This opin­ion piece by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the Dai­ly Tele­graph.

My inclu­sion in the Russ­ian Government’s list of Aus­tralians sanc­tioned for “for­mu­lat­ing the anti-Rus­sia agen­da” will not change my sup­port for Ukraine, my deep affec­tion for the won­der­ful Ukrain­ian-Aus­tralian com­mu­ni­ty, or my revul­sion at the ille­gal and inhu­man war.

The inva­sion of Ukraine launched on 24 Feb­ru­ary 2022 revived the worst instincts of Sovi­et-Russ­ian despo­tism. The defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of Russ­ian lead­er­ship in both Sovi­et and Impe­r­i­al times was a sav­age dis­re­gard for human life. Indeed, one of the archi­tects of the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion, Leonid Trot­sky pro­claimed that “we must put an end, once and for all, to the Papist-Quak­er bab­ble about the sanc­ti­ty of human life.”

Russ­ian com­mu­nism took human dis­pos­al to new heights. Half a mil­lion Sovi­et cit­i­zens bled out in the Finnish snow in the doomed win­ter war of 1939. Mil­lions were hauled off to servi­tude build­ing infra­struc­ture as slave labour­ers, liv­ing out their lives in squalor at the behest of the people’s gov­ern­ment. 300,000 died build­ing the Trans-Siber­ian Rail­way alone. Killing quo­tas dur­ing col­lec­tivi­sa­tion, show tri­als, blood-spat­tered con­fes­sions, the delib­er­ate appoint­ment of psy­chopaths like Yezhov, Yago­da and Beria to posi­tions of immense pow­er.

The stag­ger­ing death rate of Sovi­et sol­diers in the two world wars is not a tes­ta­ment to nation­al pride or noble sac­ri­fice but to crim­i­nal cul­pa­bil­i­ty of its lead­ers. There is no hon­our in run­ning at ene­my posi­tions unarmed, wait­ing for a com­rade to be struck down before pick­ing up his weapon or of charg­ing at machine-guns with farm­ing imple­ments.

There is anoth­er Rus­sia though, which is why my sanc­tion­ing means some­thing to me. There is a Rus­sia of exquis­ite lit­er­a­ture and music. A beau­ti­ful lan­guage that is my moth­er-tongue. A cui­sine that invokes all the soul and depth of a tor­ment­ed his­to­ry. A peo­ple for whom I har­bour absolute­ly no ill-feel­ing. A coun­try that scores of my rel­a­tives vol­un­teered to defend against the fas­cist invaders. An army that stalled and turned back the Nazi killing machine and whose men were the first to open the gates of Auschwitz.

This is one of the great tragedies of Putin’s war. The cor­rup­tion of the his­to­ry of the Great Patri­ot­ic War by shame­ful­ly equat­ing the Nazis with mod­ern Ukraine. But the great­est tragedy is that inflict­ed on the peo­ple of Ukraine.

Decry­ing this scan­dalous war, lend­ing our voic­es to the Ukrain­ian nation and its suf­fer­ing dias­po­ra is the bare min­i­mum we can do. Ukraine will pre­vail because its cause is just, and it sol­diers fights to pre­serve a home­land that is right­ful­ly theirs rather than to sub­ju­gate anoth­er peo­ple. Glo­ry to Ukraine and let the sanc­tions fall where they may.