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Why Putin Welcomed War

Apr 11, 2022 by allanauthor 1 Comments , , , ,

Hello Fellow Patriots:

I have eight infrequently discussed theories on why the war in Ukraine is taking place.

  1. Because Putin can
  2. Putin uses wars to solidify his power and control
  3. Putin needs war to test his weapons
  4. Putin needs war to keep his fighting forces formidable
  5. Putin uses war to enhance his stature in the world
  6. Putin believes he can obtain certain political and economic objectives only through war
  7. Putin is testing his belief that the West is decadent, in decline, and can only focus its attention for so long
  8. Putin has never tasted failure

Because Putin Can:

Few of us live lives of white or black, true or false, seeing things in the context of success or failure with no middle ground. Putin does. Putin is very much a student of history. He does not love or hate like so many of us do. He’s a logician that understands that nature abhors a vacuum and like nature does, he fills vacuums. Putin perceives a weakness in the world that is exploitable. That’s why he is in Syria, that’s why he is in Kazakhstan and several other smaller countries, mostly in Asia. Ukraine has natural resources that Putin wants; that’s one significant reason of several as to why he invaded. That theme repeats itself wherever you see Russian military force being applied. Either the specific nation has natural resources or they control access to them.

Ask yourself why is Russia being so brutal? First, military doctrine as classically understood is about killing people and breaking things. Check. The West is much more nuanced about war and protecting non-belligerents. This has proven to be costly for us, prolongs war, and ultimately has largely been unsuccessful. The brutal truth is that this is the only way he can wage war and win. He lacks the resources that America has to stay at war forever. It was costing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2 billion dollars a week at some point in Afghanistan. Putin understands he can’t afford that kind of cost, and in the end, in conducting a forever war, we lost anyway. He believes in fighting his wars the old-fashioned way because it can achieve his objectives more economically and faster. At least that’s what he likely believed at the start of this conflict which he doesn’t even allow his press to call it war under penalty of imprisonment.

Putin Uses Wars to Solidify His Power and Control

Back to that brutality thing. Study how Putin runs his political apparatus at home. It can be very hard to understand the unique setup that allows Putin to stay in power and control his population. Like in 1984, Putin depends on keeping his population misinformed and seeks to destroy any political opposition or differing political thematics.  He imprisons his enemies, kills disloyal individuals outright, and empowers over 200 oligarchs to economically run Russia according to his desires. It also helps to be able to simply order these oligarchs to send him money when he demands it! https://foreignpolicyi.org/vladimir-putins-net-worth/

Anyone wanting to effect change in Russia knows the risk they are taking; so, few actually will take the risk.  More brutal, the better, as far as Putin is concerned. Russian Mafia, major hacking conglomerates, and various other supporting evil doers all swear an oath of fealty to Putin; or they would cease to exist. Putin runs what amounts to a vast criminal enterprise because he can. War is simply an extension of his internal killing, poisoning, disappearing, and imprisoning of his enemies. Note that Putin has executed various political leaders in Ukraine recently. https://www.businessinsider.com/head-of-mi6-ukraine-executions-part-of-putins-invasion-plan-2022-4?op=1

Putin needs war to test his weapons:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/how-russia-is-using-tactics-from-the-syrian-playbook-in-ukraine

It’s in his playbook. Russia was in a steep decline economically from right after the dissolution of the USSR until the West reinvigorated its oil and gas fields. We created a resurgent Russia. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/24/business/exxon-bp-shell-russia-oil/index.html Until relatively recently, Russia was unable financially to assert itself to any significant degree on the world stage that it covets. Russia has aggressively played its energy card to its advantage at the expense of the West.

Russia has spent rapidly on advanced technology to deter and defeat the West in some future confrontation. Putin is spending big on a range of technologies including nuclear-powered cruise missiles, hypersonics, stealth aircraft, and first strike weapons such as a hundred megaton underwater nuclear-powered torpedo designed to create massive tsunamis to inundate our coasts. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/carrier-killer-or-overkill-russia-built-100-megaton-nuclear-torpedo-190808 This is not science fiction. It’s diabolical and ultimately clever for someone who has no morality except for the pursuit of victory at any cost. Are we even forming a clever response to what you can see Putin is thinking about? How can he kill massive amounts of Americans cheaply and effectively? We are not even playing the same game as he is. The US has already been defeated so far, through a lack of focus and determination. That must change; but will it?

