The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Tag: nationalism (Page 1 of 2)

Kiev me a break! Ukraine’s divisive language policies get worse

2023-12-10 / / 0 Comments

[all links in Russian]

A few days ago, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law that increases protections for speakers of official EU languages in Ukraine (the good part), but removes the time limit for the current restrictions on the use of Russian (the bad thing). This law is unconstitutional—although the Ukrainian constitution deems Ukrainian the sole state language, there are provisions to protect the use of Russian and other languages—but the Kiev regime has been using the constitution as toilet paper. Yet again, Ukraine is continuing to divide its people rather than uniting them. If they keep doing things like this, they won’t have a state left to defend. Russia will continue to exploit Ukraine’s refusal to incorporate its ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking citizens (who may or may not support the Russian government; I suspect most of them don’t).

Russia doesn’t even need to fabricate propaganda about the mistreatment of Russians or Russian-speakers (not the claims about genocide, which are fabricated, but the ethnic-chauvinist “total Ukrainianisation”). The Ukrainian government is doing it for them. And then disgruntled Ukrainian citizens who are tired of being told that they can’t speak Russian, or that all Russians are synonymous with Putin, get fed up and start working directly with the Russians. Or maybe they’re in an occupied area and just need to eat, so they will “collaborate” with the local Russian-installed authorities. Ukrainian propagandists act accordingly and claim that they’ve been proven right, so they make life even harder for the “superfluous Ukrainians.” But then the Russians seize on the new anti-Russian laws and regulations, claiming that it is they who were right. And the cycle continues inexorably until someone gets the sense to say, “Wait a moment. Why are we doing this? All we’re doing is playing into the Russians’ hands.”

Is it any wonder that a country that constantly scores own-goals is failing on the battlefield? I despise Putin and want Russian troops off Ukrainian territory, but the bunglers in Kiev can’t seem to get their act together and work strategically—or avoid alienating at least a fifth of its population. And I suspect that its reckless actions, both with regard to domestic and military policy, have led to its inability to regain most of the territory it lost last year.

Bullet-point thoughts too short for independent posts

2023-12-06 / / 0 Comments

… really, these could just be shitposts, but they’re too serious for that, so I’m combining them into a convenient bullet-pointed list.

  • Russia and Ukraine are both using cultural and ethnic minorities as scapegoats to keep the public in line. The Russians are notorious for systematically targeting LGBTQ+ people as a symbol of “Western decadence” and “extremism.” They’re also a convenient sacrificial lamb for the ultraconservative, rural Orthodox Christian voters that Putin depends on. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are doing the same with ethnic Russians, as well as Russian-speaking Ukrainians and socialists who are critical of the government. Although some of these opponents are pro-Russian, not all are. To keep the support of the hardline nationalists, especially in the West, the central government will happily sacrifice these “superfluous Ukrainians.” I expect this from Russia, since its human-rights record has been spotty for a long time, but Ukraine’s actions disappoint me more because I expected better from a country that aspires to be more democratic than its former ruler. Being of Russian descent, speaking Russian, or preferring socialism over capitalism is not the same thing as supporting the Putin regime. (See also my comments about the Ukraine War being Russia’s proxy war against the West, and the own-goals by Ukraine and Russia.)
  • People who support terrorists are assholes? Who would’ve thought? I hate to say this, but I have seen more empathy and compassion from progressive Zionists than anti-Zionists or hardline Netanyahu supporters. Every day I continue to be dumbfounded at how cruel, vengeful and inhumane some anti-Zionists can be. I can’t side with anyone who’s being that cruel and vindictive. Not in an anodyne “why don’t we all just get along when the Israeli government is doing monstrous things” way, but the idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians or take hostages for being “settlers.” I know there are several anti-Zionisms, but I am talking about the people who support or do nothing but make apologies for Hamas. I shouldn’t expect humane behaviour or decency from anyone who actively supports a terrorist organisation. I have said this before and I will say it again: this isn’t Nelson Mandela. Mandela wanted to make a South Africa for everyone. His goal was not to kill everyone in sight and kick out non-Black South Africans. Hamas’s goal is to eliminate and destroy, not merely to liberate.
  • Western countries should drop sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Not because anyone should approve of these countries’ practices (I certainly don’t, which is obvious to anyone who’s read this blog), but because the main people who suffer from these sanctions are ordinary Russians, North Koreans, and Iranians, not their leadership or oligarchs. Russia has enough global influence (and oil) to make up for the revenue lost from sanctions. The South African sanctions worked, but that’s probably because South Africa had historical ties to the West. American and British pressure worked. There’s no love lost between Iran/North Korea and the West, and the relationship between Russia and the West has been adversarial since at least 2014, after the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.”
  • Many Marxists can be reductive and dismissive about any relationship of dominance and oppression that isn’t economic, but their universalism is refreshing in a polarised society. I’d like to see a communism that keeps some of Marx’s ideas but makes them more expansive, easier to understand and responsive to today’s modern needs.
  • There’s a difference between being a supporter of human rights and being an identitarian woke-scold. In the first case, you acknowledge systemic oppression and want to rectify it. You do this by implementing policies that allow the historically oppressed group to be a full member of their society. It’s about including everyone, not acting at someone else’s expense. Identitarians, on the other hand, use real grievances to justify an eye-for-an-eye, dog-eat-dog, hyphenated-thing-to-reflect-violent-actions morality. Gandhi never said, “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind,” but it fits all the same. Social equity is not a zero-sum game. (This kind of violent “morality” is an own-goal by social justice activists… and I think that will be my next full post.)
  • FUCK HAMAS, FUCK PUTIN, FUCK ZELENSKY, FUCK NETANYAHU. (I couldn’t resist.)

