Never enough: to Western progressives, from a certain state of an Eastern European mind
For the West, places like Ukraine or perhaps also my country of birth will never be adequately European, will never be white enough. Otherwise, there would be no 8-year-long war in Ukraine.
Some of us presently have the privilege of watching Vladimir Putin’s crimes against humanity in Ukraine as a subject for analysis. As something one can turn into a tailored argument for an academic article or a Twitter post winning likes. I especially have in mind the so-called progressives of the West who can use their emotional and physical distance from Ukraine to show that they know all crises which led to this historical moment. This alleged knowledge is weaponized to slow down the end of Putin’s terror in Ukraine.
I, too, am in the West where I have lived for the past 17 years. My passport is Lithuanian, it is the only one I have because my country of birth has delayed legalization of dual citizenship. I write this from the US, 7 hours apart from my 72-year-old mother who lives in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. This morning, she told me over the phone: “They are coming for us.”
My mother and many friends are just over an hour by plane from Ukraine, where Putin’s armed forces shell hospitals, destroy Holocaust memorials1, and shoot unarmed civilians when they block roads from Russia’s troops with nothing but their bodies. Ukraine’s refugee crisis is already one of the largest humanitarian crises on the planet; it is the largest one in Europe since World War II.
With the flood of Ukrainian residents to neighboring Eastern and Central European Union2 countries, the West watches this region like never before in my adult years. And it is a strange feeling to witness this interest peak.
Easter Europeans now seem to matter to the West. But first we endured years of drowning in international debt. We learned to live with additional visa restrictions the West imposed upon us. We learned to live with cancellation of some visa restrictions when our armed forces joined wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We learned to live through years of exploitative labor conditions in Germany’s greenhouses and Swedish nursing homes. We even endured decades of buffoonish stereotypes about us in award-winning Western films and TV shows. At times, we laughed with you. But now we seem to matter to the West.
This is the bottom line that emerges as I watch my news feeds from the comfort of my home in the US.
At this point, especially in the English-speaking West, there is a tendency to polish the anti-war argument. Some denounce Putin’s war in Ukraine, but emphasize the West’s ignorance of other ongoing wars, occupations, and dictators across the world, especially in places where populations are not white. Others cautiously support Ukraine’s resistance, but argue against waging more wars and intensifying the presence of Western armed forces in Ukraine. The caution of the latter argument rests on Putin’s capacity to start a nuclear war.
When I follow these two lines of argumentation, I hear that the no-fly zone is madness and that, from historical perspective, American help to countries fighting Russia does not end well (think Afghanistan). I hear that Ukrainian neo-Nazies in Eastern part of the country now fight for Ukraine, a country led by a Jewish Ukrainian president. I hear calls to stop anti-blackness at Ukrainian-Polish border so Ukraine's non-white internally displaced people from abroad - mostly international students from Nigeria, Morocco and Egypt - can safely cross the border to the EU.
These are valid points. The heartbreaking irony is that, to illustrate these points, progressive individuals who live in Western countries - and especially in the US - actively distribute images and quotes which strikingly resemble Putin’s key talking points when he justifies his invasion of Ukraine. Putin has been building these talking points since 2014, when Russia occupied Ukraine’s eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. When the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov reflected on the capacity of planned disinformation to make an impact, he said:
“Putin has been pumping poison into their heads for 20 years, every channel & outlet. For perspective, it took Trump, Facebook, and one cable news station a few months to turn a third of Americans against democracy.”
When I encounter the more moderate anti-war arguments, including those which American progressives use to highlight how the West now ignores places other than Ukraine, I simultaneously feel helpless, disenchanted, and angry.
We just spent two years arguing about vaccines while 6 million people died across the world from COVID-19. Many still do not believe these deaths, largely because of the Russia-sponsored propaganda machine which splintered the West and validated the anger of under-resourced countries which the West abandoned during the pandemic.
As Putin’s global propaganda machine intensified during his 22 years in Kremlin, he waged terror in Chechnya, Tskhinvali, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Crimea, Donbas, and Syria. Putin has been pursuing world domination at any cost. Powerful Western leaders enabled this pursuit through Western consumption of Russian gas, coal, and oil.
If there is anything American progressives should have learned about Western countries and especially the US, it is the hypocrisy which rules Western democracies. American, not Ukrainian citizens elect openly far right individuals as presidents. The US rather than Eastern Europe is going though intensely homophobic and transphobic stretch as American law makers write discrimination of LGBTQ+ kids into law. Holocaust deniers thrive in the US, not Ukraine, where the Ukrainians now mourn the bombing of the country’s largest Jewish cemetery.3
This ping pong of striking contrasts could be infinite. Meanwhile, Odessa awaits bombardment, and, in Volnovakha, Russian military’s shelling damaged 90% of all buildings.
This image of Odessa now widely circulates in Eastern and Central Europe where Odessa is one of the region’s most iconic cities.
Even Ukrainian scholars and journalists acknowledge that intellectual traditions so prominent among the Western left (especially the critique of American imperialism and the military industrial complex) are no longer sufficient for understanding what is happening in Ukraine and for proposing immediate solutions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Here is how the Ukrainian author Volodymyr Artiukh fleshed out this argument:
“...I see how the Western left is doing what it has been doing the best: analysing the American neo-imperialism, the expansion of NATO. It is not enough anymore as it does not explain the world that is emerging from the ruins of Donbas and Kharkiv’s main square. The world is not exhaustively described as shaped by or reacting upon the actions of the US. It has gained dynamics of its own, and the US and Europe is in reactive mode in many areas. You explain the distant causes instead of noticing the emergent trends.”
