#BeingHuman? Reflections on a sleepless night with sirens blaring from yet another massive ruzzian shelling… I owe you an explanation of a term I keep using, one I provided once above, and I feel I should repeat it here again. By “Romantic peacemakers,” I mean people who love peace as an idea more than they love the people who will have to live under its terms, and most of them live outside Ukraine (or other war-affected countries with active ongoing combat). Some are foreign politicians who want this war off their agenda to focus on making money and are ready to call any ceasefire a success, not caring about the consequences for the victims of the war… while others are foreign Christian leaders and peacemakers who urge “both sides” to forgive and to talk, as if ruzzia’s invasion were a quarrel between equals or just a civil war.
I do not doubt that some of them are sincere, but sincerity does not change how their appeals work in practice. An appeal can move only the side that listens, so the pressure falls on the attacked country, which depends on outside help to survive existentially, while the aggressor is asked for nothing but respect from the victims of its aggression. We have already seen where this leads, because the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 froze the front line without holding ruzzia accountable, and in 2022 the full-scale invasion followed, or, to say it more correctly, was allowed…
A peace that leaves the aggressor with what it took teaches them, and others who are watching, that aggression pays. When church leaders add Scripture to this, the harm goes even deeper, because the victims now hear that defending their families is a failure of Christian love… Please, think about it: defending their families is a failure of Christian love… not aggression, and not the support of the “special military operation”, but defending… And none of those who offer us this peace will have to live in the occupied towns or under the rule of the “ruzzian world”, which is a cost they leave to us, not for themselves… Moreover, no one wants peace so much as Ukrainians, at least 100 times more than the Romantic peacemakers could even imagine…
Ultimately, this ruzzian war is not about Ukraine, even though it is fought on our land and paid for with our lives first, and then with financial support of others (do not take it please as disrespect)… If it were about NATO at ruzzia’s borders, then Finland’s entry into the alliance in 2023, which roughly doubled the length of that border, would have brought a similar response, and it brought none… If it were about protecting Russian speakers, the ruzzian army would not have destroyed Mariupol, a city where most people spoke Russian…
The stated reasons fail their own tests, so the real reason has to be found in what ruzzia itself demanded before the invasion. In December 2021, it asked in writing that NATO withdraw its forces from every country that joined after 1997, which means Poland, the Baltic states, and others who were never part of this “conflict”. And those countries would not join NATO if they felt secure and assured that ruzzia would not invade them again, as it did with the Soviet Union… Moreover, in 1994 ruzzia signed the Budapest Memorandum, promising to respect Ukraine’s borders in exchange for our nuclear weapons, the third largest in the world in quantity. If that signature can be broken at no cost, then no border in the world is protected by a promise, and every state without nuclear weapons has learned what its security is worth. Ukraine is the place where this question is being answered, but the answer will apply to everyone…
On the matter, why I write “ruzzia” and “ruzzians”… Some of you have also asked why I write “ruzzia” and “ruzzians,” and this needs an explanation as well, because it has nothing to do with dehumanization (as some suggested). In February 2022, the ruzzian army crossed our border with the letter Z painted on its tanks and trucks, and within weeks that letter was displayed across ruzzia as a public sign of support for the invasion, on government buildings and billboards, in schools and at public rallies, even by many Orthodox priests and a number of evangelical pastors… So it is a symbol they chose for themselves, not us…
When I put it into the name of the country, I am pointing to that choice and to the fact that this war has been carried out and sustained by a state and a society and a big part of the Christians, with broad public support and little visible resistance (it does not mean that there is no resistance by an extreme minority). The lowercase letter in “ruzzia” and “ruzzians” is a common wartime practice in Ukraine, a small refusal to give the usual sign of respect to a state that denies our right to exist. Again, it has nothing to do with dehumanization… I do not use these words for ethnicity or for the language, and I do not mean those Russians who oppose the war and pay a price for it. This spelling is our protest against describing this war in normal words, as if nothing had changed (where Romantic peacemakers push us), and I will return to the standard spelling when the aggression ends, responsibility is acknowledged, and, hopefully, Romantic peacemakers repent and change their protocols and practices too…
Finally, we, in Ukraine, also do not accept the phrase “Putin’s war,” because it puts the effect in the place of the cause. A ruler can shape a society only after he comes to power, and what we face today was there before him. ruzzian troops fought in Moldova in 1992, and the first war in Chechnya began in 1994, when putin was still an official in the St. Petersburg city government. He rose from a little-known KGB officer to prime minister and then president in 1999 and 2000, while Grozny was being destroyed, and his popularity grew alongside that war. The same happened after the seizure of Crimea in 2014, when his approval rose above eighty percent.
A society that is forced into aggression against its will does not reward its ruler each time he attacks a neighbor… Many Christians were part of this, beginning with Patriarch Kirill, who in 2012 called putin’s years in power “a miracle of God,” and whose council in 2024 declared the invasion of Ukraine a “holy war.” Leaders of several Protestant unions either publicly justified the war or stayed silent (because they do not object it). I know that few priests and pastors signed letters against the ruzzian war in 2022 and paid a price for it, and we respect them, but they were very few, and the vast majority of churches did not follow them. putin has certainly deepened what he found in ruzzian society… yet he did not create it, which is why his departure alone will not end it… Something for Romantic peacemakers to consider seriously… Taras D, Ukraine
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