Putin Needs War to Keep his Fighting Forces Formidable

It is now obvious, with at least 20,000 dead Russians that Putin wildly miscalculated the current war in Ukraine. Let me let you in on a macabre fact. Militaries that don’t go to war regularly lose their ability to conduct successful war. On paper, the European armed forces are very formidable. In actuality, their ability to kit out for war is limited. Let me give you a couple of hard to believes:

  1. The Dutch army is unionized and can’t be called out to fight without consulting their unions. https://www.liquisearch.com/armed_forces_of_the_netherlands/unionized_military
  2. Switzerland Air Force is off on the weekends. You can’t make this stuff up! https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swiss-air-force-ethiopian-airlines-hijacking-office-hours
  3. Germany does not have enough bombs and bullets to go to war if it happened on short notice. https://sofrep.com/specialoperations/germanys-military-readiness-is-considered-abysmal-despite-vow-to-nato/

Have I made my point? For better or for worse, even though we have recently seen Congress trying to experiment socially with our military, we’re a better fighting force due to the continued number of engagements we have been involved with throughout the world. Sad, but true.

Putin watches us closely. He does not model his forces on us. Instead, he looks at our weaknesses and strategies. He politically and tactically seeks to find an advantage over the West anytime he can. He has discovered recently that theory can only be proved right or wrong on the battlefield. Without military experience on the field of battle, you are only a paper tiger. He is learning that lesson again at a very high cost to his people, military, and the previous world view of the 10-foot-tall Russian soldier. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/just-how-tall-are-russian-soldiers

Putin Uses War to Enhance his Place in the World:

Sun Tzu, in The Art of War famously said “Know Your Enemy to Gain Advantage”. https://www.shortform.com/blog/know-your-enemy/  One of those advantages is to be so feared that your enemy will surrender without a fight. That was the strategic doctrine that Putin employed in his war with Ukraine at the start. He expected a 3-to-7-day war with mass defections of Ukrainian soldiers, a collapse of support for President Zelensky, and for Zelensky himself, a former comedian to be ineffectual and nothing more than a fool. He was wrong on all counts.

Right idea, wrong implementation. Had Putin been successful in his strategy, it would have changed the calculus for Russia going forward. Putin, much like Genghis Kahn carefully curates an image of someone you would not like to tangle with. Violence, brutality, torture, and even rapes are carefully and precisely encouraged to strike fear into Russia’s enemies. Putin wants you to think of him and Russia as ruthless, unstoppable, and worse. All to deter its enemies from standing up to it and to carve out outsize advantages through such thinking. Fairness is not part of his DNA. I fear that having unmasked Russia as something much less than his ambition would have you think, makes him more dangerous than ever. The West has hold of a wounded tiger; a very dangerous position to be in. You can’t let go now or that tiger will likely kill you! We will have to play out a most dangerous hand.

Putin Believes He Can Obtain Certain Political and Economic Objectives Only Through War:

Weakness. Putin thrives and lives off the weakness of others. Whether domestic or international, Putin seeks advantage in the weakness of others. Except for its nuclear weapons, Russia is a second-rate nation by almost every metric. The GDP of Russia is less than that of South Texas. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/04/17/which-has-the-bigger-economy-texas-or-russia/?sh=37d38ac170b9  Threatening war, veto power in the UN, and constant general Sabre rattling is Putin’s tried and true method to get what he wants through intimidation and deceit. With the West always willing to loan money to him and his cronies, always willing to grant him this or that concession, Putin takes everything he can get and rails against those that would deny him what he wants. It’s been an effective strategy for him.

