By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It’s super hip to give a fuck about Ukraine right now. Everybody’s doing it! All the cool kids anyway. Everywhere you look it’s blue and yellow, blue and yellow, blue and yellow. There seems to be a Ukrainian flag on every other flagpole as a strange case of jingoism by proxy takes the country by storm. Social media is awash in posh celebrities and political hopefuls virtue signaling all over the heroism of tiny Ukraine’s resistance to what we’re told is totally senseless Russian villainy. Volodymyr Zelensky has been transformed by the sexiest cult of personality since the last half-fuckable Kennedy got popped and a strange new “antiwar” movement has hit the streets across the globe demanding peace through crippling sanctions and omnicidal thermonuclear no-fly-zones. And anyone who so much as even suggests that maybe just maybe twenty years of NATO harassment may have played a role in provoking this mess is declared a heretic and burned at the stake while the Ukrainian National Anthem drowns out your screams.

In no place is Ukrainian fever thicker than the State Department echo chambers of cable news. People who couldn’t be bothered to deviate from their coverage of the cultural significance of Kim Kardashian’s latest buttlift for just fifteen seconds to even mention the Washington facilitated genocide in Yemen have suddenly been reborn as stoic, dewy-eyed, war journalists giving round the clock coverage to the plight of the only victims white enough to matter. This isn’t to say that this coverage, however drunk on pro-NATO narratives it might be, isn’t necessary. What’s going on in Ukraine is undeniably despicable. Even if it was provoked by American imperialism, Vladimir Putin is still a baby killing savage engaged in a grotesque regime change campaign that rivals anything that NATO has pulled in the Middle East.

Innocent people are dying, civilian infrastructure is being bombarded, and an entire population is being held hostage by the kind of conquest anti-imperialists like me have devoted our lives to speaking out against. It’s just a little disgusting to be joined by the same cable chickenhawks who have either ignored or cheered on identical acts of savagery for decades and not just in the Middle East either. The thing that sickens me most about America’s imperial double-standard is that it has totally trivialized the plight of the people who allegedly inspired Putin’s rage. Everybody gives a fuck about Ukraine but there are zero fucks left to be given for the people of the Donbas.

Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed across Ukraine over the last several weeks but over 14,000 people have been killed in the tiny Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine alone over the last eight years. According to the UN 81% of the civilian casualties have been ethnic Russians and their tormentors have been the same supposedly democratic plutocrats in the Ukrainian government that our media so blindly idolizes. The breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have been virtual microcosms of everything that Ukrainians have suffered under Russia. These poverty-stricken people have spent the better part of a decade under siege, cowering in their basements as crooks like Zelensky have given Neo-Nazi mercenaries like the Azov Battalion the green light to pepper them with indiscriminate shelling that includes the use of cluster munitions. All for the unforgivable sin of seceding from a nation they were never asked to be made a part of in the first place.

The Donbas region had been a part of Russia for 350 years until Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. They have only been a part this relatively recent Ukrainian experiment for about 31 and their patience for the project officially ran out of steam in 2014 after the US State Department used openly Russophobic neo-Nazi thugs like Svoboda and Right Sector to hijack a relatively minor pro-EU protest movement in Kiev and used it to overthrow the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian-speaking people of Eastern Ukraine had overwhelmingly voted for the Donetsk native who promised to play the middle ground and retain Ukraine’s historic connections to their ethnic motherland.

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