A queer antinationalist on Ukraine and Russia

2023-12-02 / / 0 Comments

I am queer. I am also a vehement antinationalist. These facts make it impossible for me to offer ideological support to either Moscow or Kiev.

Let’s start with the obvious one: the Putin regime. Russia has heightened its repression of LGBTQ+ people, including a new Supreme Court ruling that effectively outlaws pro-queer activism as “extremist.” LGBTQ+ activists face the risk of fines and imprisonment up to 12 years. Putin has already used these tactics against dissidents like Boris Kagarlitsky, Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Putin’s Russia tries to contrast itself with the “decadent” West with its persecution of LGBTQ+ people, even though our right-wing politicians hold views that are just as bad as Putin’s. Like western conservatives, Putin weaponises religion—in this case, the Eastern Orthodox Church, rather than evangelical Protestant denominations or the Roman Catholic Church—to impose an authoritarian social agenda. And I could go on about Russia’s other reactionary, repressive policies and laws, but there’s already ample coverage in CNN, the New York Times, NBC, The Guardian, etc.

Ukraine, for its part, is aggressively pursuing an ethnonationalist agenda that conflates Russian ethnicity and language with Putin’s vile regime. Even soldiers in the far-right, extreme nationalist Azov Battalion have been attacked for speaking Russian, primarily by the now-fired Lviv Polytechnic professor Iryna Farion, who used to be a member of the Nazi-adjacent Svoboda party (link in Russian). Nationalism has infected even otherwise progressive circles in Ukraine: according to the Kharkov-based anarchist group Assembly (link in Italian and English; English is on the bottom), many feminist and LGBTQ+ activists are closely tied with Ukraine’s nationalist movement. Instead of uniting the entirety of the Ukrainian people against the Russian state, the Ukrainian government and many of its supporters have chosen instead to create even more divisions. As I’ve said before, Kiev’s own-goals push people towards supporting Russia, even though it’s unlikely they’ll get any more freedom there than they do in Ukraine.

The situation is undoubtedly worse for people who find themselves ostracised from both sides—for example, I can’t even imagine what it feels like to be a queer leftist in occupied Eastern Ukraine (especially one who primarily speaks Russian) who runs the risk of being persecuted by Kiev or the Russian occupiers. Or for pro-Ukraine (or merely anti-war) Russians who want to leave the country: many of Russia’s European neighbours have closed the border; Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles distrust Russians, regardless of their support of Putin; and Putin’s dictatorial rule has made it impossible for them to stay home in Russia with the people they love the most. They’re being told that there is something inherently evil inside them for being from Russia, and they’re also being told that there’s something inherently wrong with them for opposing the Russian regime.

I can’t support either position. Both Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ repression and Ukraine’s ethnonationalism are incompatible with a functioning pluralist society. They imply that if you’re not an ethnic Ukrainian who speaks Ukrainian, you’re not a real Ukrainian, or that if you’re gay or bi or trans, you’re not a real Russian. If you’re not a nationalist, you’re not a real feminist. If you’re a leftist, you’re not a good Ukrainian. If you’re a liberal or progressive, you’re not a good Russian.

And once you’re no longer seen as a real member of your society, you’re open to persecution, since civil rights and liberties are reserved only for real people, not superfluous ones.

