ukraine, for Ukrainians already had gained it. Their goal was to find a monarch who could provide their newly formed autonomous society with legitimacy and protection.

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

The Ukraine war has turned into a bloodbath for Ukrainians and Russians.

The Ukraine war has its roots in the expansion of NATO to be closer to Russian borders.

The Ukraine war is really Russia fighting the expansion of NATO onto its borders.

When you get down to basics, the Ukraine war is really about Russia fighting with NATO.

The USA is at war with Russia. It is called a ‘Proxy War’ and Ukraine is the front man.

The war had given the Ukrainians the upper hand. The Germans promised them a free Ukraine, free from Poland and from the Soviet Union, in return for their collaboration, and they gladly gave it. Ukrainians cooperated zealously in the elimination of the Jewish population. As the war progressed, and the Jewish people were all but eliminated from the area, the Ukrainians turned their attention to the Poles. The Banderas, a national Ukrainian group, would sweep into Polish villages pretending to look for Jews, and more often than not would leave the villages in flames.

What happened in war? People died -- that's what happened.' He fixed me with that stubborn clenched-jaw look. 'Those who were bravest perished first. Those who believed in something died for belief. Those who survived...' He starts to cough. 'You know that more than twenty million Soviet citizens perished in this war.

Being a borderland meant two things. First, Ukrainians inherited a legacy of violence. ‘Rebellion; Civil War; Pogroms; Famine; Purges; Holocaust’ a friend remarked, flipping through the box of file-cards I assembled while researching this book. ‘Where’s the section on Peace and Prosperity?’ Second, they were left with a tenuous, equivocal sense of national identity. Though they rebelled at every opportunity, the few occasions on which they did achieve a measure of self-rule – during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, the Civil War of 1918–20, and towards the end of Nazi occupation – were nasty, brutish, and above all short.

Though the historical Cossacks ceased to exist in the eighteenth century, they lived on powerfully in the Ukrainian imagination. The anarchic peasant armies of the Russian Civil War called themselves ‘Cossacks’, as do a few fringe nationalists today, turning out in astrakhan hats and home-made uniforms at anti-communist rallies. Khokhol – the name of the long pony-tail, worn with a shaven head, which was the Cossack hallmark – is still derogatory Russian slang for a Ukrainian.

Of all the endlessly mythologised figures of Ukrainian history, Khmelnytsky is both the most influential and the most mysterious. For Ukrainians he is the leader of the first Ukrainian war of independence; for Poles he is the misguided peasant rebel who split the Commonwealth, pushing Poland into her long pre-Partition decline. For Jews he is the prototype pogromshchik, author of the infamous Khmelnytsky massacres; for Russians he is the founder of the Great Slav Brotherhood, the Moses who led Ukraine out of Polish bondage into the welcoming arms of Muscovy.

Of all the endlessly mythologised figures of Ukrainian history, Khmelnytsky is both the most influential and the most mysterious. For Ukrainians he is the leader of the first Ukrainian war of independence; for Poles he is the misguided peasant rebel who split the Commonwealth, pushing Poland into her long pre-Partition decline. For Jews he is the prototype pogromshchik, author of the infamous Khmelnytsky massacres; for Russians he is the founder of the Great Slav Brotherhood, the Moses who led Ukraine out of Polish bondage into the welcoming arms of Muscovy. In Kiev, the tsars erected a statue of him astride a rearing charger, pointing his mace towards the north-east and Moscow. According to its original design, the hetman was to have been represented trampling the cowering figures of a Polish nobleman, a Catholic priest and a Jew. Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral.

Ukraine needed new owners and a new class of managers to revive its economy. The country got both in a group of young, ambitious, and ruthless businessmen who had no roots in the old planned economy of Soviet times and had made their way up from the economic chaos of the perestroika years and mafia wars of the 1990s. Known in Ukraine, as in Russia, as oligarchs, they emerged as the main beneficiaries of the second stage of privatization, which amounted to the sale of government assets at a fraction of their actual value. The oligarchs made their fortunes by being innovative and opportunistic, but also by ingratiating, bribing, and shooting their way into the offices of the “red directors.” With the military-industrial complex in steep decline, the Ukrainian metallurgical industry became the richest prize in the 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, more than half the country’s industrial output came from four eastern oblasts—Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk—that were rich in iron ore and coal and produced Ukraine’s primary export product: steel.

