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As Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on toward its third year, I am thinking about the small Ukrainian town where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years in the early 2000s. It is now occupied by the Russian military, which has spent the past two years trying to turn it into North Korea.
The Ukrainians in the Zaporizhzhia region where I served were warm and welcoming to me, but I did encounter a few who were suspicious of America. They didn’t want their newly independent country to become part of any alliance, especially not with America or NATO. My response was that it was OK to feel that way — earning the title of “U.S. ally” usually meant that a country was buying U.S. weapons and cooperating with the CIA and the State Department and their American-centered plans. When I was there, those plans were President George W. Bush’s war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.
The Peace Corps is a nonpolitical organization of the U.S. government, which meant that I was allowed to criticize President Bush so long as I didn’t mention local Ukrainian politics. And I did. The Seattle Times published a letter I wrote protesting the war in Iraq while I was serving in Ukraine in 2003. I didn’t think of my choice to criticize my government as dangerous or revolutionary, nor did I think of my friends’ desire just to live as Ukrainians and be neutral as something extreme.
I could not have imagined the way things have changed since then. At the time, we volunteers thought we were being apolitical by partnering with business, educational, and environmental organizations in Ukraine, and we were amazed by the growth of these civil society groups. Now the very existence of this robust civil society has proved to be a powerful political weapon against dictatorship. Dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin hate civil society. The perverted nationalism Putin promotes doesn’t negotiate with anyone or any group — it’s just the dictator and his mob of thugs, thugs who kidnapped the mayor of the Ukrainian town where I lived and served. He is still missing and presumed murdered.
Now I’m a returned Peace Corps volunteer living in the Seattle area, wishing there were a way out of this crisis that didn’t involve huge amounts of military equipment. But there isn’t an alternative, so I’m asking readers of this independent newspaper to support Ukraine and contact their congressional representatives to ask them to pass the Ukraine assistance funding that’s stuck in Congress.
Here, we sometimes forget how fortunate we are. I think writing to this newspaper is ordinary, but in Russia and the occupied zones, they don’t have independent media, nor do they have a meaningful parliament, nor can people criticize the government. Under Russian rule, all those things can get you killed. Ukraine is a developing democracy with a parliament, independent news media, and a robust civil society of nonprofit organizations, many of which have done an amazing job helping their fellow citizens during attacks by Russia. The Ukrainians are the best allies we could have in the effort to keep democracy alive, and they deserve our continued support.
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