I don’t know what the right answer is, either to put a stop to Russia’s increasing repression or Ukraine’s nationalist obsessions. I don’t think anybody does, no matter how many thinkpieces are written, no matter how many declarations are made on TV, no matter how much people rant and rave on Telegram and Reddit and Twitter.

What I do know is that people are suffering, dying and praying for a better chance for themselves, their families, their friends and their communities. And neither Russia’s sexist repression nor Ukraine’s reactionary ethnic nationalism will bring their people the peace they so desperately deserve. You don’t want real liberation or justice if your goal is to make a new group of second-class citizens.

Kiev doubles down on linguistic nationalism

2023-10-30 / / 0 Comments

According to a new poll from the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 45% of Ukrainians think that linguistic discrimination is a problem—even more than discrimination based on sexuality, gender, or disability. But you wouldn’t guess that from the attitudes expressed by some Ukrainian officials and hyper-nationalist citizens. Yet again, Kiev has continued to score own-goals by discriminating against large swathes of its population instead of trying to bring its people together.

Keep in mind that KIIS’s poll probably doesn’t include the heavily Russian-speaking Donbass, currently occupied by the Kremlin. The people being polled are in places like Kiev, Lviv, and Vinnytsia, far away from the frontline.

The English-language press hasn’t picked up on this—they’re too busy focusing on the fanatical Israeli and Palestinian nationalists instead. All the links in this post will be in Russian and Ukrainian—Google Translate will help you out if you don’t read them fluently, which I don’t.

By treating the Russian language and its speakers as synonymous with Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is merely playing into the Kremlin’s narrative about oppressed Russian-speakers who need to be saved from Kiev. And yet they do it anyway:

  • Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s head of national security, said that the Russian language should disappear from Ukraine, equating its very use with Kremlin propaganda. Of those who continue to use Russian, he said, “We don’t need anything from them. Let them leave us behind; let them go to their swamps and croak in Russian.” He also said that the government would switch its “FreeДом” channel from Russian to English—even though English is not a native language of most Ukrainians. Russian, however, is. This lack of regard for his fellow Ukrainians is stunning in its callousness. Is it any wonder that there are so many Ukrainian citizens willing to work with the Russians? He’s giving talking points to Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov, Margarita Simonyan, Dmitry Kiselev and Vladimir Soloviev, not encouraging national unity.
  • The Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev will stop teaching Russian, Belarusian and Farsi courses. (I suspect that they’re cutting Farsi because Iran is anti-Israel—they’re mixing in Zionism with their own local ethnonationalism. I would also object if a university cut Hebrew because of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians.)
  • A taxi driver in Kiev was fired because he refused to give into his riders’ rude demands that he stop speaking Russian. He kicked his riders out for their behaviour, and from what I can pick up, they reported him to the government. Ukraine’s “language ombudsman,” Taras Kremin, promised to impose a fine on this driver.
  • Taras Kremin has called for Ukrainian TV stations to stop making bilingual programming.
  • The irony in all this is that, although just over half of bilingual parents in Kiev have started to speak Ukrainian more frequently to their children, 20% of Kiev preschoolers barely understand Ukrainian. Kids often pick up Ukrainian at school, but according to this survey, most of them continue to speak Russian during breaks and with their families, and the memes that teens share online are vastly more likely to be in Russian or English than they are Ukrainian.

The most disturbing aspect of Ukraine’s anti-Russian-language drive is that the authorities simply don’t care about at least one-fifth of their population, if not more. They’re throwaways, or “superfluous Ukrainians,” as the leftist activist Anatoly Ulyanov put it.

I am actually afraid of the consequences if Kiev wins. A Russian victory would be worse—everything Ukraine is doing, Russia does at least fivefold—but if Zelensky pulls out a win against the odds, it will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. Hollowed-out cities, a lowered standard of life even for the poorest country in Europe, unbearable national debts, privatisation and neoliberal policies in a country whose president has sold out its people to the highest bidder, and a class of second-class citizens based on their native language. I cannot enthusiastically support Ukraine. I have not quite reached the point where I can’t support it at all—I think Kiev can eventually be held accountable, unlike Israel and Hamas—but it is extremely difficult to do so.

Why is it so difficult? Because nationalism is heartbreaking, gutting, life-destroying poison. Unlike patriotism, it relies on a desire to eliminate anything that does not match its narratives. It is chauvinistic, narrow-minded, bigoted and short-sighted. And when there is nationalism, there is no real peace.

