As the Russo-Ukrainian War approaches the four-year mark, the demographic consequences for each side are becoming glaringly apparent. Given the horrendous losses incurred thus far, the populations of both countries will experience critical shortages of manpower for the next generation, along with the devastation that will take decades to rebuild.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has produced a downward-spiraling cataclysm of events that bode grave concerns for the future, regardless of which side ultimately “wins” the conflict. Estimates range over 250,000 killed or wounded to date to over one million. Such figures are clouded in mystery as neither country has revealed the extent of its losses.
The current Russian aggression began in 2014 when Crimea was seized by Russia and continued with the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, urged on by Russian separatists living there, many of whom had been moved there to beef up Russia’s claims to the territory. The Crimean take-over was not challenged by other nations, and the military operation reportedly took only six lives. The result proved to whet the Russian appetite for further aggrandizement.
Historically, the Crimean Peninsula, jutting into the Black Sea from Ukraine, was the last vestige of the Mongol overlordship, known as the Golden Horde, that dominated the territory of the Kievan Rus state for 200 years following its invasion in the mid-13th century. The Horde gradually was repulsed, chiefly by Moscow, until only the Crimean Peninsula was left. The Russian Empress Catherine II, the so-called “Great,” succeeded in 1783 in repelling the last of the Horde, thereby claiming Crimea for Russia.
Despite the differences of language, religion, economy, geography and culture, the Muscovite state has clung to its ambition to occupy and control Ukraine. Motivated by the country’s great plains that traditionally were termed “the breadbasket” of the Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union, Russia’s overriding goal has been to occupy and “Russify” the territory of Ukraine. The present war is the latest effort in that quest, this time augmented by the greed to have control over Ukraine’s rare earth deposits.
“Moscow the Third Rome” has been the historical rationale for Russia’s ambition during the Tsarist period, and expressed under Soviet rule in a secular, atheistic form. In our time, one of the most egregious examples of this drive has been the Russian kidnapping of Ukrainian children, forcibly taking them from their families, moving them to Mother Russia and requiring them to learn and speak Russian rather than Ukrainian. The focus of the drive is to destroy all aspects of life that separate Ukraine from Russia.
Since the end of the Second World War and Stalin’s grab of Eastern Europe for Soviet Russian domination, America has continued to stand by the nations swallowed up by Russia. In 1959, Congress passed, and President Eisenhower signed, Public Law 86-90, the National Captive Nations Law, which acknowledged the rights of self-determination for those nations swept into the Russian hegemony.
The Act was the brainchild of Professor Lev Dobriansky of Georgetown University, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, who was the catalyst for promoting American understanding of the human rights and national aspirations of those peoples subjected to Russian domination against their own free will.
Americans of Ukrainian descent along with others united under his leadership to erect a monument in Washington, D.C. to Taras Shevchenko, the “Bard of Ukraine” as a symbol of America’s understanding of and support for the independence of Ukraine. In 1963, over 2000 people came to the groundbreaking ceremony for the monument’s construction at 22nd and P Streets, N.W. In December 2022, following the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Congress designated the park in which the statue stands “Ukrainian Independence Park.”
Sadly, the good that came from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, which gave long-awaited independence to Ukraine, is being challenged once again by the “Russian Bear” eagerly seeking its annihilation.
