let's talk about Ukraine

Last winter we had a Ukrainian woman. let’s call her Uma, in our watercolor class, very nice woman, a little younger than the rest of us, talkative, genial. She didn’t talk all that much about Ukraine, and we didn’t ask her that much because it seemed remote, uninteresting.

The last time we saw her was the class before the last one of that term, and she never did sign up for the next one, and we have never seen her again. Not that big a deal, people miss classes casually, and often drop out after a class or two, so we never paid it especial mind.

But in between all hell broke lose in Ukraine. Maybe that had something to do with it, I thought later.

Well what about Ukraine, and here I am just going to pick off the top of my mind without going to wiki. I imagine it became officially part of the USSR after their revolution when they were consolidating all the countries around them, but it had always pretty much in Russia’s orbit. And the Russians, as they did whenever incorporating one of these countries into itself, sent some of the Ukraines elsewhere and moved a whole lot of Russians in. The, let’s call them the original Ukrainians, as opposed to the Russian Ukrainians, were never happy about that and when the nazis marched in they welcomed them with rose petals, but the nazis treated them like crap anyway. When the war turned the Russians came in to liberate them, though of course this liberation was not for the sake of the noble Ukraines, but for the greater good of the soviet union. The soviet union was divided into states which the Ukraine was one, and at some point the Russkies transferred the Crimea into Ukraine, which at the time was just an administrative shuffle because nobody at that time figured Ukraine would ever be a nation separate from the soviet union.

But they did when Russia fell apart. The Ukraines never distinguished themselves as a nation, their government was inefficient and corrupt, largely dependent on the Russian largesse, which they provided to keep the Ukraines in their orbit. And there was friction between the original U’s in the west and the Russian U’s in the east. Governments rose and fell with the new reformist government turning out to be just as bad as the corrupt one it replaced, and this last guy was really bad and they deposed him by force. He had wanted closer ties to Russia, but the western, original U’s wanted to be closer to the west. This naturally upset the Russkies who first of all took back the Crimea, which most people thought was no big deal, but now Putin is dicking around with eastern Ukraine, and well, nobody knows what Putin is up to, so everybody is nervous.

But back to Uma. We never did learn whether she was an original or Russian U. Had she returned to class once the shit hit the fan, it would have been the elephant in the room, we would have had to talk about it. I guess if we had leaned that she was an original we could have all rallied around her and talked about how brave and noble we thought were her countrymen standing up to those awful Russkies, but if she had been a Russian U, we probably would have limited ourselves to wringing our hands and saying isn’t war awful.

Would have been awkward for her also, because she wouldn’t have known whether we were flag waving patriotic Russia hating Americans, or sophisticate political analysts who saw things in an even handed way, and then she may have been an original who thought the Russians had a point, or a Russian who thought the originals had a point.

Well I meant to consider the whole world, including the mideast and Afghanistan, but I’ve run out of time, and I haven’t gotten past Ukraine. Well there is always tomorrow.U