Brody exchanged hands almost twenty times: 1914—the Russians 1915—the Austrians 1916—the Russians, the Austrians 1917—the Ukrainian People’s Republic 1918—the Austrians, the Ukrainian People’s Republic 1919—the Poles, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Poles 1920—the Bolsheviks, the Poles 1939—the Germans, the Bolsheviks 1941—the Germans 1941–1944—the difficult years of the German occupation During World War II, a ghetto was established here.

Awake, arise, and treat the Putin pandemic, like you treated the Covid pandemic.

Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The Russian annexation of the Crimea, the hybrid war in the Donbas, and attempts to destabilize the rest of the country created a new and dangerous situation not only in Ukraine but also in Europe as a whole. For the first time since the end of World War II, a major European power made war on a weaker neighbor and annexed part of the territory of a sovereign state. The Russian invasion breached not only the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1997 but also the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which had offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons and acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear state. The unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine threatened the foundations of international order—a threat to which the European Union and most of the world were not prepared to respond but one that demands appropriate counteraction. Whatever the outcome of the current Ukraine Crisis, on its resolution depends not only the future of Ukraine but also that of relations between Europe’s east and west—Russia and the European Union—and thus the future of Europe as a whole.

A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the “realist” concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Mearsheimer totally ignores. While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Mearsheimer’s statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest of Ukraine leads him to support Ukraine’s having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, promote substantial economic assistance and other measures to help maintain Ukrainian unity and independence, and sponsor contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine.

Bush took Gorbachev’s side in his address to the Ukrainian parliament, dubbed by the American media his “Chicken Kiev speech” because of the American president’s reluctance to endorse the independence aspirations of the national democratic deputies. Bush favored setting the Baltic republics free but keeping Ukraine and the rest together. He did not want to lose a reliable partner on the world stage—Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that he represented. Moreover, Bush and his advisers were concerned about the possibility of an uncontrolled disintegration of the union, which could lead to wars between republics with nuclear arms on their territory. Apart from Russia, these included Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In his speech to the Ukrainian parliament, President Bush appealed to his audience to renounce “suicidal nationalism” and avoid confusing freedom with independence. The communist majority applauded him with enthusiasm. The democratic minority was disappointed: the alliance of Washington with Moscow and the communist deputies in the Ukrainian parliament presented a major obstacle to Ukrainian independence. It was hard to imagine that before the month was out, parliament would vote almost unanimously for the independence of Ukraine and that by the end of November, the White House, initially concerned about the possibility of chaos and nuclear war in the post-Soviet state, would endorse that vote.

Events in Ukraine took an unexpected and tragic turn in early 2014, when a confrontation between the protesters and government forces violently disrupted the festive, almost street-party atmosphere of the earlier protests. In full view of television cameras, riot police and government snipers used live ammunition, wounding and killing dozens of pro-European demonstrators in February 2014. The images shocked the world. So did the Russian annexation of the Crimea in March 2014 and, later that spring, Moscow’s campaign of hybrid warfare in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. In July, the downing by pro-Russian separatists of a Malaysian airliner with almost three hundred people on board turned the Russo-Ukrainian conflict into a truly international one. The developments in Ukraine had a major impact on European and world affairs, causing politicians to speak of a “battle for the future of Europe” and a return of the Cold War in the very part of the world where it had allegedly ended in 1991.

The temptation of what is sometimes called realism—the belief that nations are solely motivated by a struggle for power, that they have eternal interests and permanent geopolitical orientations—is as strong as that of isolationism, and can be equally misleading, not least because it appeals to the indifferent. If nations never change, then of course we don’t need to exert the effort to make them change. If nations have permanent orientations, then all we need to do is discover what those are and get used to them. If nothing else, the Ukraine war showed us that nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. Their behavior can be altered by acts of cowardice or bravery, by wise leaders and cruel ones, and above all by good ideas and bad ones. Their interactions are not inevitable; their alliances and enmities are not permanent. There was no coalition to aid Ukraine until February 2022, and then there was. That coalition then made what had appeared to be the inevitable, rapid conquest of Ukraine impossible. By the same token, a different kind of Russian leader, with a different set of ideas, could now end the war quickly.

