Myth #4: The revolution against Yanukovich threatens Russians who live in Ukraine.
Why it’s false: The evidence of Yanukovich’s corruption and oppression is far, far beyond dispute. It is documented in photos and videos that have been circulating through the internet for many days now. His snipers opened fire on unarmed, peaceful protesters, and he had looted literally billions from the treasury of Ukraine. The uprising against him was designed simply to halt the bloodletting, and there has never been any kind of threat to Ukraine’s population of Russians. Those people were oppressed and victimized by Yanukovich just as much as everyone else, and they despise him just as much. It is only Russian propaganda that has invented some kind of threat by one group of Ukrainians against another.
Indeed, like a bloodthirsty pack of wolves, thousands of Russians marched through the streets of Moscow over the weekend in support of aggressive military action in Ukraine. Many wore the military uniforms of the USSR, the regime that oppressed the Ukrainians for decades and was responsible for a genocidal famine there. This unbridled imperialistic fervor is the result of Russians believing that they can act with impunity to restore what they see as the “glory” of the homicidal Soviet regime. The world must show the Russians that this is simply not so.
For years now, Russia has demanded that the West not resort to military force in places like Syria, Libya, and Egypt, but rather had insisted that all such disputes must be resolved only at the bargaining table. Yet, without even the slightest pretext, that entire history has been thrown out the window by the Russians as soon as it was they who wanted to utilize military force. Russia is riddled with separatists regions like Dagestan and faces intense pressure from China in the East, and its actions create a precedent that is crazily reckless for Russia to support.
All of Europe is rising to confront Russia’s naked power play, and so is the United Nations. Even the Obama regime, whose weakness in the face of Putin’s repeated imperialistic moves has surely encouraged them, now sees that the loss of Ukraine would be a blemish it could never overcome, and it is moving, though too slowly, to confront Putin as well.
If Putin is not forced to back down, the valiant people of Ukraine, who have already laid down many lives to depose Yanukovich, will be forced to defend their nation from invasion. The consequences of watching that unfold, in the light of the tortuous history of European war, are too horrific to contemplate.
Putin must be forced to back down.