A war for the soul of humanity

Ukrainian-American Journalist-activist David Kirichenko’s account of a trip to the frontlines earlier in the Ukraine War to distribute donated aid goods appears in the More News section on the Asia Times homepage. In this opinion piece, he goes into his family background and explains his views of history and the war.

As a child, I had always known that I would play a role in helping the Ukrainian people. And the same spirit that I felt as a child I still feel today. Among nearly two dozen grandchildren, I was the only grandchild who would sit and listen to my grandpa, Vasiliy Kirichenko, tell endless stories about his life experiences. His father, my great-grandfather, had been executed by the NKVD, the precursor to the Soviet-era KGB.

The Soviet government murdered my great-grandfather because of his Christian faith and refusal to bend to the will of communist officials. He had been captured during World War I and converted by German Protestants while he was a prisoner of war.

Before and after his conversion to pacifism, members of my Ukrainian family were forced to fight for the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in such conflicts as the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, World War I, the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-40 and World War II.

My grandfather told me about the manmade Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 (the Holodomor), in which the Soviet Union starved millions of Ukrainians to death. Scholars debate whether that amounted to genocide, but the case is strong that it was no mere byproduct of Soviet economic policy. Rather, the killing was inflicted in whole or in part in order to crush the Ukrainian countryside’s opposition to Stalinist collectivization.

That was a resistance founded in Ukraine’s desire for freedom, independence, and self-determination. The Holodomor, translated from Ukrainian, means “death by hunger.” The peak of this atrocity was in June 1933, when 28,000 Ukrainians were starving to death every day.

In addition to the widespread death toll within Ukraine, Soviet leaders in Moscow also deported millions of Ukrainians to Siberia and other far-flung corners of the empire. Many, particularly village leaders, simply disappeared into NKVD prisons, while countless others died in transit.

After killing off millions and deporting millions (including 180,000 Crimean Tatars), Stalin used social engineering to repopulate eastern Ukraine and Crimea with ethnic Russians and other Soviet citizens who had no previous ties to the regions.

Finally, Stalin imposed a forced assimilation policy by promoting a new Soviet identity centered on Russian language and culture, further suppressing Ukrainian culture and identity. The Holodomor emptied the Ukrainian countryside, allowing Moscow to colonize Ukraine with more Russians, continuing imperialist policies begun under Catherine II centuries earlier.

Grandpa recounted to me that during the Holodomor a cart would come by nearly every day to pick up the people who had starved to death. If he helped load the corpses onto the cart, they would give him a slice of bread to eat.

Like his father during the previous world war, grandpa also was captured by the Germans. I listened to his experiences of being in a German camp during World War II. Once liberated by American soldiers, he had wanted to return to his family, even though he had the opportunity to emigrate to the United States.

Once he got back to a Soviet Red Army camp, they marched by foot from Germany to western Ukraine. From there, their documents were confiscated and they were imprisoned in a train car that was locked from the outside and deported to eastern Ukraine to work in a Soviet camp.

There he labored alongside German prisoners of war. Once my grandpa was finally freed in the Khrushchev era, he stayed in the area and settled in the Donbas region. As a result, my father was born in Luhansk Oblast. Growing up, children of Russian-speaking colonizers constantly made fun of my father for speaking Ukrainian.

During the Russian Empire and its successor state, the Soviet Union, Russian was promoted, while the Ukrainian language faced deliberate suppression. To advance in society, business, politics, or education within both Czarist and Soviet-ruled Ukraine, people were required to speak in Russian. It became the administrative language and the predominant mode of communication in Ukraine’s urban centers.

Concurrently, Ukrainian was relegated to a lower rank, often dismissed as the language of the countryside and peasantry as officials worked to ensure the Ukrainian language had no high cultural or political currency. In 1863, Pyotr Valuev, the Russian minister of the interior, asserted that “a separate Ukrainian language (‘Little Russian’) has never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.”

Additionally, a quote attributed to Tsar Nicholas II reinforced this perspective, claiming “There is no Ukrainian language, just illiterate peasants speaking Little Russian.”

Russia’s current Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, reportedly said that Vladimir Putin only has three advisers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

Putin, drawing parallels between his vision and that of Peter the Great, sees both their missions as efforts to reclaim Russian territories. Commenting on the 18th-century tsar’s prolonged Northern War, Putin remarked, “Peter the Great waged the great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden and took something from them. But he did not take anything from them.”

Putin’s position was that Peter the Great simply restored to Russian control what was Russia’s.