They see the garish discrepancy between the West’s generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees and the barriers it builds to keep out darker-skinned victims of its own failed wars.

Brennan’s identification with the land, and with a persona that seems as solid and enduring as the earth itself, made him the natural choice to play Karp in The North Star (November 4, 1943). Karp, a Ukrainian peasant, is unbowed by the brutal German assault on his village at the beginning of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Counterpointed with Brennan, Erich von Stroheim exerts all of his aristocratic bearing as a German surgeon disdainful of his second-in-command, played by Martin Kosleck (himself a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who often played Nazis). Brennan’s daughter, Ruthie, working under the name Lynn Winthrop, made her screen debut as Karp’s granddaughter, who takes up arms against the invading Germans. She ended her career early when she married. When I mentioned the film to Mike Brennan, he immediately said his father did not like it: “It had too much Commie in it.” Directed by Lewis Milestone, and written by Stalinist Lillian Hellman, this three-million-dollar Goldwyn production was, at the time, considered part of the war effort aimed at bolstering America’s solidarity with its Soviet allies.

The government employed these men and women for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare, for work in American laboratories, and even as special guerrilla troops for deployment inside the USSR in the midst of a nuclear war. CIA recruiting in Europe in particular often focused on Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and other Eastern European nationalists who had collaborated with the Nazis during Germany’s wartime occupation of their homelands. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such recruits were SS veterans; some had been officers of the bloody Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi party’s security service.

the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1944, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn.

Размен не равноценный, даже если один к десяти... Россия избавляется от своего человеческого дерьма, от шлака, от мусора. А Украина теряет свою элиту. Своих лучших парней.

Люди не хотели войны. Они хотели жить. И жили. Солдаты тоже хотели жить. И умирали.

Даже для мирной жизни у страны не было достаточно денег, а ей приходилось вести кровавую войну

Then the pogroms started. Not that they had ever stopped. Still, the Jews had not seen brutality on this scale in nearly four centuries. During the civil war of 1918-22, the different entities that called themselves the White Army, each led by its own general, attacked the Jews for their perceived support of the Bolsheviks and disloyalty to the czar. The self-proclaimed Ukrainian national army, commanded by Symon Petlyura, attacked the Jews for being Jews. The anarchists, led by Nestor Makhno, engaged in random violence, as did a long list of what were essentially roaming gangs. In all, more than two thousand pogroms were carried out in the three years following the Bolshevik revolution, killing nearly two hundred thousand Jews and leaving half a million homeless.

The Russians-especially the Ukrainians-are very gay and hospitable, and ready to celebrate almost any occasion. I remember several pleasant gatherings at the homes of these enthusiastic people, during which everyone managed to forget the rivalries of the war. And I remember the girls, shouting with laughter when they had every reason to hate us-on another human scale altogether from the affected Parisian beauty, obsessed by her appearance and her cosmetics.

At that same time, the war raged in Western Europe; German u-boats were haunting all shipping, yet we knew little about the rest of the world. True, we could listen to the radio, in our homes, but were afraid of being found out. One could not talk about it since it was forbidden. The only newspaper in town continued to be "Radianska Bukovina" (Red Bukovina), a Ukrainian daily, which praised workers and peasants, glorified the party and Stalin.