 

Hamas is an oppressive, right-wing, authoritarian government. Leftists need to stop defending it.

2023-10-16 / / 0 Comments

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: Hamas is a right-wing, repressive, theocratic, authoritarian, dogmatic, inequitable, terrorist organisation. If it gains control over what is now called Israel, it will be no better than the current Israeli government. Instead of Jewish-supremacist nationalism, it will bring Muslim-supremacist nationalism.

Just two months before Hamas started its attacks, people in Gaza were protesting against Hamas’s mismanagement and repression, as well as Israeli oppression. Hamas responded by beating protesters and clamping down on dissent. Hamas claims to speak for the people of Gaza, but it doesn’t give a shit about their welfare. Gazans are starving, unemployed and struggling to survive, while Hamas leaders are living high off the hog. For example, Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, is a millionaire. The Gazan government has been known to harass and muffle journalists.

What happened in August was a legitimate pro-democracy protest. What Hamas is doing, on the other hand, is terrorism.

Hamas may have a lot of popular support despite its clear failings—but then again, so do Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, despite the wartime political repression occurring in both Russia and Ukraine. Ironically, the defenders of Hamas (as well as leftists who refrain from condemning it) are often those who criticise Kiev for its repression of opposition politicians and journalists, its association with American and NATO imperialism, the promotion of Nazi sympathisers among some ultranationalist politicians and activists, and its disregard for ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Hamas’s repression is worse than Ukraine’s, but because the West is not supporting Hamas, contrarian leftists continue to support it without criticism. Ukraine, at the very least, aspires to be democratic; Hamas does not. This is why, despite my severe misgivings, I have not completely turned against the idea of offering Kiev military aid. Hamas, on the other hand, deserves no support from the left. Nor does the Israeli government.

Instead, leftists must reject both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, as well as the leaders who promote it. Although Palestinians are clearly the victims of Israeli oppression, it is dangerous to counter eliminiationist nationalism with more of the same thing, this time with a crescent instead of a Star of David. Neither the Israeli nor Palestinian leadership is worthy of our support.

If you’re looking for a Palestinian Nelson Mandela, he won’t be in Hamas

2023-10-13 / / 0 Comments

This isn’t a contrarian opinion in the Western mainstream media, but it is contrarian for a leftist: I do not support the Hamas uprising. This is not because I agree with the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, especially in Gaza—in fact, I find Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians repugnant.

But if Israel is analogous to South Africa, Hamas and its leaders are no Nelson Mandela. Hamas uses civilians, including children and the elderly, to strike fear into the hearts of all Israelis—and Jews generally. Hamas thrives on fear, intimidation, nationalism, chauvinism, hatred, religious dogmatism, obscurantism and authoritarianism. They have included elderly Holocaust survivors among their hostages. Hamas ostensibly fights for freedom, but it restricts the civil rights and liberties of its own people, even absent of Israeli or Egyptian control.

Hamas is a terrorist organisation.

I am not opposed to the use of violence to defend or agitate for freedom. Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, for example, used both violent and non-violent tactics to topple South Africa’s apartheid regime. The ANC’s goal was to establish legal, social and political equality for Black South Africans. It was not to establish an antisemitic, chauvinistic, religious and ethnic nationalist state. The ANC’s primary targets were government buildings and officials. They did not attack hundreds of revellers at music festivals during religious holidays. Hamas killed more people in one day than the ANC did in ten years. It bears more resemblance to the Nazi-sympathising Ukrainian “freedom fighters” who slaughtered Jews and Poles in the interwar period and World War II—think of the wizened SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka, so recently applauded by Canada’s Parliament and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Hamas is a terrorist organisation.

Palestine deserves better. But that “better” does not, or should not, include Hamas. I do not and will never support Hamas. Even anti-Zionist leftists should resist supporting a right-wing, ethnic nationalist, fundamentalist religious movement that will bring nothing but more oppression, fear and war. Even the tankies’ beloved Russia hasn’t come out defending Hamas. Movements for liberation should inspire hope. They should lead people to dream of better lives than they or their parents had. They should respect the freedoms of those seeking liberation. Hamas has done none of those things. The government in Gaza is an authoritarian regime that resembles the other Islamist states in the Middle East, and its goal is to terrorise Israelis into leaving and creating yet another Iran or Saudi Arabia in its place. Israel has a lot to answer for, but Hamas is not the solution.

In fact, Hamas is a terrorist organisation.