Ultimately, he’s willing to spill Russian blood in the pursuit of his larger objectives; of which Ukraine is not the main focus, but an appetizer to the main course, the destruction of NATO politically and militarily. Putin was also very aware of NATO’s problems before the invasion of Ukraine. He felt he had a good chance of not only winning Ukraine but also his wider goal of emasculating and castrating NATO. Putin forgot one of the fundamental rules of war…no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. This revealed Putin’s war machine’s ultimate weakness. Running a war directed by the Kremlin, with loyalty as the most important measurement over competence, is doomed to failure as we have seen recently. A command-and-control system has its limits. Russian morale is low, logistics seems to be an afterthought, and the complete failure of Russia to dominate the skies has doomed him so far. The problem with dictators is that they frequently don’t learn their lessons. We’ll see if Russia changes its tactics and salvages a modicum of success in Ukraine. They definitely have completely lost the war against NATO.

Putin is Testing His Belief that the West is Decadent, in Decline, and Can Only Focus its Attention for a Limited Time:

It is the last part of the above statement that I want to focus my attention on. I have to agree with Putin, at least partially, that we are decadent and in decline. Success has in fact weakened our resolve, discipline, morals, and other measurements of a society’s health. But I think we’ll pull through if we discover and correct, at least to a degree, these failings. It’s our attention span that bothers me the most.

As a society, we are too distracted by shiny things, self-esteem, and a decidedly lazy population, measured both in effort and pleasure-seeking. That’s not a good thing. I believe Putin is banking on America to grow weary of this war, no matter how awful it gets. It’s a form of battle fatigue. Both the media and our political leaders will eventually move on. The only way forward is to supply Ukraine with the decisive tools they need to bring this war to a close on better terms than Putin would willingly offer. The signs that we are willing to do so don’t portend well. There are too many things Biden and some NATO members withhold on fears of a wider war. They are wrong. History is replete with failed gestures, strategies, and tactics that don’t shut down aggressors in their tracks. Let there never be any doubt where we stand; it should be all or nothing, in for a penny, in for a pound. That’s what history reveals over and over again.

Putin Has Never Tasted Failure:

This is simple. That clever rascal has played chess better than his opponents so far. Throughout his career, Putin has figured out how to come out on top, through any means necessary. And, he’s gotten away with it…until now. There’s an expression that says “They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.” The West has started to congratulate itself already on how they have comported themselves in this evolving war crime. I strongly caution those that are almost ready to break out the champagne glasses though. War must, by its nature be all or nothing. Trying to measure the aid we are giving Ukraine out of fear of proportionality or other specious rationales is dangerous.

We must defeat Putin on the battlefield. He can not escape only to have him pop back up at someplace of his choosing. We must put a stake through his proverbial heart so he will plague us no more. Don’t we understand that? Putin must not only taste failure, he must experience it and be consumed by his failures. The decency of good people living or dead owes him something less than a sweet farewell. He must be made an example of.

The Future:

What Putin has started; the West must end. We are at a moment of inflection. My friends know me as the eternal optimist. If we destroy this devil, it will be a well-lit signpost for the rest of the world that clearly implies that there is no room for dictators, war crimes, genocide, and unjust war in general anymore. If we take the right road, this world will be much calmer, less dangerous, and generally a much better place to live and prosper than at present. Yes, the United States does have a special role in ensuring an end to the suffering of others by providing the conditions for all to prosper. Do you think we would allow some nation to start up the slave trade all over again? Why let dictators wage unjust war then? The United Nations needs an overhaul. It has been completely ineffective at calming the world and preventing outrages. It is feckless and self-involved. I don’t think it can be reformed. That leaves us as the ultimate guarantor of freedom, democracy, and keeping the bullies of the world from doing their worst.

I hope you think about these thoughts.

God Bless America and especially at this time of extreme suffering in Ukraine.

Allan J. Feifer

Patriot

Surrender?
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Surrender? – 1plus1equals2

Mar 14, 2022 by allanauthor 0 Comments , , ,

Hello Fellow Patriots:

All of us are Ukrainians today. There is no justification for war-making in Ukraine. None. No nation was invaded, no actual threats were made against Russia, no genocide befell Russian-speaking Ukrainians. We are simply watching the will of a single man who has demonstrated his past cruelty in Chechnya, Georgia, and other former Soviet Bloc countries. Putin is KGB trained and will gladly show you his knowledge of how he can (has) killed with his hands, used and directed death by a myriad of other weapons. He’s proud of that. He wants you to be not just impressed but cowed at his iron will and power.

