Of course we’re lucky to live in a civilized place where every effort is made to restore power quickly. No one but a cad or a criminal would turn off your heat in January. Yet the Kremlin did just that to Kyiv on Christmas eve in the Orthodox Christian world – “from Russia with love.”
Ukraine has reserves but those will soon run out. Then what? Since many Western European states are addicted to Siberian oil and gas and Russia makes no secret of its contempt for Ukraine’s democratic tilt, countries like Germany, supported by Italy and France, have ironically become Moscow’s handmaidens, isolating Ukraine by blocking her admission into the European Union and NATO. The strudel, spaghetti and croissant eaters comply because they don’t want the lights to go out in their beer halls, their espressos to get cold or their pizzerias to get chilly.
Certainly Kyiv is not blameless. What passes for a government there has generally been ineffective and corrupt, increasingly an embarrassment to a Ukrainian emigration that yearned for so much more after Ukraine recovered its independence. Having done little to wean itself off Moscow’s teat, preferring to remain seduced by the cheaper-than-world-price-energy dolled out by their “Elder Brother,” Ukrainians now find themselves at a bully’s mercy. They’re screwed. They don’t have the coin for what they need. Ought they to have known better? Yes. This is not the first time their neighbor to the North has mucked them about. The man in charge, Vladimir Putin, questions Ukraine’s very existence and insists the Soviet empire’s undoing was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Oddly enough I recall most people celebrating the collapse of Communism. But I suppose a KGB man harbors a different perspective.
What is to be done? Realistically there seems little alternative but for Ukraine to start paying market prices for its energy, most imported from next door. It’ll be dear. But since the pipelines moving oil and gas into Western Europe cross Ukraine’s territory it’s also time for Kyiv to start raising those transit costs, significantly. If Europeans want gas from their Russian friends they should pay more for Ukraine to allow them to get it. In the longer term Ukraine must also diversify its energy sources. Getting over Chornobyl by developing nuclear energy is critical, as is exploiting oil, oil shale and gas deposits in the Black Sea littoral and securing reliable energy supplies from the Near and Middle East.
It’s also time for redress from the Russian Federation. In 1991 “Mother Russia” quickly seized the greatest share of the Soviet empire’s wealth. Josef Stalin’s beneficiaries can now shoulder their fair share of a less pleasant legacy. They can start paying reparations for the crimes of Communism, particularly for the Holodomor, the genocidal Great Famine of 1932-1933 that snuffed out the lives of many millions of Ukraine’s citizens. The precedent was set by West Germany paying billions to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora for the Holocaust. As for the objection that some Ukrainians also served Stalin that’s easily resolved. If any such villains are found they must get a fair trial. Then they should be executed. Since Ukraine apparently isn’t good enough for membership in Europe’s club it need not worry about the prissy standards of Brussels when it comes to capital punishment. Few had a problem with hanging Nazis. Applying the Nuremberg noose when dealing with Commissars seems fitting.
Ukraine shouldn’t stop there. Developing its own short and intermediate range nuclear weapons will allow Kyiv to protect its interests just like India and Pakistan do or, for that matter, France and Israel. Ukraine doesn’t need NATO once it has a credible nuclear deterrent. And, unlike Russia, Ukraine has never posed any threat to the West. If Muscovites can manage missiles why can’t Ukes have nukes? I don’t recall president Yushchenko threatening president-elect Obama the day after the US elections. Russia’s president Medvedev did.
As for those countries that imposed their Führer and their fascism on the rest of Europe, it’s time for them to atone. No other country in Nazi-occupied Europe suffered as many civilian casualties as Ukraine. For decades that truth was buried by Soviet propagandists and fellow travelers blathering on about “20 million Soviet dead” while foisting the myth about a “Great Patriotic War” that began June 22, 1941. Didn’t World War II begin on Sept. 1, 1939? In whose interest was it for us to ignore how “Uncle Joe” Stalin and Adolf were allies when Poland was dismembered, the Battle of Britain joined and the gates to hell first opened at Auschwitz?
It was a cold Christmas in Kyiv. I have no gift with which to warm the long-suffering folks there. Instead I’ve been thinking about how the Old Testament warns us that sons pay for the sins of their fathers. Today the French, the Germans and the Italians are mollycoddling Moscow, much as their forefathers once did. They might end up by sparking a new Cold War, one they might not win.
Professor Lubomyr Luciuk teaches political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada. Luciuk also edited the newly published book “Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933.”
