To the Editor:
Having just returned from a 10 day vacation in the Ukraine certainly doesn’t make me an expert on the politics of this wonderful country. But I am worried that the eastern half of the Ukraine is leaning toward Russia and the western half toward Europe.
Russian is almost the spoken language in the east due to the domination of Russia for close to 3/4th’s of a century. The forced migration of farmers to collective farming back in the early 1930s killed probably in excess of a million people, and it was Stalin who brutally did this. In addition, another million died in the Siberian work camps.
The monumental book, “With God in Russia,” by Walter J. Cizek, SJ, tells the story of all this brutality better than I. He spent eight years in the most horrible prisons in Moscow and 15 years in the Siberian work camps that killed millions of Ukrainian, Russian and Polish civilians. Why would their president be courting people like Putin, a former KBG enforcer, and treating him like a savior?
Somehow, the millions of Ukrainians throughout the United States and Canada must unite and hold seminars on human rights issues in the Ukraine, and by a show of force save the courageous people there from becoming another part of Russia. It will happen if we stand by and do nothing, and history has proven that over and over again. Maybe we can start a movement called “Ukrainians for Ukraine.”
TOM BRAGEN