Who Do We Listen to When It Comes to Ukraine?
Who Do We Listen to When It Comes to Ukraine?
Reflections on Ukraine & War in Tim Judah's "In Wartime"
In one of the hundred-plus Ukrainian towns called ‘Zhovtneve’ — meaning ‘October’ — the writer Tim Judah planted himself briefly during his time covering the 2014 war in Ukraine. As conflict brewed in the eastern border regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, Judah spoke to locals in a small Bessarabian town of 3,000 detached from any land connection to the rest of Ukraine. When he asked the town’s then-mayor, Elena Zhecheva, about Russia and Ukraine, she said
“My opinion is that people just can’t understand what is going on… what (people) really want is work and to earn money for essential things and to at least live their simple lives.”
A day or so later, at the town’s school on the last day before Christmas break, a pair of women pulled Judah aside into a room laid out with sandwiches and drinks. It turns out that all across the country, people desperately wanted to talk. One of the women, Natalya Kircheva, pleaded with him that she was
“a patriot of this land, not of Ukraine, but of my bit of land, of Bessarabia. If my son died in this war and afterward Ukraine was powerful, why would I need it…I understand that I need to think globally, but now I am thinking like a mother.”
It was then that her friend, Galina Petrova, joined in, saying
“A mother who has lost her child has lost the most precious thing…life is not worth living then.”
The Ukraine that we are shown on the news is a blank slate, a war-torn wasteland, a frontier on the outer regions of Europe’s borders and Europe’s minds. It’s portrayed merely as a surface where the tensions and conflicts of the great powers – Russia, The United States – are projected. Our coverage in the West prioritizes Ukraine as the backdrop of Russian aggression led by Vladimir Putin, while Russian outlets speak of ‘American imperialism’, NATO overreach, and ‘fascist juntas’ in the midst of Ukrainian nationalist movements. While popular political narratives are being set by media outlets in D.C and Moscow, what’s critically lost is the voice of the people on the frontlines of the actual war. Readers and viewers, both in the U.S and the rest of the world, are being fed abstracted images of maps, satellite imagery, and troop movements as war looms. But the voices and stories of those living in Ukraine and the border regions – farmers, young students, business-owners, ideologues – are secondary, as if they were pawns on a chessboard.
A crucial perspective is missing. And it’s that focus that I desperately wanted (and found) in Tim Judah’s “In Wartime”, published in 2016 — two years after the insurgencies in Eastern Ukraine began. Instead of a dry academic piece with endless maps, numbers, and charts, Judah’s book is full of interviews with the people impacted by the conflict the most. And in their stories, we might find not only a seed of understanding, but hope for the future as well.
Much of the current focus on Ukraine is driven by fear of a new war in Europe. But war has been happening in Ukraine for nearly a decade. Since the Euromaidan revolution of 2013 pitted a pro-Russia administration in Ukraine against pro-EU protestors, a deadly and expanding insurgency has gripped the eastern Ukrainian regions of the Donbas and Luhansk. Since 2014 the war in Ukraine has claimed thousands of lives, destroyed countless villages, and ruined the livelihoods of millions. In 2015, the UNHCR estimated that 1.25 million people were displaced by the conflict in the Donbas region, and since 1993 the overall population of Ukraine has fallen by approximately 8 million due to war and economic recession.
While much of the physical conflict has marred Donetsk and Luhansk, which Putin recognized as independent from Ukraine just recently, Judah’s book shows us that the conflict has also been waged in the minds of Ukrainians and Russians alike. In Ukraine’s short 30 years of being a sovereign country, its sense of history has been extremely fragmented. While many in the western bastions of Kyiv and Lviv align more closely to Europe, much of the East still turns towards Russia. This isn’t only a question of physical proximity; it’s also tied to language, ancestral bonds, and the different histories told and re-told through countless generations of Ukrainians.
