OUR GOOD WORLD HAS BEEN TURNED UPSIDE DOWN BY RUSSIA

Before Russia began hoarding its tanks and armored vehicles at the border with Ukraine, the latter had done nothing significantly evil or dangerous to provoke Russia. There were no Ukrainian mercenaries on Russian soil engaged in clandestine operations and no subversive activity of any kind.

Two chief reasons Russia said precipitated the attack, which Lavrov Russia’s Foreign Minister actually denied days later, i.e. that Russia ever launched an attack on Ukraine. Ridiculous how countries so openly speak lies and kill masses of people and raze whole cities to the ground!

The reasons were these:

(1) That Ukraine was getting too close to NATO and thereby angering Russia since Ukraine was once the bastion of the erstwhile Russian Empire as well as Soviet culture, pride, and history.

(2) That Ukraine was developing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons directly endangering Russian sovereignty and peace.

The first can be easily rejected on the basis of the argument that a sovereign country has the right to relate with whoever it chooses and should be under no compulsion from any other country to toe its line.

On the second, Russia had the duty to take its concern to the United Nations and ask for scrutiny by an independent international body of professionals. Russia should have talked to Ukraine directly given that the two countries are culturally and historically so close and weren’t as hostile to each other as countries in certain other parts of the world.

Russia did not do any of these. And this may point to other reasons. Russia has for long been preoccupied with the dominant role played by NATO in global affairs and has obviously not taken kindly to how the western world has been involved in the supposed deterioration of countries such as Iraq, Libya, and in particular its friend Syria.

Was Ukraine a threat to global peace like any of these three countries were? Did any of these countries have peaceful, democratic societies like Ukraine had? These aren’t questions and issues important to Russia and Russia does not have much time and space in its thinking for values of democracy, humaneness, freedom etc. Under Putin Russia has been for all these years since Glasnost and Perestroika resolute about restoring the ‘apparent’ power of the Second World that was lost in the Kremlin’s thinking under Gorbachev and became a joke under the dancing, stumbling drunkard Boris Yeltsin. That Russia would think that it can create awe in the watching world for it by bombing Ukraine to the stone age is a problem specific to the trust in brawn and slaughter by testosterone oozing Russian dull heads.

In what it has done Russia has opened a can of worms. It has set a precedent for bullies around the world taking similar measures and threatening the rest of the world with utter chaos if it interfered. Thus, the likes of Bassar Al Assad have suddenly felt great strength to come out of their hideouts and go on a world tour of greeting like-minded friends.

Our world armed to the teeth is no more safe and peaceful because those who once felt guilty about what they did are now proud of their past and what they can do in the future. It has unfortunately come to this – that the good, moral, and peaceful must put their heads down and go into hiding.