In a speech to the nation in 2005, Putin also said that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin and Russia have an obsession with restoring old Soviet glory and, at the same time, causing Putin to be viewed in the same light as the tsars of the past. He is obsessed with dragging Ukraine and the rest of Europe back into the past because Russia refuses to let go of it.

In 2021, Putin penned a contentious essay detailing his objectives around Ukraine. He has repeatedly emphasized his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are fundamentally “one people” and implied that Ukraine’s statehood hinges on Moscow’s approval and that Ukrainians have no right to a separate identity.

This stance isn’t novel for Putin. He famously suggested to US President George W. Bush in 2008 that Ukraine isn’t a real country. Like Stalin, Putin views Ukrainian statehood and its national identity as challenges to Russian imperial ambitions. Putin’s determination remains unwavering as he persists in his quest for dominion over Ukraine. His mission to restore the Russian empire via the genocide of the Ukrainian people is a continuation of what Russia has done for centuries.

One thing that always struck me as a child: I had an aunt who told me she hated speaking and listening to the Ukrainian language, as she had been taught that Ukrainian was the language of the lower class. She said she knew it was wrong but she was conditioned to it. I couldn’t wrap my head around how Russia and the Soviet Union were able to make Ukrainians hate themselves.

As a child, I always loved reading books and watching documentaries. After hearing my grandpa’s stories, I would read about Ukrainian history. In discovering how bloody and complex Ukraine’s story is, there was always one factor that bound the Ukrainian people and spirit together – something that Ukraine’s greatest freedom fighter, poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), spoke about. Freedom was the greatest value of all, and Shevchenko believed that it should be the uniting principle for people, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

For centuries, Ukrainians were butchered, slaughtered and starved for simply being Ukrainian and wanting to be a free people. That spirit of freedom that I felt as a boy took me over once Russia’s full-scale invasion happened, and it has become a life mission of mine to fight for freedom. Never have I ever felt so in tune with the spirit of my ancestors and what feels like destiny.

Reflections from the frontline

The first time I approached the Ukrainian base near Horlivka, a city near Bakhmut, the horizon painted a vivid scene of the battles on the frontline. From one end to the other, thick black smoke billowed toward the sky, signaling intense battles. Drawing nearer, the looming threat became palpable: any second, enemy artillery could strike.

Once, while delivering supplies to a civilian hospital in Toretsk, an artillery round from Russian forces narrowly missed us. The immediacy was undeniable: I urged everyone to keep moving, fearing that the next shell would hit us.

Medical workers I spoke with at hospitals said they were depressed because they could see no end to the fighting. The Russians bomb cities and kill people every day and destroy what few possessions people have left.

Across the frontline, many of the older people who stayed behind in cities under constant Russian bombardment no longer care who rules over them. You see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in action when people simply ask for food to eat and just want to have some shelter.

It’s hard to make sense of this war when the Russians kill and destroy everything in their way. I kept asking myself what the Russians were attempting to conquer and what their aim might be. There is nothing left for them to take. I witnessed the same thing earlier in Bakhmut, where the Russians bombarded civilians and killed everyone they could.

Once you see the evil that Russia represents, it doesn’t feel real because it’s the same type of evil you read about in history books about the fight against Nazi Germany and the same evil that motivated Soviet leaders to starve Ukrainian peasants. Yet this evil is real and it represents the worst of humanity. This evil wants to grow and spread and it wants to consume and destroy everything in its way.

Norman, who leads a unit in the 109th Separate Territorial Defense Forces Brigade, told me that this is a war of the “civilized world vs the uncivilized world.”

It is a battle for humanity itself, and if we allow Russia to prevail in this genocidal war, what does that mean for us as humans? This war is a battle of good versus evil, and humanity has not been tested on such a scale since World War II. Russia is extending its historical efforts to carry out its genocidal aims against Ukrainians, which it has done for hundreds of years, while Ukraine continues to fight for its right to exist and be free.

My ancestors would never forgive me if I did not answer the call to fight for the freedom of the Ukrainian people. It is what Ukrainians have fought for throughout the centuries. Now is the time to secure it for every future generation.

If Ukraine fails, this evil will spread throughout the world and humanity will fight more of these wars. I struggle with feeling that I can never do enough and that I could always save more lives – for every Ukrainian soldier deserves to live. I owe it to the brave souls that are giving their lives every day to defend human life, fighting for freedom and the greater good of humanity.

This article is excerpted from a longer article that was first published by Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and appears here with permission. Follow David Kirichenko on X @DVKirichenko.