This is a pledge to all the people reading this blog: please help the Ukrainians.
In whatever way you can. If you can fight, go fighting. If you can send money, do send money. If I hear of any practical way to send help, I will share it here.
But please, please. Do not blame this war on the Russians who live among you. This is not their war. This is Putin’s war.
Should they speak up, you say? They do. Even the ones who live at home, where freedom of speech is far from granted and exacts a heavy price. Ask the 10,000+ Russians arrested, threatened, and often abused since the start of the war. Or the incredibly brave journalist that appeared on national television to tell her country the truth about this ‘special operation’.
Let me be absolutely clear. I have no personal ties with EITHER Ukraine OR Russia.
I’ve never been there, and I don’t speak the languages. I’m a Western European born and bred, who relocated to the North of Europe after (happy) decades spent in East Asia. As a student of history, I’m even guilty of knowing too little too late. My knowledge of South Korea or Thailand is far more accurate than anything East of the Danube River.
But if you’re European, you MUST care (you should care anyway, no matter where you are from. But if you were born on this continent, my friend, you have no choice).
Because this is not about Ukraine or Russia.
This is about Europe, and the values Europe has finally chosen to live by after centuries —no, thousand of years—of conflicts, blood, and deaths.
Make no mistakes. Any claim of the like of Putin’s —Ukraine is the heart of Russia, because for centuries was part of it— are void, dangerous, and delusional. For a good reason. Get back long enough in history, and everybody has belonged to anyone.
Would you like to see the Roman legions back to entire Europe until present Iraq? Get ready: that was the case, when Emperor Trajan led the Roman world to its largest territorial extension. (I may even favour it: Latin was my second language as a teen.)
I could make many other examples, but you get my drift.
If we let the past inform the future, we deny the idea of progress at its core. What comes next is not necessarily better than what was before, but we can make conscious efforts to make it this way. Renouncing war in Europe after 1945 was one of those efforts, even though we had to destroy a continent and set ablaze the entire world for it.
We can do better than fighting over the past’s empty shadows, guided by a deluded sense of grandeur. As a species, we face decades of unprecedented challenges if we want to keep this planet alive. We shouldn’t add yet more toxic elements to make these challenges even worse to conquer —which is exactly what’s happening now.
No country should be told by others the way they should live their own lives. No-one.
This is why we need to stand by Ukraine and support the Russians who dare challenge dictatorship and (re)Stalinisation at home.
Not for them. For us.
For what their desperate fights means to the rest of Europe and, with Europe, to a world where people, with all their limits and contradictions, have refused war as a way to resolve their disputes.
Democracy might well have its (substantial) limits, we all agree about that.
But it’s still the best device history has concocted to have humans live side by side in the long run. At the very least, it’s a place where you can tell your own leaders to f*** the hell off when you’re unhappy with them.
All considered, it looks to me a bloody damn luxury.
Thank you.