For the West, ending this confrontation may prove to be even more agonizing than ending the Cold War, because: the West is refusing to recognize that this is not a regional crisis, but a clash of opposing systems; the West has lost the ability to contain a civilizational adversary; the Kremlin has created self-protection mechanisms within Western societies; the liberal democracies don’t see any need to fight for norms in their foreign policies; they believe the Russian ruling elite is less risk-averse than the aged and decrepit Soviet leadership, but they’re still not sure how risk-averse; the system of global governance, which was based on the outcome of World War II, no longer fits today’s world; Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has blossomed into a crisis of Ukrainian statehood;

The war in Ukraine probably will not be decided by fighting. And so far diplomacy and a cease-fire agreement have failed. The best hope is that the Ukrainian people will seek a solution. They have experienced nearly 5,000 casualties in the war with tens of thousands of people displaced. They may also tire of their churches blurring the line between the religious and secular spheres. Russians, too, may tire of the Orthodox Church being used for political purposes, especially as more Russian soldiers die in Ukraine. The front to watch in the war may not be on the battlefield or in the diplomatic offices of Europe. The people and their church leaders could finally set the conditions for peace. ========== The Christian Science Monitor (The Christian Science Monitor) - Clip This Article on Location 526 | Added on Thursday, February 5, 2015 5:43:08 PM

In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.

FOR SIX MONTHS in the winter, spring, and summer of 1919, Paris was the center of the world. The Great War had ended. The victorious Great Powers—Britain, France, Italy, and the United States—were redrawing much of the world’s map, “as if they were dividing cake,” one diplomat noted in his diary. The city’s streets teemed with petitioners from nearly everywhere on earth, eager to enhance their own position in the final settlement: Africans, Armenians, Bessarabians, Irishmen, Koreans, Kurds, Poles, Ukrainians, Palestinians, Zionists, and desert Arabs in flowing white robes all elbowed their way past French war widows dressed in black. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson compared the colorful scene to “a riot in a parrot house.

For supporters from Western countries and other foreign admirers of Putin and the rebels, it also provided what seemed like a noble “anti-fascist” cause to belong to, rather than subscribing to an invented and racist interpretation of events in which all Ukrainians were fascists and the Russians or the rebels were heroic liberators. “We can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of [Stepan] Bandera,” said Putin, “Hitler’s accomplice during the Second World War.

In much the same way that the wartime cooperation of ordinary Germans (and, indeed, Poles, Ukrainians, and other nationalities) in the persecution and removal of Jews had been obtained by the opportunity it provided to appropriate Holocaust victims’ property, Czechoslovak, Polish, and Hungarian citizens’ enthusiasm for the expulsions owed a great deal to the prospect that they would profit from the confiscation of their German neighbors’ wealth.

not merely to ensure that reservoirs of desirable genetic material should not be lost, but to weaken the racial stock of Germany’s eastern enemies by diminishing the quotient of “Nordic blood” in the Polish or Ukrainian gene pools.

While the experience of the Second World War has to a large extent shaped the political makeup and destinies of all European societies in the second half of the twentieth century, Poland has been singularly affected. It was over the territory of the pre-1939 Polish state that Hitler and Stalin first joined in a common effort (their pact of nonaggression signed in August 1939 included a secret clause dividing the country in half) and then fought a bitter war until one of them was eventually destroyed. As a result, Poland suffered a demographic catastrophe without precedent; close to 20 percent of its population died of war-related causes. It lost its minorities - Jews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the war. Poland's elites in all walks of life were decimated. Over a third of its urban residents were missing at the conclusion of the war. Fifty-five percent of the country's lawyers were no more, along with 40 percent of its medical doctors and one-third of its university professors and Roman Catholic clergy. Poland was dubbed 'God's playground' by a sympathetic British historian, but during that time it must have felt more like a stomping ground of the devil.

Since February 2024 I turned from a writer into a war crimes researcher and then learned to be both to tell you, the world, the story of Ukrainian civil society's quest for justice. Now there should also be a story of me learning to be a mother to my eleven-year-old son. But I'll let him tell this one in the hope that our children and loved ones will understand, respect, and forgive our choices.

U.S. intelligence showed that Russia planned to create concentration camps in the Ukrainian cities and towns it occupied to “filter out” civilians who would not succumb to Russian rule.

More than 2,400 Ukrainian civilians were killed in Mariupol. More than 450 civilians were massacred in Bucha with clear evidence of execution: hands tied behind backs, gunshots to the head, slit throats. In Irpin, more than 290 civilians were found dead—many from indiscriminate Russian fire or execution. The missile strikes in crowded urban centers were at the busiest time of the day. Putin was also responsible for the mass abduction of at least 6,000 Ukrainian children, taken from occupied territories like Mariupol, Kherson and Kharkiv and adopted out to Russian families.