But, let’s back up for a second. Here’s a statement from Albert Einstein, who was German and Jewish, and who lived through a dark period of mass slaughter. He observed:

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

Ronald Reagan said much the same thing when he said: “If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s folly was that he declared “peace in our time” after meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich. Sadly, Chamberlain believed Hitler’s promise not to seize more territory.

World War II has faded from the minds of too many of us. If only we read our history mindfully, we’d be ok, but too few of us did. Most either don’t remember or never bothered to pay attention in the first place. The ability to be cruel is, unfortunately, in the blood of leaders around us. Have you ever heard of Babi Yar?  It’s a place and more importantly, a point in time, coincidentally located in Ukraine. Read to remember the horrible reality of the consequence of not recognizing and facing up to evil.

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On Friday, Sept. 26, 1941, when the Germans occupied Kyiv, announcements printed in Russian, Ukrainian, and German began to appear on lampposts and walls around the city ordering all Jews to assemble Monday at 8 a.m. near the site of a Jewish cemetery. That morning, the day before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur was to begin, over 33,000 people gathered, mostly women, children, and the elderly, as the Soviet government had already mobilized the rest of the men capable of fighting into the Red Army.

The obedient multitude was marched under guard through a barbed-wire enclosure leading into Babi Yar. Babi Yar – “yar” means ravine in Russian and Ukrainian. It is actually a system of ravines, where estuaries that once fed into a tributary of the Dnieper River had left steep troughs and inland fields. It is a scenic site, still crowded on weekends with picnickers and soccer players.

As the assembled Jews entered the ravine on that day in 1941, German SS units, together with Ukrainian prisoners recruited from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp intended to serve the Nazis as local police, robbed the Jews of their money, possessions, and documents. They made the Jews wait in the meadow, from where, behind a mound of earth, the relentless sound of machine gunfire could be heard.  Over the next 36 hours, the Germans methodically took small groups of Jews, stripped them naked, and murdered them.

The postwar trial records tell the story of what occurred. The victims “were made to lie face down on the bloodied corpses of victims who had already been shot. If they did not do this willingly, they were beaten and knocked down. Then the gunners climbed over the dirt mounds toward the victims and shot them in the back of the neck.”  According to an operational situation report the Germans sent back to Berlin, 33,371 Jews were executed at that time, on that site.

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I hope you did not skip over this horrible accounting of man’s capacity for inhumanity. Putin has empowered his forces to be just like Hitler. And, for much the same reason:

The Polish Corridor had some 19% ethnic Germans in it. The Poles were “stubborn” about not ceding territory with 80 % Polish population (and not wanting to be isolated from the Baltic,) so Hitler decided to take it anyway. He then split the rest of Poland with the Soviet Union.

Hitler knew that the war against Poland was not justified. That’s why the Nazis did a false flag operation, attacking German radio stations in Polish Uniforms so that it would look like the Poles hit Germany first.

Do you see any similarities with modern-day Ukraine? Russia’s Little Green Men created mayhem and mischief in Eastern Ukraine, giving Putin the excuse to come to the “rescue” of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Russian disinformation painted NATO as an offensive force that supposedly broke a “promise” in 1979 not to move NATO nations alongside Russia’s borders.

Putin did the same thing in independent Georgia back in 1988.  The causes of the conflict between the two countries – particularly a long-running dispute between Georgia and its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – are complex, but the fact remains that on August 7th, 2008, Russia launched a full-scale land, air, and sea attack against its tiny neighbor, across an internationally recognized border. The conflict pitted 70,000 Russian troops against Georgia’s army of about 10,000 soldiers and another 10,000 reservists. Needless to say, the “war” did not last long. It was over five days later on August 12.