 

Nationalism is poisonous and must be resisted

2023-10-12 / / 0 Comments

Nationalism, regardless of its variety, is one of humanity’s worst afflictions.

If it weren’t for virulent ethnic and religious nationalism in the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians—or Muslims and Jews in general—wouldn’t keep killing each other over and over again. These parties’ competing claims are rooted in religious supremacism that disallows peaceful coexistence in a pluralist society.

If it weren’t for virulent ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe, Russians and Ukrainians wouldn’t keep throwing their soldiers into a meat grinder for nearly a decade.

And if it weren’t for virulent ethnic nationalism in Central Europe, millions of Jews and Roma would have avoided the Shoah and Poraimos.

Nationalism often arises out of systemic oppression. Those who cling to these beliefs often want to defend their cultures and people against invaders or imperial overlords, whether past or present. We see this with ultra-Orthodox Zionists, Palestinian nationalists, Russian nationalists, and Ukrainian nationalists, all of whom have legitimate grievances against antisemites, Israeli nationalists, Nazi Germany, the USSR under Stalin, Poland, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But these groups go beyond simply defending themselves. They promote their own chauvinistic ideas that invert what the Germans, Russians, Poles, or Israelis said about them. They sully their reputation abroad by attacking civilians, defending ethnic cleansing, oppressing their own citizens, and silencing dissent.

You cannot fight oppressive chauvinism with more of the same. Fighting for liberation need not mean that you copy your oppressor’s tactics—or plan to do so once you have regained your power. All you have done is drunk the poison and internalised it.

Spit out the poison. Resist all nationalisms.

 

German-owned Politico publishes piece defending SS veteran

2023-10-05 / / 0 Comments

The European edition of Politico, which is wholly owned by Germany’s Axel Springer conglomerate, published an op-ed by Keir Giles on the Yaroslav Hunka affair. Giles, a British Russia expert, claims that SS-Galizien was cleared of all crimes in a Canadian investigation (but not the Nuremberg trials) and that Hunka was forced to make a difficult decision because of the threat the Soviets presented to the Ukrainians. He dismisses the complaints of Jewish groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, even though it is Jews who were the Nazis’ primary victims. Every acknowledgement of Ukrainian nationalists’ complicity with the Nazi regime is Russian propaganda and no more.

If I didn’t know it was from Politico and not Euromaidan Press or Ukrainska Pravda, I’d have thought Giles’s essay was Ukrainian propaganda.

The Nuremberg Trials declared all SS divisions criminal organisations with one exception: the Equestrian SS [second link is in Russian]. This means that SS-Galizien was not cleared at Nuremberg. In an article (rehosted by the author on academia.edu—the actual site is paywalled and unavailable on Sci-Hub) for the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, the historian Per Anders Rudling makes clear that the the volunteer members of SS-Galizien were not mere dupes or heroic Ukrainian freedom fighters. Members of the division had to swear oaths to Hitler, and they were educated in Nazi ideology. SS-Galizien committed multiple war crimes against Poles and civilians. Ultranationalists affiliated with the Ukrainian government—especially Volodymyr Viatrovych, the former head of Ukraine’s Institute for National Remembrance—have attempted for years to play down the atrocities that fascist and Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian nationalists have committed.

I don’t get why some of Ukraine’s supporters have to bend over backwards to defend its worst elements. By doing so, it simply hands the Russians more material for their propaganda.

Bad pro-Ukraine arguments: “Svoboda barely got any votes” and “Jewish President”

2023-10-03 / / 0 Comments

A common refrain among Ukraine’s uncritical supporters is that Kiev is free of far-right movements because extreme nationalist parties (e.g. Svoboda) barely got any votes in the last election. But this is a poor argument, since movements outside a country’s legislature can still exert influence on politicians’ decisions. For example, the British Conservative Party has been pushed further to the right because of more extreme parties and movements. The UK Independence Party has held only two seats in Parliament since its creation, and only one of those MPs won his seat in a general election. Despite UKIP’s lack of parliamentary representation, however, it was successful in achieving their main goal: withdrawing the United Kingdom from the European Union. UKIP accomplished this by pushing the Tories to the right on immigration. Not wanting to be outdone by Nigel Farage & Co., the Tories introduced more and more xenophobic policies designed to appeal to the base. Theresa May introduced the hostile-environment policy, designed to discourage migrants from settling. Tabloids like the Daily Mail and Daily Express launched incessant “crusades”—as the Express terms them—to drive out economic migrants from poorer EU countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. (The United States, on the other hand, seems to incorporate its radicalising elements into the party structure—consider the Tea Party movement and its eldritch offspring, the Trump/MAGA movement.)

