Ukraine: Two years of fire
Oleg Yasinsky
I was born, raised and lived half my life in kyiv, and despite having been away for so long, I never stopped feeling like I was home. In these two years there is something that frequently escapes the dramatic global explosion of news without context, and that is that a little more than 30 years ago, Ukraine as an idea of an independent country did not exist in the imagination of the vast majority of its inhabitants. The Ukrainian "independence" project was embraced and promoted by the Western media that already dominated the USSR with the sole objective of destroying it and dividing a people with the same cultural identity, the same values and the same memory. Among the inhabitants of the coasts and mountains of the Andean countries of America there is much more cultural and ethnic difference than between the majority of Russians and Ukrainians in their daily lives of centuries and centuries of joint history. The great diversity of regions within Ukraine was part of its great wealth, and that wealth consisted not only of the variety of musical rhythms, dialects and landscapes, but also of religious creeds and political ideas.
In the Soviet years, all Ukrainian schoolchildren were forced to study the Ukrainian language and literature, although almost all of us in kyiv always spoke Russian, as I have said so many times. That is why now, when the German government makes the brilliant new decision surely to save the Zelensky regime from an imminent political and military defeat and orders to change the name of the Ukrainian capital from Kiew to Kyjiw on its new maps, for many surely It will be a great surprise to learn that the vast majority of the inhabitants of Ukraine, Ukrainians, Russians and various others, had Russian as their native language, and loving the language and beautiful Ukrainian songs, we are undoubtedly part of Russian culture.
If we are not guided by the lies of Wikipedia, with its figures for the "native language of Ukrainians" (in surveys the concept of "native language" was not explained and the majority of people with Russian native language indicated "Ukrainian" as the language of the name of his Republic, although in his region its inhabitants never spoke it), in the four main cities of Ukraine, with more than a million inhabitants each, Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnepr (formerly Dnepropetrovsk, before that the Ukrainian patriots a couple of years ago cut off the "Petrovsk" part (which remembered that this city was founded by the Russian Empress Catherine II and that it was Yekaterinoslavl, and that in 1926 it was renamed in honor of the Soviet revolutionary Grigory Petrovsky) ALL its inhabitants ALWAYS spoke Russian.
In a little-known North American survey by the Gallup International Association in 2007, 83% of Ukrainians preferred the Russian language to fill out survey questionnaires, which means that they understood it better and that it was more natural to them. In 2015, 59.6% of Ukrainian websites were in Russian and in 2020, despite years of official Russophobia and forced "Ukrainianization" in the country, Google searches from Ukraine were in Russian 8 times more frequent than in Ukrainian. In 2022, the Ukrainian statistics agency Serpstat gave us similar data, that 74% of Google searches were done in Russian and 26% in Ukrainian.
I think it is important to know this data to be able to analyze what happened after February 24, 2022, an event presented by the unanimous chorus of Western media as "Russia's aggression against a sovereign country", referring to a "sovereign country". "which 10 years ago, under the Maidan coup, had lost any remnant of its sovereignty. The same media did not hesitate to call this "Revolution of Dignity."
Beyond the voices of one or another propaganda, natural and inevitable in any armed conflict, we cannot fail to point out that this specifically has all the characteristics of a civil war. What is especially painful is that the adversaries on the battlefield recognize each other, they know how to interpret each other's word, look or gesture. Since they were children they listened to the same songs, musical groups, they grew up with the same books and the same movies, they share the same imagination. This is precisely the scenario that the West sought for decades: to confront with arms the people of the heirs of the Russian traditions so that, once and for all, any possibility of the resurgence of the great force would be destroyed of our people.
These days, two years after the start of the Russian military operation, many people in Ukraine, with their childish conscience, which is not clouded by the search for cause-effect relationships, will write their main verdict "We will not forgive ! " . Later they will surely add that this is not the result of television propaganda, but of what they see through the window. The problem is that reality cannot be seen either on television or through the window, because it is not a photo, but part of a world in motion. Understanding is not the same as recording the facts. This is a tragedy that some realized too late, only two years ago, when the explosions first sounded to them and not on television. For the inhabitants of Donbass, this war has been going on for 10 years now, and unlike the other one, it never mattered to anyone in the "civilized world."
Some people build their relationships with the world based on personal resentment over an injustice committed against them personally. This shapes and defines your political opinions and worldview. Personal cries overshadow your ability to see the world. Sometimes this turns them into monsters.
Most tragedies in history (with a small "t" so far) could have been avoided if we had learned to face the things that hurt us to see, without looking away. And then, try to understand. Do not distract ourselves from what causes us pain with different types of anesthesia, but rather look for its causes and treatment, because all pain is a warning of danger for a living organism . The Ukrainian tragedy would have been impossible if the Ukrainians had seen the warning in time in the multiple mirror of Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and the rest of the victims of the same executioner.
Furthermore, it is impossible to understand the history of these last two years without having traveled to Donbass to see its face destroyed by another war, the invisible one, the one that has cost so many lives, that of its more than 15,000 deaths invisible to those who teach us of humanism. The one that began eight infinite years before the Military Operation.
Let us also remember that a few days before February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian army began a massive artillery attack against what were still independent republics of Donbass. Knowing the behavior of the Nazi battalions of the Kiev army, we have all the grounds to affirm that this Russian military action was carried out to avoid in the Donbass what we saw in the following two years in Gaza: destroying an entire population that is in the way of a territory, a tragedy that, without a doubt, would also have been made invisible by the media.