This commentary is by Kem Phillips, a retired statistician who lives in Cavendish.
Ron Jacobs’ commentary “It’s time we demand peace from Congress” should be renamed “Let Ukraine capitulate to Putin.”
He begins by referring to “the war between Russia and Ukraine.” This is Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, not a war “between” them.
Mr. Jacobs then tries to put readers on the defensive by lumping in supporters of Ukraine with those he says are “infected with military madness,” when Putin and his sycophants are the ones most accurately characterized that way. He follows this with an invented Ukrainian history, suggesting that the independent country of Ukraine had no right to “reject neutrality,” an insult to Ukraine, and music to Putin’s ears.
He then makes a geometrically challenged reference to “ongoing military encirclement of Russia’s western border — an encirclement that includes the positioning of nuclear-capable missiles very near that border.” Even AF Möbius, inventor of the famous strip, would be hard-pressed to “encircle” the western border.
The concept of distance also eludes Mr. Jabobs, who seems unaware that Russia is exactly the same distance — zero kilometers — from Europe as Europe is from Russia. Russia has nuclear missiles in, for example, Kozels that are less than 330 miles from Kyiv, not to mention submarines that can carry nuclear weapons to the shores of most countries, including into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov that define the shores of Ukraine.
By contrast, the Büchel Air Base in Germany, where some “unarmed” nuclear weapons are based, is over 1,200 miles from Moscow. Furthermore, as various people have commented, Russian policy on the use of nuclear weapons is much more aggressive than that of NATO.
Another fact ignored by Mr. Jacobs is that Ukraine willingly gave up around 1,900 nuclear weapons via the “Budapest Manifesto” in 1994. These weapons went where? You guessed it: Russia. This agreement was in exchange for the United States, Russia and Britain “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” not invasion by one of the signatories, Russia.
Having done a “small amount of research,” Mr. Jacobs describes what he thinks happened in 2015. Had he read a few previous pages, he would have seen that these poorly described events actually happened in 2014. He parrots the Russian notion that “Washington assisted an overthrow of the elected government.”
Of course, he does not mention the name Viktor Yanukovych, possibly because that would have made it easier to discover that the removal of this corrupt criminal was not a “coup” and was the doing of the Ukrainian people because of Yanukovych’s corruption and ties to Russia. In the process, Yanukovych killed 70 to 100 Ukrainians in Maidan Square, many by snipers.
In the end, Yanukovych fled his mansion, leaving behind his cars and other loot, running off to his sugar-daddy Vladimir Putin to escape justice. The same year, Russia “annexed” Crimea, Ukrainian territory. This all happened in early 2014, not 2015 as Jacobs says.
After this Russian aggression, it made sense to train Ukrainian troops. As Ukraine has shown, this training was highly effective against an incompetent Russian army.
Those opposing support of Ukraine say NATO is really the one that is to blame. But NATO expanded only because countries rightfully felt threatened by Russia. Now even Sweden and Finland are applying, again for fear of Russia.
Putin and his sycophants Lavrov, Medvedev, Shoigu, Peskov and Kirill are war criminals. These are not people who care a whit for Mr. Jacobs’ pacifism, nor for the lives of Ukrainian children. They are no more likely to bend to humanist notions than Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito were. If they were, they would not have, just a few days ago, used their “precision bombing” to strike Kyiv’s Shevchenko Park, “leaving a large hole near a children’s playground,” or sent their soldiers to rape, torture and murder Ukrainian civilians.
Having served two years stateside during the Vietnam War, I’m aware of the evils of unjustified wars. Pacifism was defined then as being “conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.”
The problem with taking that stand is a small matter called World War II, fought against several Fascist states. This was the problem faced by Bertrand Russell. He was a pacifist in World War I, and continued to be one through the 1930s, even with the rise of Hitler. But eventually (see Caroline Moorehead’s biography) “he had, he confessed, been wrong,” and said, “If I were of military age, I should now be fighting.”
Ukraine is experiencing something similar to World War II right now.
