Ukraine Response
Dear Editor: Thank you to Olga and Doug Borland, of Sitka’s the Russian American Company, for their letter to the editors, “Ukraine Strong,” in yesterday’s Sentinel.
It expressed very clearly my deepest conviction that Americans need to clearly separate the Russian people from what the Russian government is doing in and to Ukraine.
I have Russian friends who live in Yakutsk and Irkutsk in Siberia, and can personally confirm their personal – albeit understandably reserved – opposition to and condemnation of what Mr. Putin has unleashed in the west. And I can report their claim that they are not alone in that sentiment; as seen in Russia’s nascent and quickly throttled anti-war movement.
And those friends are reporting that the effects of the various forms of economic, financial and information warfare being waged against Russia in response to the invasion are already being felt significantly by individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities, and their businesses and social and cultural institutions. And they anticipate that things can and will only get worse, much worse, for quite some time to come.
And some questioned whether all those measures will have any significant negative impact whatsoever on Putin and his “government, cronies, outlaw oligarchs, and ruling privileged,” as compared to the impact it is already having on the people of Russia.
They may lose a yacht or estate mansion or two in all the excitement; but their mega-wealth is well hidden, secure, and very fungible in a world run by other governments with their own sets of cronies, legal oligarchs, and ruling privileged.
And that is why I question the value – to the Russian people – of the economic, financial and information war we have launched in response to the invasion; e.g. banning the purchase of Russian oil, seafood, or anything else, as the Borlands called for in their LTE. But that is a separate rant.
What is unfolding in Ukraine and East Asia is straight out of Orwell’s 1984. We have a Eurasia with its Putin and an Eastasia with its Xi. All that is lacking is an Oceania with its Big Brother. And we have a whole gaggle of folks on the American political landscape – on the left and on the right – who would love to have the chance to fill that slot.
America’s 20-year “Forever War” after 9/11 was, is, and ever will be a half-time show designed to keep the troops occupied, the defense contractors profitable, and the American people comfortably numb to protracted conflicts in places many of them cannot find on a map of the world.
For now, Russia has recovered from the disintegration of the USSR – and China from the madness of Mao – sufficiently for either (or especially both) to present viable, credible “threats” to America’s 30-year reign of global, unipolar hegemony since the end of Cold War I in December 1991.
For now, looms Cold War II, with Ukraine kicking it off in fine fashion.
Jeff Moebus, Sitka