Tomorrow you are going to Ukraine to fuck up some shit,” a Russian commander told Corporal Nikita Chabin, a twenty-seven-year-old soldier in a unit posted on the Belarusian- Ukrainian border. The “shit” happened to be radioactive. That task force moved not only between the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the Prypiat marshes to the west of it but also through the exclusion zone itself.

For various reasons it had always suited the Soviet purpose to downplay the distinctively racist character of Nazi brutality: the massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar was officially commemorated as the ‘murder of peaceful Soviet citizens’, just as the post-war memorial at Auschwitz confined itself to general references to ‘victims of Fascism’. Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But now the presumptively cosmopolitan qualities of Jews—the international links from which Stalin had hoped to benefit in the dark months following the German attack—began once more to be held against them as the battle lines of the Cold War settled into place and international wartime contacts and communications became in Stalin’s eyes a retroactive liability.

This is genius,” Trump said during an interview on a conservative radio show the next day, February 22, at Mar-a-Lago, praising Putin’s move to declare certain Ukrainian regions independent. “So Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep the peace all right. No but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy, I know him very well. Very, very well,” Trump said gleefully. “I knew that he always wanted Ukraine,” Trump said. “I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it.’ But I could see that he wanted it.

One country that agreed to help rescue Afghans who had worked with the West was Ukraine. In mid-August 2021, Zelensky’s administration sent Ukrainian military planes to the Kabul airport, which was still controlled by American Marines, and dispatched special forces troops into hostile city territory to pick up the evacuees. Weeks later, when I returned to Kabul, the Taliban were already driving around the country in American Humvees and MRAPs and flying a Black Hawk over the city.

In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated. This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker. Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.

There’s no manual for explaining war to your children. Only a trembling voice and the unbearable task of protecting innocence in a shattered world.

In the chaos of war, I found purpose. Not in survival alone, but in helping others keep breathing too.

The day war began, my daughter asked if it would hurt us. I held her close and said, 'We’ll do everything we can to keep you safe.' But inside, I was just as scared as she was.

War turns parents into prophets of despair and children into silent survivors.

Many years later, serving time in a special detention center after yet another arrest, I sat in my cell reading a collection of newly published materials from the archives. These were secret reports by the KGB branch of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proudly documenting an extraordinary operation involving a journalist from Newsweek who had visited Ukraine sometime after the accident. Some twenty or so individuals had been involved in this operation, including members of special militia units and retired KGB agents. The KGB arranged it so that everybody the journalist interviewed was an intelligence officer, and all of them assured him the consequences of the accident were minimal and that the public was impressed and delighted by the efficient way the party and government had dealt with it. Vast resources had been brought to bear to deceive a single reporter because it was the appropriate thing to do. We could hardly allow enemy journalists to slander the Soviet reality by twisting the facts. Therefore, we would rather twist the facts a little ourselves. None of these tricks were any more effective than the infamous grocery stores in North Korea in which plastic produce is strategically placed so foreigners being driven from the airport can see that bananas and oranges are freely available. For years now the foreigners have been merrily snapping photos of these stores as a tourist sight. Hey, look over there! The famous fake fruit! Paradoxically, people in Washington, London, and Berlin knew more about what was really happening than those living in the contaminated zones. Our family did not know the whole truth, but we knew a whole lot more than most: when the party and government robustly denied the "contemptible insinuations of Washington's propaganda" about an explosion in Chernobyl, our relatives phoned and told us everyone in the region was aware there had been an explosion at the power station and that there were soldiers all over the place. Then the nightmare began. Soon, everybody within thirty kilometers of the power plant was being evacuated, and no matter how glowingly state television reported a well-coordinated operation, we already knew better. Our numerous relatives had been dispersed all over Ukraine, to wherever empty accommodations, like Pioneer camps, could be found. People were in despair. It was unbearable to be forced to abandon your farmstead, a home you had built with your own hands, especially since these people could be considered well-off by Soviet standards. We were the poor relatives compared to them, even though my father was in the army, which meant his pay was above average. We were just living a standard Soviet life in a military unit, with an apartment and a salary, while they, with their orchards and cows and private plots of land, were better provided for, at least in terms of food. Now they were leading their children to a bus and being driven away permanently to who knows where with only their identification papers and a minimal set of clothes. There were cows mooing and dogs barking, just like in films about the war. A couple of days later soldiers went around the villages shooting the dogs. A starving cow will just die, but dogs go feral, form packs, and might attack the few remaining people. What a monstrous shambles it all was, and it could not be concealed...A total of 116,000 people were evacuated. They needed new housing, new jobs, and compensation for the property they had abandoned. Even for a rich, developed country that would be a big ask. For the U.S.S.R., with its planned economy, it was a nightmare. New homes were needed; new cars were needed.