In response to that Russian invasion of Georgia, supported by the United States and its European allies, France helped broker a ceasefire agreement. The agreement was signed by then-Presidents of both countries, Mikheil Saakashvili for Georgia and Dmitriy Medvedev for Russia. Under the ceasefire agreement, Russia promised an immediate withdrawal of its forces from Georgia to their positions before the hostilities began.

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Russia not only failed to live up to this and other requirements of the ceasefire agreement.  On August 26th, it exacerbated the situation by recognizing Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries. Yet, for the past ten years, Russia has occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia in violation of that ceasefire agreement.

In August 1999, a then-unknown Vladimir Putin was named Prime Minister when his predecessor refused to condone a full reinvasion of Chechnya. Putin, however, was ready, and in return for their unconditional support, he granted the military a free rein, allowing them to avenge their humiliating 1996 defeat in blood and fire. On the night of 31 December, an aging and broken Boris Yeltsin stepped down, handing the presidency like a gift to the newcomer. In March 2000, after famously promising to “grease the terrorists even in the outhouse”, Putin was triumphally elected president. Except for his four years as prime minister (2008-2012), he has ruled Russia ever since.

It was Twenty-two years ago that a vicious war in Chechnya brought Vladimir Putin to power. Ever since war has remained one of his main tools which he has used without hesitation throughout his reign. Vladimir Putin exists thanks to war. He has built an Empire and thrived through war. Let us now hope that war will finally bring him down.

As many as 250,000 civilians were killed in the combined Chechen wars, along with many thousands more combatants on both sides. Reports of rape, arson, torture, and other crimes by Russian soldiers were widespread and cast as a wholly necessary evil by those forces.

“Without bespredel [no limits warfare], we’ll get nowhere in Chechnya,” a 21-year-old Russian conscript told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “We have to be cruel to them. Otherwise, we’ll achieve nothing.” https://theweek.com/russo-ukrainian-war/1010764/putins-brutal-record-in-chechnya-and-syria-is-ominous-for-ukraine 

Russians know only the importance of power. They use power to get things they want or believe they deserve. They subvert the power that other nations and peoples have. They covet power for the satisfaction power conveys, and for the things that a powerful person acquires therefrom. Ask yourself the question…how does someone in government become a billionaire able to own a 99-million-dollar yacht as Putin has done?  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-vladimir-putins-dollar99m-yacht-that-sailed-from-a-german-shipyard/ss-AATMjNg  Like America’s President, and unfortunately, as can be found throughout other nations of the world, the accumulation of wealth through “government service” is all too common. At least in Putin’s case, we know he is a dictator and we expect anything and everything he touches to be corrupt. Putin exists only through the use of power to impose himself on Russia. He eliminates his enemies through poison, imprisonment, or simply by making sure they simply disappear.  His power seems to be absolute.

Our own system, which is sadly politicized and all too frequently corrupt, is nowhere quite as bad…. yet! But, the absurdity of our national position is on display reflected in our surreptitious efforts to help Ukraine from behind the scenes. The position we have boxed ourselves into seems to justify that anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons are ok, but sending surplus aircraft is not. Who draws these kinds of distinctions? What genius is thinking we’ll give them enough bullets, missiles, and rockets so they will continue to die slowly, but we will not send the real weapons that can make a difference?

Yes, I believe that we have made a bargain with the Russian devil and in the process, sold our soul to him. Life has too many opportunities to live in the gray, but the reality is that things are either true or not. At their core, they are white or black. If we want to help the Ukrainians, there are only two choices. Either find a way to settle things in Ukraine’s favor or admit Democracy’s failure, publicly and leave the victims to their fate as Russian slaves. On one hand, we are going through the motions of helping, but in the process, we’ll knowingly let many people die. Where is our moral compass?

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There are always options.  Evacuating everyone out of Ukraine who wants to go is an option. The world could absorb them and, in the process, it would highlight the victim’s flight from the oppressive Russian bloodlust. Or, deciding to confront the evil that Putin is should also be an option. I know he threatens nuclear Armageddon. But realistically, if the world gets together, not just NATO, but the vast majority of free nations to tell him in a loud, clear voice that the age of Colonialism is over, I believe he will hear us roar, loud and clear.  When he hears our united voice, it can and will make a difference over our time in history.