Emergent economic, cultural, social, and political trends in places like Ukraine after 2014 (or Eastern and Central Europe in general) are complex, context-specific, often difficult to translate across cultures. In the West, we may be too late to catch up. Meanwhile, ignorance of the region’s past is already causing irreparable damage. This ignorance now enables Putin’s terror in Ukraine. And this ignorance is instrumental in arguments which currently summarize the state of things in Ukraine as something that should remain Ukraine’s isolated long war, as something the West cannot get involved in.
These arguments, roughly, boil down to two main categories. One, NATO only brings destruction. Two, empathy for refugees fleeing Ukraine demonstrates Europe’s racism because, across European countries, no other group of refugees, not even Syrians, received such a welcome as Ukraine’s displaced people.
In terms of NATO, the alliance has most certainly contributed to the devastation across the world, especially in Muslim countries after 9/11. Yet what Russia’s military force currently does in Ukraine as it bombs and shells Orthodox churches, railway tracks, airports, and apartments is not exactly a peacekeeping operation. It is a war waged against a sovereign country, a war waged in 2014, but which the West mostly noticed only on February 24, 2022. Ukrainians now are pleading for NATO help as Ukraine’s democratically elected president Zelensky warns us: Europe will be next. Putin’s experience of pitching neighboring regions against each other suggests that Putin won’t stop with Europe.
Now, about race and ethnicity. It is difficult to unsee that the reception of Ukraine’s refugees contrasts sharply with how European border zones looked just a few months ago. In 2021, Belarusian dictator’s regime lured refugees from primarily Iraq to come to Minsk and cross the border to the EU via Poland and Lithuania. Multiple Eastern European authors, including myself, condemned local Eastern European authorities for the handling of this border crisis with barbed wire, fines issued to volunteers helping refugees, and laws permitting refugee detention without due process. In terms of human rights, Polish and Lithuanian authorities mishandled that ongoing border crisis on all accounts.
In this context, the scale of especially Eastern and Central Europe’s welcome to refugees from Ukraine startles. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania are main destinations because they share their border with Ukraine. Over 2 million Ukrainians worked in Poland prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this February, so Poland is an obvious destination. Moldova, not an EU country of 2,5 million, reports that 120,000 people from Ukraine remain from those who crossed the border. At this point, around 30,000 Ukrainian residents have fled to Western countries like Germany. For comparison - Polish authorities report over 1 million refugees from Ukraine.
Kharkiv train station, March 6, 2022.
To the best of my understanding, Poland and Lithuania deprioritized formal asylum seeking for everyone fleeing Ukraine. Authorities are looking into ways to simplify access to employment and child benefits. At this point, nobody can be certain if these measures will provide adequate assistance to people fleeing war rather than seeking employment. What is clear is that the less wealthy European Union countries are taking on this refugee crisis. Those countries which, along with Ukraine, live in Western imagination as “relatively civilized, relatively European.”
These words, used to describe Ukraine on American prime television, belong to one American journalist. Many pointed out that this logic terms non-Western countries as barbaric, as places where war is natural, where it belongs. As an Eastern European, I cringed when I heard this American journalist utter “relatively.” What I heard was that, for the West, places like Ukraine or perhaps also my country of birth will never be adequately European, will never be white enough. If the West truly considered Ukrainians as alike, Germany would not offer them moldy Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles. If the West truly considered Ukrainians as alike, there would be no 8-year-long war in Ukraine.
In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania and where I was born, a plaque on the city hall includes the following words: “Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America.” The quote belongs to George W. Bush Jr. and the plaque commemorates his visit in Vilnius. When Donald Trump’s term in the White House began, there were days those words frightened me.
Vilnius Town Hall plaque. Photo: www.vilnius.lt.
Today, in the formerly occupied Lithuania, these words are the cliffhanger. The Baltic region hopes that, if Putin’s regime attacks it in retaliation for support of Ukraine’s resistance, this time, the West will acknowledge this part of Europe as a region of sovereign countries who cannot be given or taken.
For now, Ukraine witnesses the opposite - that the West, again, allows dictators to take sovereign countries and, meanwhile, does business with them. There was no NATO in 1939, when the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divvied up chunks of Eastern and Central Europe. Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Donbas and Luhansk regions frightens Eastern and Central Europeans like myself precisely because it is happening under the watch of NATO and its big player the US.
When I wake up in the morning in Western New York and I hear my mother say to me over the phone “They are coming for us,” I console her by saying that we have NATO, that we have the US. The tragedy is that, at this point in history, NATO and the US are the world’s only answers to wars like the one Putin waged on Ukraine.
As for progressives in the West, including myself and especially the diasporic academia or what’s left of it, I believe it is our moral imperative to condemn all wars, all occupations, all dictators - at all times. But Ukrainians now say that, right now, this may be an “All lives matter approach.” And it only prolongs Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At the time of writing this essay, there were reports that the shelling of Kyiv’s TV tower damaged the nearby Babyn Yar, a Holocaust memorial dedicated to over 30,000 Jews killed in 1941. Presently, there are few details about the state of Babyn Yar or exact damage.
The European Union is an economic and political alliance of 27 countries which are located on the continent of Europe. Citizens of members states have fairly easy access to the labor market of the entire union. Lately the EU’s bureaucratic structure has slowed down the decision making on issues such as the pandemic, the Syrian refugee crisis, and LGBTQ+ rights violations in individual member states, especially Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania. See Wikipedia for more.
See footnote #1 for more details.