Since February 24, 2022, I turned from a writer into a war crimes researcher and then learned to be both to tell you, the world, the story of Ukrainian civil society’s quest for justice. Now there should also be a story of me learning to be a mother to my eleven-year-old son. But I’ll let him tell this one in the hope that our children and loved ones will understand, respect, and forgive our choices.

Principles are the first thing dictators attack. Various “Putins” around the world are undermining principles in their societies through propaganda and repression so that people cannot stand up for what they believe in. And then, when the dictatorship gains strength and resources, it tries to export its lack of principles, creating gray zones devoid of values. Europe has had to face this many times. Now we are experiencing another defining moment. Russia is trying to convince nations that it is easy to compromise principles—that they can ignore international law and turn a blind eye to injustice if it will supposedly bring stability. This is Moscow's main message - Putin invites everyone to forget about their principles, to show no resolve, to give up Ukrainian land and people, and then, he says, Russian bombing will stop. But throughout history, every time such agreements have been made, the threat has returned even stronger. Today, we have a chance to win in Eastern Europe so that we don't have to fight on the northern or other eastern fronts—in the Baltic states and Poland, or in the south—in the Balkans, where it is easy to ignite a conflict, or in African countries, whose problems are much closer to European societies than it may seem. We have to stand up for international law and the values on which our societies are built. We must be decisive. People matter. The law matters. State borders and the right of every nation to determine its own future matters. And while we know that Putin is threatening leaders and countries who can help us force Russia to peace, we must not give in. I thank you for every package of defense assistance to Ukraine. Every weapon you have provided helps to defend normal life—the kind of life you live here in Iceland or in any of your other countries, a life that no longer exists in Russia, where basic human rights have been taken away. We are now in the third year of a full-scale war, and our soldiers on the front lines need fresh strength. That is why we are working to equip our brigades. This is an urgent need. We are already cooperating with others—France has helped to equip one brigade, and we have an agreement on another. We invite you to join us in creating brigades, Scandinavian brigades, and demonstrate your continued commitment to the defense of Europe. I am grateful to Denmark and other partners who invest in arms production in Ukraine. Artillery, shells, drones—everything that allows Ukraine to defend itself despite any logistical delays on the part of partners or changing political moods in world capitals. We see that Putin is increasing weapons production, and rogue regimes like Pyongyang are helping him with this. Next year, Putin intends to catch up with the EU in munitions production. We can only prevent this now (...). - Translated from Ukrainian

Der Himmel über Charkiw war heute hoch und klar, und die Wolken irgendwie leichtsinnig sommerlich. Die schweren Schneekappen fallen von den Dächern. In der Stadt selbst ist es still, daher sehen sich die Menschen um, wenn Schnee herabrutscht. In der Stadt ist Frühling. Und in der Stadt ist Krieg.

