The Chasm between America and Donbas

Donbas rebels in 2015

The war in Ukraine has a religious dimension.

The picture above is a 2019 procession in Kyiv. It is the annual celebration of Prince Vladimir's Baptism of the Rus people in the 10th Century. Both Russia and Ukraine commemorate that event as their country's Christian birthday. The pilgrims above are Ukrainian Orthodox Church members of the Moscow Patriarchate, the UOC-MP. Although the Moscow Patriarchate is the largest Eastern Orthodox church inside Ukraine, President Zelensky is antagonistic towards it and its processions. This is ironic since the Moscow Patriarchate openly backed Zelensky during his 2019 presidential campaign. The pro-Russian rebels of  Donbas are  UOC-MP and AT THE TIME Zelensky was saying he wanted peace-in-Donbas .  Zelensky's 2019 opponent,  the incumbent Poroshenko, had become known for being a hardliner and wanting to reconquer  Donbas. In an unguarded moment, Poroshenko was caught on camera saying that he would win the war by making Donbas children "grow up in basements instead of schools".  Zelensky trounced him with 73% of the vote.

 A second piece of irony:  In the previous election, in 2014, it was Poroshenko who had been the PEACE candidate .   In the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan uprising which ousted a pro-Russian President and with the Donbas war already raging, it  was Poroshenko who ran  as the talk-to-Russia candidate. He ran against a handful of aggressive candidates and beat them all in a landslide. He received 55% of the vote. His closest opponent Tymoshenko once advocated surrounding Donbas in barbed wire and pouring concrete over it. She received 13%. The people of Ukraine elected the candidate who promised a speedy, peaceful resolution to the war.  To Americans, who are assured that Ukrainians want to fight Russia until everyone is dead, it is a strange and irrefutable fact that no Ukrainian presidential candidate, neither in peacetime, nor in war, has ever been elected by being bellicose and anti-Russian.

Shortly after Poroshenko's election he was visited by US VP Joe Biden.  Poroshenko's conciliatory position reversed and  it was thereafter that he began talking about  making Donbas children grow up in basements.

Just prior to Poroshenko's 2019 election drubbing, he successfully lobbied the Orthodox  Patriarch in Constantinople to create a new, independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, OCU, which would separate from the Moscow Patriarchate. Poroshenko's new OCU also held a (smaller) Rus Baptism procession  a day earlier than the Moscow Patriarchate's.  The new church's procession is pictured below:

The Jesus and Mary banners are gone. In their place - a sea of yellow and blue flags.

 

30 days before that new Church's procession, Kyiv had also hosted another grand procession. Gay Pride. This was not the first. Kyiv had begun holding Gay pride events ever since the 2014 US-backed Maidan revolution. 

The United States' fingerprints are on all three of Poroshenko's actions with regards to, Gay Pride, the new Church, and the war. The US State Department has made LGBT promotion a fundamental pillar of US foreign policy, making it clear that US foreign aid clients must adopt US style LGBT programs. The US State Department also strongly backed the creation of Poroshenko's new Church.  Months before its creation, the OCU's prospective leadership made a pilgrimage to DC to speak with then-Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. Finally, with regards to the last point, US influence has helped transform the past two successful peace candidates, Poroshenko of 2014 and Zelensky of 2019 into warmongering presidents.

The US State Department is not composed of Orthodox Christians. Therefore it is understandable that the former's members might be blind to seeing any real differences between the processions depicted above.  However, the contrasts are not lost on Ukrainians and Russians. The US 'soft power' moves, in particular meddling in church matters and promoting the LGBT agenda, are a large part of why the eastern Ukrainian rebels see the current conflict as a religious fight- even a crusade. 

The language eastern Ukrainian separatists have adopted to describe their fight with European values is apocalyptic.  In the years before the 2022 invasion, this sentiment became pervasive enough to be reflected even in  pop songs that their young people listened to. American Christians might be shocked to discover that many eastern Ukrainians think: "European values"= Antichrist. A 2020 top hit  goes like this....

"the Beast emerged out of the pitch black and made his offer to God,

Everyone would bend before him, even our brothers in Christ,

Everything would bend, but not my country!

There was a huge harvest that year and Death became drunk on blood,

The smoke-filled skies seemed even to sag down

Everything would  bend, but not my country!

(refrain)

The skies are half flames, half smoke

Donbas stands behind us, and God  beside us!"

The open expression of religious faith in popular culture in Eastern Ukraine is a phenomenon that pro-western  experts lament.  America has chosen enemies in Ukraine that warn of the Antichrist as they deck their tanks and armored vehicles with banners of Jesus Christ. The eastern Ukrainians mix modern culture with a Faith resembling something right out of the Middle Ages and it exposes a jagged cultural rift between Americans and the latest people that the US is conquering for democracy. The feelings of antipathy are mutual. Our Western leaders have decided that this culture needs to disappear.   Our news outlets teach us to clap and cheer whenever we hear that American HIMARS and Artillery have obliterated more of these people, whom we are assured are both stupid and evil.

(The speaker in this September 2022 clip comes out of Donetsk.  He rejoices to see that tanks bringing up the rear all have Christ's 'Flag of Salvation'.)

Most Americans are not familiar with  Donbas iconography. Armored vehicles bearing Jesus banners remind us more of the Crusades than of our own times. We have exclusively been fed with a diet of images of brave Ukrainian boys and girls defending their homeland.  The latter are true enough....but so are the former. How can that be!? How can there possibly be two sides to this conflict, honorable people on both sides?  To answer this question, it may help to look at  Ukraine's 2010 presidential election results below. It reveals a situation that must be seen to be understood. The blue areas voted solidly for the pro-Russian winner, Yanukovich and the red and pink for his pro-EU opponent Yulia (prior to her barbed-wire remark) Tymoschenko. ... How can there be two sides to  this story? ......There are two sides to the country.