He should be cut off from trade completely. There should be no airline flights out to the free world. There should be no commercial banking, no sale of grain or oil; no exchange of monies or students or educators. Close Russian embassies throughout the world.  There should be no more free association with other world nations. If our world locks the doors to the barbarians, the signal would be given that despots will not be tolerated, not now or not ever in the future. There will be no place anywhere for tin-horn dictators Who would enslave their own people and would attempt to do the same to others.

Who are we as a people if we don’t stand strong and unitary in thought and action when it matters most? This is not a nod towards Globalism, it is in every nation’s Nationalistic interest to live not in fear, but in freedom. This is our time. Nothing is as inevitable as an idea whose time has come.

A free world is on the line today. Either we collectively meet the challenge or we don’t. Future generations will see this as another pivotal moment in the history of the world. They will see the ability of free people to make hard decisions that may not be popular or easy but are necessary and powerful.

We must make Putin sue for peace. And, if he continues his threats to use nuclear weapons, which could result in the annihilation of our world and his, somehow make sure his own people know they have a madman, a would-be Emperor of the World on their hands. And that we will all fall with him unless we right this wrong. A civilized world cannot exist under the constant threat of nuclear oblivion. Something has to give or we have signed our own death warrant with a temporary stay of execution. The future belongs to the free and to the brave, not foolish cowering people who exchange their freedom for safety. They will wind up with neither.

It is maddening to want to do something, anything to make a difference, and not feel so impotent to do anything of consequence. In my case, I write to you in the hopes you become more aware of what’s at stake and perhaps, like me, you will contribute what you can to a relief organization like the Red Cross, which was our choice. You may link to it here: https://www.redcross.org/donate/cm/FOXForward-pub.html/

God Bless America and especially at this time of extreme suffering…Ukraine

Allan J. Feifer

Deep Background for those who would like to know more about Ukraine’s History:

At the entrance to the memorial park in Kyiv, there is a sculpture of an extremely thin girl with a very sad look holding a handful of wheat ears in her hands. Behind her back is the Candle of Remembrance, a monument with details reminiscent of authentic embroidery that can be found on traditional Ukrainian costumes. This is a monument that commemorates a historical event known as the Holodomor.

What is the Holodomor?

After the end of the First World War, Ukraine was an independent state, but in 1919 the Soviet Union “sucked” it into the community of Soviet states. The Ukrainians, who even then considered themselves a Central European people like the Poles and not an Eastern European like the Russians, tried to restore Ukraine’s independence.

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In 1932, not wanting to lose control of Europe’s main granary, Stalin resorted to one of the most heinous forms of terror against one nation. In the process of nationalization, he took away the grain-producing land from the Ukrainian peasants, but also all its offerings, thus creating an artificial famine. The goal was to “teach Ukrainians to be smart” so that they would no longer oppose official Moscow. Thus, the people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread. The peak of the Holodomor was in the spring of 1933. In Ukraine at that time, 17 people died of hunger every minute, more than 1,000 every hour, and almost 24,500 every day! People were literally starving to death in the streets.

Stalin settled the Russian population in the emptied Ukrainian villages. During the next census, there was a large shortage of population. Therefore, the Soviet government annulled the census, destroyed the census documents, and the enumerators were shot or sent to the gulag, to completely hide the truth.

World War. Their poison gas was hunger. Their Hitler was Stalin. Their Holocaust was the Holodomor. For them, fascist Berlin was Soviet Moscow, and their concentration camp was the Soviet Union. Today, 28 countries around the world present the Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainians, which you could not learn about in school, because almost all evidence was destroyed and victims were covered up for decades, survivors were forcibly silenced by not having the right to vote until recently.

The Holodomor at that time broke the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine’s independence from Russia eternal.

This is the hidden reason you don’t see, that you don’t know about, why so many Ukrainians hate Russians and would rather die than be under their boot ever again.  Never again. Don’t believe Russian propaganda that paints an entirely different picture!