Scottish Borders
’ve had many messages from friends and neighbours and some forumites who know my family background about the situation in Ukraine and my relatives there.
I’ve drafted a response (which is long) to those requests for information and I’ve cross posted to those social network groups that I interact with and/or manage. Apologies if you see it more than once.
For those that are not aware I was born of a Ukrainian father and Estonian mother here in the UK. They came to the UK after the Second World War having been in displaced persons camps on this side of the Iron Curtain when it came down. Unable to go home they moved to the UK at the request of the then UK government as part of the need for labour.
I was brought up in a house where the political situation in the then USSR was a frequent topic and the demise of the Warsaw Pact / USSR was not surprisingly greeted by them with joy.
Unfortunately by the time this happened they were in relatively poor health and they died in exile, never seeing their homelands again.
I took my father’s ashes back to the now independent state of Ukraine in 1994 and through a set of consequences that were far stranger than fiction became reunited with his surviving family members in a remote village near Poltava.
I’ve subsequently followed closely the evolution of a democratic nation state that has falteringly moved to become a western facing democracy that has divorced itself from its former overlord.
To the current position, I have family, half of which lives in Kiev. The Kiev based folks are down near the Moldavian border in the south east or back in their old house near Poltava where my cousin Petro Petrovitch is an old man, normally living on his own. I have another relative near Kremenchuk but have been unable to contact her.
They are frightened and angry as all Ukrainians are of course but with their AK47s and Molotov cocktails they are not giving up without a fight.
Despite the impossible situation they fight on, fortunately due to the lack of size of the Russian forces relative to the size of the country, 5 times larger than England and its 44m population, and on the basis they thought it was going to be easy, the Russian strategy to date has been to focus on trying to decapitate the Ukrainian government without going on a flagrant scorched earth policy (unusual for them, but politics still does have an effect).
As a result most of the fighting, so far, has passed my family by.
So there are dreadful casualties and stories of heroism and as I write it’s not clear what the end political solution will be.
I say political because there is no way that Putin will ever subjugate the Ukrainian people. It’s now too late, and his disconnected from reality views of former Russian empires and his desire to create a new one in his demented vision will not work, ever.
So the situation is very bleak, but it will be a transient period..when I say transient it may be 20 years!
However at some point, the Ukrainians will re-establish themselves as a democratic, western orientated entity, unfortunately there will be much pain and sorrow before that.
Whether there will be a guerrilla war, or a sufficiently benign puppet government that people accept on a short term basis is created who knows.
People ask me how I feel, and it’s been very difficult.
I find myself quietly weeping with sorrow..that this nation that has spent most of the last 100 years under the ruthless suppression of a string of dictators and has had only the briefest of time to enjoy the light of democracy and liberalism should yet again be subjected to a dictator with his distorted sense of history and his place in it.
I do know that this situation will not endure forever and one day Ukraine shall be a free and independent nation.
And to the western nations, what is it that they must now recognise and do?
There can be now not doubt in anyone’s’ minds, that Putin is a deranged demigod with parallel behaviours to Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and many others. This situation will not re-stabilise till Putin is gone, by his death or by being deposed.
However that could take 10 or 20 years.
The only way that the west will initially halt his Russian Empire vision is by collective response using the most powerful constructs the west can muster, i.e. NATO and the EU and their onward connections and relationships.
It will take a combination of economic sanctions and constructs that have not been seen before together with an increase in military spending that hasn’t ben seem since the height of the cold war.
These actions will have profound effects on the people’s living standards and normal first world priorities.
If sustained they will in the end cripple Putin and his regime, just as the west brought the USSR to its knees by out spending and out deploying its military capabilities.
Whether the western world has the ability to maintain very long tem strategies and avoid collapsing into short term expediencies, who knows?
I’ve drafted a response (which is long) to those requests for information and I’ve cross posted to those social network groups that I interact with and/or manage. Apologies if you see it more than once.
For those that are not aware I was born of a Ukrainian father and Estonian mother here in the UK. They came to the UK after the Second World War having been in displaced persons camps on this side of the Iron Curtain when it came down. Unable to go home they moved to the UK at the request of the then UK government as part of the need for labour.
I was brought up in a house where the political situation in the then USSR was a frequent topic and the demise of the Warsaw Pact / USSR was not surprisingly greeted by them with joy.
Unfortunately by the time this happened they were in relatively poor health and they died in exile, never seeing their homelands again.
I took my father’s ashes back to the now independent state of Ukraine in 1994 and through a set of consequences that were far stranger than fiction became reunited with his surviving family members in a remote village near Poltava.
I’ve subsequently followed closely the evolution of a democratic nation state that has falteringly moved to become a western facing democracy that has divorced itself from its former overlord.
To the current position, I have family, half of which lives in Kiev. The Kiev based folks are down near the Moldavian border in the south east or back in their old house near Poltava where my cousin Petro Petrovitch is an old man, normally living on his own. I have another relative near Kremenchuk but have been unable to contact her.
They are frightened and angry as all Ukrainians are of course but with their AK47s and Molotov cocktails they are not giving up without a fight.
Despite the impossible situation they fight on, fortunately due to the lack of size of the Russian forces relative to the size of the country, 5 times larger than England and its 44m population, and on the basis they thought it was going to be easy, the Russian strategy to date has been to focus on trying to decapitate the Ukrainian government without going on a flagrant scorched earth policy (unusual for them, but politics still does have an effect).
As a result most of the fighting, so far, has passed my family by.
So there are dreadful casualties and stories of heroism and as I write it’s not clear what the end political solution will be.
I say political because there is no way that Putin will ever subjugate the Ukrainian people. It’s now too late, and his disconnected from reality views of former Russian empires and his desire to create a new one in his demented vision will not work, ever.
So the situation is very bleak, but it will be a transient period..when I say transient it may be 20 years!
However at some point, the Ukrainians will re-establish themselves as a democratic, western orientated entity, unfortunately there will be much pain and sorrow before that.
Whether there will be a guerrilla war, or a sufficiently benign puppet government that people accept on a short term basis is created who knows.
People ask me how I feel, and it’s been very difficult.
I find myself quietly weeping with sorrow..that this nation that has spent most of the last 100 years under the ruthless suppression of a string of dictators and has had only the briefest of time to enjoy the light of democracy and liberalism should yet again be subjected to a dictator with his distorted sense of history and his place in it.
I do know that this situation will not endure forever and one day Ukraine shall be a free and independent nation.
And to the western nations, what is it that they must now recognise and do?
There can be now not doubt in anyone’s’ minds, that Putin is a deranged demigod with parallel behaviours to Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and many others. This situation will not re-stabilise till Putin is gone, by his death or by being deposed.
However that could take 10 or 20 years.
The only way that the west will initially halt his Russian Empire vision is by collective response using the most powerful constructs the west can muster, i.e. NATO and the EU and their onward connections and relationships.
It will take a combination of economic sanctions and constructs that have not been seen before together with an increase in military spending that hasn’t ben seem since the height of the cold war.
These actions will have profound effects on the people’s living standards and normal first world priorities.
If sustained they will in the end cripple Putin and his regime, just as the west brought the USSR to its knees by out spending and out deploying its military capabilities.
Whether the western world has the ability to maintain very long tem strategies and avoid collapsing into short term expediencies, who knows?
Devon