Soon after the birth, Maria was shown her son. He was no longer crying. The baby was tiny, frail, his skin wrinkled — yet his bright, restless eyes darted stubbornly in every direction, as if he were trying to take in this vast, unfamiliar, and beautiful world as quickly as possible. “You did well, Maria! You have a son! You did well!” Irina kissed her daughter’s hand joyfully. “Everything will be all right now.” Seeing her child, Maria felt relief wash over her. She longed to take him into her arms, to press him to her chest — but the baby was taken away. After the necessary procedures, the midwife quietly pulled Irina aside. “Breastfeeding is dangerous,” she whispered. “The baby could contract typhus. But he is premature, weak — and if he does not receive colostrum now, I fear he will not survive. The previous woman gave birth a week ago and has no colostrum left. I believe we must take the risk: newborns contract infection from sick mothers in only about a third of cases.” Irina looked at her grandson lying in her arms. He jerked his tiny hands and feet at random — then smiled clumsily. “God’s will be done,” she said firmly. “A child must drink his mother’s milk.” When the alcohol-sterilized breast was offered to the baby, it turned out his mouth was too small to take the nipple. Fortunately, the other breast was smaller — and the boy latched on with determined urgency. Holding the flesh of her flesh to her chest, feeling her son’s gentle sucking, Maria experienced a moment of pure euphoria. The terrible illness receded, making way for the overwhelming joy of motherhood. Neither Maria nor the newborn knew of the danger of infection. They were simply following the ancient law of nature. And Irina spent the rest of the day in prayer, asking God to spare two souls — her daughter and her grandson. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: During the Ukrainian Civil War of 1920, amid epidemics, hunger, and collapsing authority, a premature child is born into a world where survival depends on instinct, faith, and impossible choices. This moment captures motherhood and mercy standing against historical catastrophe.

1920… Chaos. A chaos brewed from fear, lawlessness, constant changes of power, civil war, and disease. The Red Commissars with their grain requisitions. The White Guards with arrogant imperial plunder. Makhno’s forces with anarchist expropriations and the division of everything and everyone. The gangs of Hryhoriev, Marusia, and countless others… Each with its own rules. Yet all of them take and kill, rape and rob. In Tomakivka, only one institution functioned reliably – the hospital. It was needed by every warring authority, every general and ataman: the wounded had to be treated, the sick healed, and the able-bodied fed and given shelter. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: Set in Ukraine during the Civil War (1917–1921), at the time of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, when multiple armed forces – Red, White, anarchist, and local warlord groups — fought for control, leaving civilians trapped in a landscape of violence, lawlessness, and disease.

The hospital’s long-time cook, Iryna, mechanically peeled potatoes as usual — breakfast had to be prepared for the patients. Work was work, and she was now the only breadwinner in her family. Yet today her thoughts were entirely at home. There, her pregnant daughter Maria had been struck down by typhus and had lain alone in critical condition for a week. To make matters worse, no one was with her. Normally, Iryna would visit her sick daughter during the day. But today the hospital was in emergency mode — another convoy of wounded from the civil war had arrived. A mother’s heart was tearing itself toward her child… though what could she really do? Wiping her hands on a towel, Iryna approached the small icon depicting the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus. She knelt, folded her hands to her chest, fixed her gaze on the immaculate face of the Mother of God — and began to pray. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: Set during the chaos of the Ukrainian Civil War and a typhus epidemic, this scene shows the quiet suffering of civilians. While the hospital is overwhelmed with wounded, a mother torn between duty and fear turns to faith — highlighting the human cost of war beyond the battlefield.

My Ukrainian grandmother and two Ukrainian grandfathers didn't have such old things; for them, everything was gone with the wind in the turmoil of the last century in Ukraine, the heart of the bloodlands.

For a long time, my father’s stories about Berlin, where he was forced to work in a factory that made brakes and machine guns from the spring of 1943 until just days before the war ended in May 1945, were the only thing I knew about the German capital. He told me about the filthy flea- and lice-ridden barracks where he and other foreign workers were housed; about the Ukrainian girls he had met—a memory that still brought wistful tears to his eyes—who lived in far worse conditions in an adjacent camp; about the tedium of factory work; and about the terror and exhaustion from Allied bombing raids that went on day and night—US Eighth Air Force B-17 bombers by day, and RAF Lancasters and Halifaxes at night. A common way for Berliners to say goodbye was no longer auf Wiedersehen, or Heil Hitler, but bleiben Sie übrig, stay alive.