Russia’s claims ignore the fact that Ukraine has an identity of its own

It was accusatory, but its intent was poetic. Ukraine was Ukraine, not Russia. That was the message inside.

During the week I spent in Lviv, I understood why it was important to emphasize what is true, what is not, what is fact and what is not, and why lies should be opposed. I was there during the autumn of 2017. Ukrainian writers and journalists I met at the time kept telling me why they fear Russian hegemony. He insisted that they were not Russian, and of course they were not.

We knew about the Cold War; But there were blurry maps in it. We knew about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – note the ‘S’ at the end of ‘Republic’, a fig leaf signifying analogy that was implied but never intended. Growing up in India, as I did, I assumed that the USSR and Russia were one and the same thing. how stupid of me; Ukraine was different, of course it was, and who was I to dispute this? And the collapse and disintegration of what was then known as the Soviet Union confirmed as much, even if it angered a priestly czar like Vladimir Putin.

When Boris Yeltsin agreed to the dismemberment of the USSR, he did the world a favor, even as Putin and other nationalists in Russia got angry. It looks like Putin wanted to remake the map, and that’s exactly what he seems to be trying right now.

To hold so many nationalities together, and to suppress nations that were independent countries in living memory but were swallowed up by the Soviet Empire, such as the Baltic Republics—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—at the end of World War II Because the West was too tired of not following up on Joseph Stalin’s grand ambitions, there was one thing. But it was not proper to accept it as a perfect accomplishment. Travel across the former Soviet republics, and you’ll find that apart from those who sided with Putin and his allies, no one wants to return to the Soviet days. No one, not even the Beatles, wants to “go back” to the USSR. We know how lucky we are.

When I was in Lviv in 2017, I not only met Ukrainian writers who were intent on emphasizing their individuality and independence, I also learned what it means to live in the shadow of a larger country that confers your sovereignty into a single state. Can hit in a jiffy. When asked what two and two add up, who other than an accountant would say ‘it depends’? Who would say with Orwellian certainty that war was peace, freedom was slavery and ignorance was power? But Ukrainians, constantly under attack through cyber warfare, needed a reminder of the truth. They were Ukrainians. The maps changed, not because they wanted them, but because the stronger powers decided so. But, one day they will recover from it.

The Ukrainians I met wanted certainty. He wanted clarity. Those conversations took me back to my time as a graduate student in America in the mid-80s. I remember I asked a classmate if he was Russian, when he said he was Ukrainian, but he angrily said he was Ukrainian even though he was a Canadian citizen, and he told me why Ukraine was not Russian . That was a harsh lesson for me. Never assume nationality, no political boundaries, and never think that big powers can decide what the national boundary should be.

Putin’s speech this week made it clear that he does not like the shrinking of Russia, even if it is the largest country in the world. He clearly wants to go back to the time when Russian nationalism ruled other nationalities without their consent, and wanted the world to exist between 1945-1991, when the ‘West’ joined forces with the ‘USSR’ had behaved. But that USSR no longer exists. The former Soviet republics are now independent and are unwilling to rejoin the Moscow-led ‘bloc’. The former Warsaw Pact nations are now in NATO. This may upset Putin, but the world should not contain him.

This does not mean that Ukrainian culture is ancient. We went one night once, intended to ridicule Ukrainian anti-Semitism, but came close to being anti-Semitic for requiring patrons at the cost of a bottle of beer (Jews like to bargain, stereotype gone) ). It was a sad night, brought alive only by conversations that took place elsewhere: with Paul Auster, Larry Sims, Ganesh Dewey and Madeleine Thien, with whom we discussed literature. But Ukraine deserves to remain as Ukraine.

We were in Lviv, the city that was home to Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpuch, who gave us the language, vocabulary and meaning of confronting evil. My good friend Philip Sands wrote about these two individuals in his wonderful book, East West Street, which took us not only to the geographic location in which they lived, but also to the intellectual environment they were a part of. . For Lemkin it helped us to define what ‘genocide’ meant and Lauterpuch helped the world understand crimes against humanity.

Those are not words that RealPolitic likes. Two men from Lviv helped us understand evil; The world should not let Ukraine down.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. Read Salil’s previous mint columns at www.livemint.com/saliltripathi