In the first decade of the past century when Europe was a powder keg almost ready to explode into war, my father, a young and exceedingly proper English youth, arrived in the village of Vonda, Saskatchewan. There, he filed on a homestead and bought a partnership in a general store owned by a widow of Polish extraction. His customers were called Galicians, ethnic Ukrainians and Poles who had come to Canada from their former homeland in Austro-Hungary. The rules that countries make for themselves can be a snare for minorities within their populations. When the Great War came, Galicians, who had no love for their former masters in Vienna and Budapest, were interned in great numbers in Canada as enemy aliens. Ethnic Germans who had come to Canada from the German colonies in the Ukraine, which was then a part of Tsarist Russia, were classified as former citizens of a friendly power.
My father liked Ukrainians. He immersed himself in their culture. He taught me Ukrainian words. His affection for Ukrainians is one of the most enduring things in the scanty inheritance he left to me. In March of 2014, it seems everybody in Canada and Western Europe loves Ukrainians, or at least will do so until the next international crisis comes along.
In any crisis situation, what our leaders and the news media proclaim soon becomes conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom too often obscures the realities behind the words. Russians and Ukrainians are different. The vast land mass of what we call Russia has always been a land of diversity in language, religion and culture. What became Tsarist Russia began in the ninth century with the dynasty created by a man called Rurik. He was a Viking. The tribe of the people called "Russ" were Vikings.
Tsarist Russia ended in 1917 when Bolsheviks overthrew the Romanov regime and executed all the members of the royal family. To acknowledge their German ancestors, the Romanovs were more correctly entitled the House of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. Throughout centuries, the rulers of Russia had taken many German brides.
The Ukrainians were Slavs, part of a migration that began when Constantinople, capital of the glittering Christian Empire of Byzantium, was overrun by the Turks in 1457 A.D. The westward movement took the Ukrainians through the Slavic states of Poland and Lithuania. The conquering warriors of Islam moved westward as well. The Black Sea Fleet, from its base at Sevastopol in the Crimean peninsula (which had been Russian territory for centuries) was the bulwark against incursions by Turkish naval power.
During the Russo-Japanese War, the Black Sea fleet remained in the Black Sea when the Tsar's Baltic fleet journeyed halfway around the globe to an ignominious defeat by the Japanese navy in the Battle of Tushima in 1905. Tushima was a factor in the growing unrest that toppled the Tsarist regime 12 years later.
The Don Cossacks of the Ukraine were the Tsar's most loyal troops. In the struggle for power after the abdication of the Tsar Nicholas II, the Ukraine was a hotbed of resistance to the Bolsheviks and safe territory for the White Russian army that opposed them. The Bolsheviks won. In various ways, Ukrainians were punished. The most murderous punisher was Josef Stalin who, in 1932 and 1933, engineered the Holodomor, the artificial famine that denuded the Ukraine of agricultural products and caused the death by starvation of an estimated 7.5 million people. The wounds have not healed.
After the Second World War, when Canada's standing in the community of nations was much higher than it is now, Prime Minister Lester Pearson was involved in the creation of the United Nations peacekeepers and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO, which included the United States and 11 other states, was intended to counterbalance the military might of the former USSR. In 1954, Ukrainian-born Nikita Kruschev, leader of the USSR, gave the Crimean peninsula to the Ukraine. In 2013, Ukrainians tried to gain a place in the European Community, among the nations that gave birth to NATO. Russia took Crimea back because they didn't want a client nation of NATO to hold territory surrounding the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. There is logic in this. Canadians would be unhappy to see the naval base at Halifax by North Koreans.
Another menacing factor in the current crisis is the fact that most of the citizens of heavily industrialized East Ukraine are of Russian birth. There could be a referendum and there could be a vote to secede. Canadians know about referendum, secession and that unique Quebec term "sovereignty association." The present overheated situation in Quebec sees another attempt by the Quebec nationalists to force immigrants to use French rather than English as their second language. This is happening despite the fact Quebec has been well treated within the Canadian federation. There is a similar situation in Ukraine, where, historically, the treatment of Ukrainians by the central government has been brutal.
The NATO partners are focussing the disapproval of the world on Vladimir Putin and the Russian federation. There are sanctions and there will be more of them. Sanctions are like boomerangs; they can return to bite the states that impose them. There will be money flowing into Ukraine's empty coffers. There will be no military aid. The NATO partners are weary of war. They are weary also of ensuring the security of oil-producing states that are becoming less important in the energy strategies of North America and Europe.
The United States alone, in its 12-year campaign in Afghanistan has paid a bitter price in blood and in wealth. So has Canada during the 10 years Canadians were involved in the effort to remake Afghanistan. It seems certain now Afghanistan will revert to a land of warlords, opium poppies and the debasement of women.
Customs that have become ingrained over centuries cannot be changed overnight by military force or by the introduction of western-style democracy -- neither in Afghanistan nor in the Ukraine. The best agents for change are time and patience.