When talking about history, much of the western-oriented side of Ukraine focuses on Ukrainian nationalism as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and ‘communism’, highlighting the Holodomor – a famine in the 1930s that killed approximately millions of Ukrainians-- and Soviet repression of ethnic Ukrainians throughout much of the 20th century. The pro-separatist side, however, focuses on the Soviet Union’s major role in the defeat of fascism in Europe, and the legacy of neo-Nazism in historical and contemporary Ukrainian nationalism, not to mention the catastrophic collapse of standards of living after the fall of the Soviet Union.
History is a living, complicated mess in Ukraine. There are enough complicated legacies of war and violence in Ukraine that any movement, with its own agenda, can concoct any sort of argument with at least a smidgeon of truth on its side. This is how the infamous Azov Battalion, a deeply Neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia often reported on favorably in the western press, can claim Ukrainian nationalism as a cause worth fighting for by using the legacies of the Holodomor and anti-communism. Equally, when Russian media speaks of the ‘fascist juntas’ in Ukraine and Western Europe, they can point to much of Ukraine’s failure to reckon with its pro-Nazi collaboration during WWII as proof that Ukraine really is a fascist, anti-Russian enemy.
As Judah writes in his book, “The modern Ukrainian state has no common soundtrack of history,” and to him this is a serious problem. While the major powers of the world have tidy ‘myths’ that explain their actions through the present in strictly positive terms, Ukraine has a deeply ambiguous history that avoids easy answers and myth-making. The history of the region is many of the things that both Ukrainians and Russians claim it to be; a story of famine, political oppression, and imperialism, while also one of nativism, Nazism, and economic exploitation.
There are few clear ‘heroes’ in Ukrainian history; the only constant is the story of the millions of people whose lives have been destroyed and caught in the middle by ideologues who weaponize history in the service of propaganda and power politics. Summing it up for many, an interviewee says to Judah; “It does not matter if I live in Russia or Ukraine. All I want is a good salary. Now I can’t even afford a new pair of shoes.”
If there are those two conventional ‘sides’ that I mentioned earlier, then most Americans are being pressed in the direction of one, perhaps unconsciously. It seems to me that the Ukrainian and NATO opinion of Russia today is largely correct; that Putin is gobbling up the territories of sovereign states, bullying rival governments, and most importantly threatening innocent people with violence through forceful coercion.
But very little American coverage of Ukraine is concerned with what that imperialism means for civilians on the ground. It’s clear that as Presidential administrations are becoming more critical of Russia, news networks are following dutifully in lockstep. There’s ample talk of a ‘new cold war’, but cold wars aren’t an inevitable state of being that’s fallen into by accident; it’s a conscious choice, one that was chosen both by Soviet and American administrations throughout the 20th century. Even as pundits on mainstream networks gab on about ‘the international order’, American power abroad, and all of those Pentagon-buzzwords, those abstract conversations are still a massive distraction from the tangible suffering facing Ukraine. Even in the recent news clips of blown-out Ukrainian schools and anxious residents, the victims are treated like props in a much larger story. But the people are the story of the conflict in Ukraine. In fact, they always have been.
In the twilight of “In Wartime”, Judah reflects on the approach that he took for his book. He writes that “I could have interviewed as many analysts and political scientists as I wanted but would never have gotten as concise a snapshot of what people in the east were thinking…”. It’s a simple but compelling conclusion. And it has ramifications for us as individuals engaged with what is happening in Ukraine. We have a choice when it comes to following this conflict; will we consume the messaging of mass American or Russian outlets, and accept their telling of this history? Or will we seek out something different – perhaps journalism that lifts the voices of those who are suffering and accepts the ambiguities at the heart of the Ukrainian story? It’s a choice that can inform a complicated and more nuanced study of history — one that sides with the oppressed in all conflicts, and refuses to fit neatly into ideological dogmas.
On that note – I’ll end with the words of a Ukrainian. During his travels, Tim Judah asked Valentina Trotsenko, a teacher and curator of her village museum, about the war in the east and what she would do if the fighting continued. She answered with a degree of resiliency that is admirable, and deeply human.
“Well”, she said, “as people say: ‘We will pickle and plant more.’”