NEW ORLEANS — As Russia invades their country, Ukrainians around the world are bracing for full-blown war to defend democracy against authoritarianism.
Watching helplessly from New Orleans, Loyola Business School Professor Leo Krasnozhon also believes his homeland is the front line in a new Cold War between the West and Russia.
“Everyone hoped that the Cold War has gone and we don't have to go back to this situation again,” said Krasnozhon, an economist who grew up in the 1980s in Kharkiv, less than 60 miles from Russia, and came to the U.S. in 2003. “But we are back in a situation that sounds like the Cold War, looks like the Cold War, is probably the Cold War.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into the eastern Ukrainian cities of Luhansk and Donetsk, border regions to the southeast of Kharkiv where Putin has been fomenting a separatist movement for years.
“Ukrainians are very afraid of what's going to happen next,” Krasnozhon said. “Personally, I'm concerned that Russia will escalate the situation. And it will affect every single Ukrainian.”
He said his friends and family back in Kharkiv are panicked. Even in cities further west and more removed from Russia, such as Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa, Krasnozhon said his friends have packed their suitcases, preparing to flee.
“Any normal person will be heartbroken by the situation,” he said. “And it doesn't have to be Ukraine. Just in general, when you have a situation (where) dictatorship invades democracy, that means that we are going back in time.”
Krasnozhon said diplomacy by the West is not working, and it’s allowing Putin to fabricate reasons to take more and more of Ukraine.
Putin claims Russian troops entered the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as peacekeepers, to support the creation of what Russia now recognizes as two new, independent countries. The United States and many other countries flatly rejected Putin’s claim, saying Russia has clearly invaded the sovereign territory of Ukraine.
Putin gave a speech Monday to the Russian Security Council, falsely claiming “modern Ukraine was entirely created by … Bolshevik, communist Russia” and, therefore, Russia has a right to its “historical territory.”
But historians agree that Putin, a former KGB agent who peddles in disinformation, is contradicting the clear historical record – including the fact that the first Slavic nation, Kievan Rus’, was founded in Kyiv in the 9th century, more than 200 years before Moscow even existed; or that Ukraine was an independent country more than 100 years ago, while the Russian communists were still fighting a revolution against the czar to establish the Soviet Union.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is also a violation of the Budapest Memorandum signed in 1994 by Russia, the U.S., the United Kingdom and three former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. At that time, Russia agreed to assure Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up the world’s third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
But Putin has repeatedly undercut the Budapest agreement since late February 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and began supporting the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The annexation of Crimea followed days of massive protests in Ukrainian cities in favor of Ukraine joining NATO. The pro-Russia president of Ukraine at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, directed security forces to fire on unarmed protesters gathered in Maidan, Independence Square in downtown Kyiv.
Yanukovych had to flee to Russia in the middle of the night. Exactly eight years ago Tuesday, a group of investigative reporters descended on the presidential palace and found ostriches, gold toilets and 25,000 documents Yanukovych tried to dump in a reservoir.
Led by Oleg Khomenok, they recovered and catalogued the records, exposing corruption on a massive scale.
Khomenok and his colleagues have put their lives on the line – working in the face of newsroom bombings and targeted killings of journalists – to root out corruption in Ukraine. In 2017, the country established a special High Anti-Corruption Court and codified some of the strongest press freedoms in the world, which Putin ridiculed in his speech Monday.
“Ukrainians love their country, and they are ready to fight for this country,” Khomenok said in an interview with WWL-TV.
He finds it especially hard to listen to the lies Putin is using to justify the invasion.
“I can just be a little angry at these stupid things that I have listened (to),” he said.