Ukes
A flurry of Ukrainian flags appeared all over San Francisco a year ago when Russia’s incremental acquisition of Ukrainian territory ramped up in earnest and turned to a hot war. It was a show of solidarity - what is sometimes called raising awareness. There were so many of these flags they displaced the Black Lives Matter signs in many windows. (I’m rolling my eyes.) These flags weren’t doing anyone in Ukraine any good. If you feel strongly about something it’s perfectly fine to let your neighbors know. But if you’re serious you need to take meaningful action as well. Otherwise you’re just moralizing and flattering yourself. And no, that $5 donation to an online charity doesn’t count.
I have a longstanding attachment to Eastern Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 I was one of those kids who filled a duffel bag with Levis, got a cheap flight to Helsinki, and trekked from Leningrad to Moscow. I lived with a series of Russian families along the way and got an up close and personal view of the Soviet Union just as it was coming unglued. At the time it was unclear what would happen after communism. Many of those Russian families made the difficult decision to immigrate to Western Europe, North America, Australia, or Israel. Others stayed and took their chances in their homeland as things wobbled.
Other trips to the Baltic Republics and Ukraine followed over the decades. I like the people, the culture, the great food, and natural beauty of the land. It’s an undervalued part of the world. The region is also full of time capsules of past experiments for someone who’s interested in architecture, land use, and urban form. A czarist palace might sit near a communist era khrushchoba apartment block, new construction luxury condos, and a suburban big box store. It’s a layer cake of geopolitics made solid in brick, steel and concrete.
The scars of past wars are evident, along with new interpretations of who did what to whom and why. Ukraine, as its ancient name implies, has aways been a borderland squeezed on all sides by aggressive neighbors. It’s a tempting bread basket offering lebensraum and a buffer zone against military advances from whoever is on the other side. Occupation, famine, and death is the usual result for the locals.
Unsurprisingly, Ukrainians are xenophobic by nature and more than a little prejudiced against people they feel don’t belong. Anti-immigrant sentiments are always high. Ukrainians have had a bone to pick with Jews, Greeks, Catholics, and Armenians for centuries with regular purges. The Nazis didn’t exterminate the “undesirables” of Ukraine so much as they gave the green light to the locals who were not all that sad to see the riffraff done away with. You can say the same about Lithuanians, Poles, and even the French. America closed its doors to select refugees before and during World War II and sent people back to their deaths. These are unfashionable statements, but it doesn’t make the underlying reality any less true.
Ukraine can’t win a war against its far larger and more powerful neighbor to the east, no matter how inept the Russian army may sometimes appear. And Russia can’t hold Ukraine if the Ukrainians and their Western friends decide to make occupation untenable. None of these outside entities have clean hands. They’ve all been tinkering with Ukraine’s internal affairs for decades, each responsible for the war in their own ways. Pick your favorite cartoon villain. There are plenty to choose from in every dark corner. That’s just what big players do to smaller weaker ones - because they can.
Keeping the conflict contained within Ukraine and slowly bleeding the other side into exhaustion is the best option for each side. This will result in Ukraine’s infrastructure and productive capacity being steadily dismantled and its viability as an independent nation reduced. In the end it will be a broken and indebted wholly owned subsidiary of one or more outside powers. That was always the plan anyway. Everyone’s plan - except the Ukes. The unacceptable alternative is for the war to escalate and include more nations and serious nastiness farther afield. No one wants that. So Ukraine is destined to remain in limbo for the duration as an unwilling proxy.
Let’s get back to the solidarity flags for Ukraine that hang in sympathetic doorways around the world. If anyone wants to make an actual difference to individual people you might consider personally sponsoring Ukrainians. I just have. Here in the US there’s a specific federal program designed to streamline the absorption of displaced Ukrainians fleeing war. If you’re an American citizen check out the I-134A page of the US immigration department. Multiple non government sites help match Ukes with willing sponsors abroad such as Host4Ukraine. If you have a spare room you can change someone’s life. Then you can hang out a flag that represents something more substantial than a feeling or awareness.