The other irritating argument I come across is “Ukraine has a Jewish president, so there’s no more antisemitism now.” Sadly, I see this coming from the same people who would see the absurdity in the statement “Obama was Black, so there’s no more racism in America.” Zelensky’s election does show real progress in Ukrainian society, just as Obama’s election showed progress in American society. But that doesn’t mean that the work is over. It’s far from over when Ukraine has streets and monuments in honour of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, or when the American South is full of statues to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. It’s not over when the Ukrainian press bends over backwards to defend a member of the Waffen-SS who was given a standing ovation by the Canadian parliament, and it’s not over when people continue to sing the praises of the Confederate Army, even though they fought for the right to “own” other people and extract their labour.

Ukraine doesn’t need far-rightists in parliament for them to influence its social policy, and Zelensky’s Jewish background does not insulate the country from criticisms of its ultranationalist tendencies. Claiming otherwise is merely spouting Kiev’s state propaganda.

You should support Ukraine’s fight against Russia, even if your support is strictly harm reduction, as mine is. But for the love of God, please stop airbrushing over Ukraine’s far-right movements. Argue on humanitarian grounds. Argue on anti-Putin grounds. Argue on national-security grounds. But don’t pretend that extreme nationalism and far-right movements don’t exist. This does no one any good—especially not Ukrainians.

 

 

Russia’s Own-Goals: How Moscow Fuels Ukrainian Ultranationalism and Far-Right Movements

2023-10-02 / / 0 Comments

Last week, I talked about how Ukraine constantly scores own-goals by doubling down on extreme nationalism, Nazi apologias, and other toxic tendencies that seem to give credence to Russian propaganda about Ukraine’s being a “Nazi state.” I would be remiss, however, to ignore Russia’s role in the rise of reactionary Ukrainian chauvinism. After all, it is Russia that initiated the Ukrainian crisis, starting with its annexation of Crimea and ending with the full-scale “special military operation” launched last year.

By attacking Ukraine, Russia is enabling Kiev’s most chauvinistic, anti-Russian politicians and activists to pass new laws restricting the use of the Russian language, openly display Nazi and fascist imagery, defend the reputation of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, marginalise predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the South and East, launch dumb campaigns to “cancel” the use in English of Russian names for Russophone cities like Kiev and Kharkov (a practice I have not adopted here), lobby international theatres and concert halls to ban Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, pulp thousands of Russian and Russian-language books from Ukrainian libraries, encourage the harassment of people who use “non-state languages” (that is, Russian), go on witch-hunts for fifth columnists who are merely critics of the current regime, ban opposition sites like Strana from being accessed within Ukraine, rehabilitate the reputation of the Galician SS, hire military spokeswomen who call Russians “Mongols” who aren’t “real Europeans” with “real European values,” name streets after Bandera and other Nazi collaborators, and make threatening promises to cleanse Crimea of all Russian cultural or linguistic influence should it fall back under Kiev’s control. Because of Russia’s attacks, many Ukrainians are adopting nationalistic views—the kinds the Russians loathe for their unsavoury association with Nazism and fascism—to distinguish themselves from their larger neighbour. Ukraine has formed its entire post-Maidan identity around Not Being Russia—and Russia has contributed to it with its actions. It is hard to want to have a close relationship with Russia when Putin is behaving the way he is. He is merely inflaming the thing he has supposedly set out to fight. If he wants to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, he is doing a miserable job at it.

None of this is to excuse Ukrainian politicians for their vicious chauvinism, especially when it is directed at Ukrainian citizens who refuse to adopt the ultranationalism imposed by the post-Maidan governments. I will never defend the Kiev regime beyond supporting its military victory over Russia. But Russia’s actions have contributed to the noxious extremism emanating from Kiev. The biggest losers in all this are the Ukrainians, especially those in the south and east. The Russians bomb their cities and abduct their children, but the Ukrainian authorities have no desire to integrate them into its increasingly ethnonationalist, chauvinistic state.

If Russia wants to put a stop to Nazism in Ukraine, if it wants to regain its influence on the world stage, if it wants to prove its strength, it must withdraw itself from this needless war of attrition. It is time for Russia to remove its troops and come to the negotiation table. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has fizzled, but that does not mean that the Russian “special military operation” is successful. Not by a long stretch. This—and only this—is how Putin can “denazify” Ukraine.

 

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