As can be seen above, Ukraine is country neatly divided along both geographical AND linguistic boundaries. The Ukrainians in the north and west speak a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian and have been historically ruled by  Lithuania,  Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Poland. Some western regions belonged to Poland as recently as 1939. They historically distrust Russia and now want to be part of Europe, adopting European values. In contrast, few people in southern and eastern Ukraine speak Ukrainian. The population is a mixture of Ukrainians, Russians and other ethnicities who speak perfect Russian because for  centuries they have been part of the Russian world.

 When the 1920's Bolsheviks redrew USSR boundaries to make the 'blue' areas  part of Ukraine, the switch was a bureaucratic footnote. It changed no facts on the ground. Ditto for three decades later when Khrushchev gifted the Crimean peninsula to his native Ukraine in 1954. Again, no one cared. Moscow was still in charge. To put it in American terms: From the time America was under George II until the time of George Bush II, Ukraine's east and south were part of the Russian world.

When Ukraine voted for independence in 1992, the east and the south went along and did not object that they were  officially no longer part of Russia. This was because Ukraine and Russia were  close allies for their first decade and a half of independence. Then, towards the the mid 2000s, things began to sour when  Ukrainian nationalists in the country's west started calling for the country's  'Ukrainization'. They erected gigantic statues of Stepan Bandera. It is important at this point to briefly review what Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian nationalist movement was about: Ethnic cleansing. 

During the heyday of racially driven political movements and pogroms, Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN, were superstars. In 1941 the OUN murdered 3,000 Jews in Lviv. Later, in 1943, the OUN systematically surrounded dozens of Polish hamlets in the Volyn district and slaughtered every inhabitant, women and children included. They killed >50,000 Poles using this system. Now, 21st Century Ukrainian nationalists were demanding to have statues of Bandera erected and streets named for him. They would eventually go on to put their 'hero' Bandera in school books for ALL the country's children to emulate....

 ....For Ukrainians in the east and south, the West's demand that the whole country uniformly:  (i) start speaking a language they didn't speak (Ukrainian)  AND (ii) venerate war criminals, was too much. In a nutshell, it was a call for them to stop being... them.

During Ukraine's first decade and a half, the central government was tentative about Ukrainization. The politicians had the pro-Russian east and south to worry about. That balance tipped in 2004 with the US backed Orange Revolution. The pro-Russian candidate Victor Yanukovich, (who would later again be ousted in 2014), had come out 3 points ahead. His opponent, backed by US NGOs,  then mounted an election protest campaign with massive demonstrations in Kyiv demanding a do-over election. A new election law was rushed thru and a do-over election was held which Yanukovich lost. 

Yanukovich's  opponent Victor Yushchenko slowly morphed from a moderate into a Ukrainian nationalist and years later go on to have Stepan Bandera declared an official 'hero of Ukraine'. Under Yushchenko the once dreamed-of Ukrainization was finally starting to get implemented.

These efforts were not widely popular. Yushchenko's 2010 reelection bid was a disaster. Even with US help, he could only muster 5% of the vote. The pro-Russian Yanukovich was back in town and won handily.

Then, in 2014, another US-backed 2nd-coup-in-a-row against Yanukovich happened and this only deepened the above pink-blue division. The blue, pro-Russian, areas saw the coup as America and Europe helping Ukraine's west to once more remove a president that the people of the east and south had elected. They had turned the other cheek in 2004. Now they were out of cheeks.

Within weeks Yanukovich's ouster was followed by a strong counter- reaction.  There were anti-Maidan demonstrations in all twelve of the largest cities in southern and eastern Ukraine. Kyiv sent in paramilitary groups who killed dozens of the pro-Russian demonstrators, most infamously in Odessa, where 40 were burned to death. 

(wikipedia)

Western news outlets blamed the pro-Russian victims for being unruly. But it helps to put unruliness in context. By this time their opponents, the pro-western demonstrators had already been throwing Molotov cocktails for months.  Before Kyiv fell, pro-western demonstrators had occupied government offices in ten regional capitals and forced the respective governors to resign. In their turn, the pro-Russian  Ukrainians reacted largely the same way as their opponents had. The main visible difference being that pro-western demonstrators had been mostly young people. 

The pro-Russian demonstrators were  middle aged industrial workers and old people.  

(Donbas residents blocking Ukrainian APC's in 2014)

(More pro-Russians demonstrators in 2014)

Just as their opponents had done, the pro-Russian Ukrainians also seized government buildings. However this time the  response by a new, US approved, Ukrainian government was much stronger. Kyiv attacked the demonstrators with tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters gunships and swastika'd paramilitary groups. The war in Donbas had begun.

It might be easier for Americans to understand the eastern Ukrainian, pro-Russian reactions if the shoe were to be put on an American foot.  If we were to imagine how people in a solid blue states like California might feel if  the January 6 protestors, had actually succeeded in toppling President Biden - using a mix of foreign-backing, Molotov cocktails and snipers. Then, to top it off,  the same scenario were to repeat itself in the very next election cycle. At that point it might not be so hard to imagine  many Californians thinking it was time to take to the streets and demand to be heard, maybe even call for a secession referendum. This is what happened in Donbas. 

(Scenes from this video were bought and paid for by US taxpayers)

Since its beginning in  April 2014, Kyiv's 'Anti-Terrorist-Operation' against the Donbas has killed thousands of pro-Russian civilians.  It formed Putin's excuse for his February 2022 invasion. Now pro-Russian civilians are being killed directly by freshly supplied US HIMARS and 155 mm howitzers. Our decision to stoke this conflict  has brought us into direct confrontation with Russia and threatens us all with nuclear annihilation.