John B. Hagney: Ukraine’s indisputable democracy and other facts worth considering

If truth is the first casualty of war, there are a few fractured facts begging to be triaged.

Contrary to Tucker Carlson’s “Ukraine is not a democracy,” Ukraine is a democracy birthed of a painful labor, Russia’s Vladimir Putin ever maneuvering to strangle nascent Ukrainian democracy in its cradle. (While Donald Trump’s glib comment that Putin’s invasion was “peacekeeping” was clearly counter-factual, it deserves the more insidious distinction of Orwellian Doublespeak, “War is peace.”)

The 2004 Ukrainian Orange Revolution compelled election reforms whereby Viktor Yushchenko, who was independent of Russian control and who worked for Ukrainian European Union membership, was elected president. During his election campaign there was an assassination attempt against Yushchenko. He was poisoned with a dioxin leaving painful facial lesions. It is believed that the poisoning was Kremlin orchestrated, poison the modus operandi of Putin hits. Consider Alexander Litvinenko who in 2006 was incinerated from the inside out with polonium-210 because he had evidence that Putin ordered FSB agents to bomb six Russian apartments buildings, killing hundreds of civilians, to justify his authoritarian ascent and the Second Chechen War.

In 2010 Yushchenko was unable to run for re-election and in what the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called “a reversal of democracy,” Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin puppet, became president. (Recall that Trump sycophant Paul Manafort was convicted of lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych.) His opponent in the election, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was imprisoned after a 2011 trial on charges the Europen human rights court called “politically motivated.” According to Human Rights Watch, she was savagely beaten while incarcerated.

By 2014 it was clear that Yanukovych opposed Ukrainian EU membership and was profiting from Putin’s largesse. The 2014 Maidan Revolution was the Ukrainian popular resistance to Yanukovych’s corrupt regime. It is credibly alleged that Putin strategized the savage counter-revolution. To suffocate the revolution, Yanukovych unleashed live ammunition against unarmed protesters, killing 198 and wounding 1,115. Yanukovych fled to Russia and democracy was restored. “Winter on Fire,” a documentary of the Maidan Revolution, depicts the resolve and courage of Ukrainians as they resisted Yanukovych’s machinations.

In 2018, Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the presidency with 73% of the vote. Zelenskyy is committed to the democratic reforms initiated by Maidan. In 2020 Zelenskyy’s opponent in the election, Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president 2014-2019, was indicted on the dubious charge of treason, likely so Zelenskyy could settle a political score. Poroshenko had continued the pro-West, anti-Putin Maidan momentum. At present Poroshenko has not been tried and days ago appeared on Ukrainian TV with a Kalashnikov, vowing that “Putin will never conquer Ukraine!” If Russia is repelled, one test of Ukrainian democratic resiliency will be if Poroshenko is granted a fair trial that will likely exonerate him. Alas, every infant democracy stumbles at its inception.

Putin’s contention that his invasion was to “denazify” Ukraine is disingenuous. This allusion is a haunting apparition given that the Soviet Union lost 20 million in World War II. The pretense for this fragile claim was that Donbas Russians, constituting half of the population in the Ukrainian east, were being subject to genocide since 2014. Ironically, Hitler appropriated a similar pretext for the 1939 invasion of Poland – to protect the German speakers in Poland.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has dismissed Putin’s charges as ridiculous. In fact, according to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than in Putin’s Russia, where political dissent is brutally crushed. Consider the present suppression of peaceful street demonstrations against the war in Russian cities. In reality, Putin fears democracy more than Nazism. Incidentally, Zelenskyy is Jewish.

Another Putin mirage is that Ukraine and the U.S. are colluding in rearming Ukraine with nuclear weapons. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to relinquish its nuclear arsenal in exchange for Russian guarantees of Ukrainian security. Ukraine denuclearized. Russia violated Ukraine security in 2014 with the invasion of the Donbas. When Russia was called to account for its transgression, Russia refused to attend the talks to mitigate the offense. In 2019 the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty which, along with NATO expansion, are central to Putin’s tirades. Based on Putin’s paranoid, conspiratorial thinking, the invasion of Ukraine will pre-empt the placement of U.S. nukes in Ukraine.

In his waning years Putin is frenetically seizing on any pretext to attain his two decades long, delusional obsession – to restore the Soviet Union. He is the emperor without clothes, Saturn who devours his own children. And again, Europa despairs as the rapacious god Mars massacres the innocent.

John B. Hagney has a master’s degree in Russian history. His thesis on Gorbachev’s reforms was published in the International Journal of Oral History, translated in six languages. He taught history for 45 years at Lewis and Clark High School.