February: the invasion of Ukraine

If the news is a bit much for you, remove the overwhelm with this basic background overview and actions you can take to help.

Hi all,

Thanks for joining me here today. I felt like I couldn’t write on anything else this week but it took me a little while to read, listen, learn before I wrote this. I want to be responsible when I write these letters, so thanks for your patience. I know I find you in a very unsettled and scary space at the moment. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been swinging between feeling as if the bare minimum you can do in the face of the Ukraine crisis is to consume as much information as you can, and then swinging towards needing to pull back from the exposure of information because it’s causing you to not be able to function as you need to. I don’t think there’s guilt in having to pull back from the news every now and again to protect your brain, because unlike previous generations, we are exposed to tens of thousands of pieces of content (highly visceral pieces of content like immersive footage of people being killed etc) per day. It’s not the same as watching a 30 min news show and consuming a newspaper worth of information per day. Our brains can’t handle it.

That’s why I wanted to write this month’s free newsletter. There aren’t “answers” in here and there isn’t a hot take (I am queasy at those trying to create something that makes them appear funny or cool via the horror of conflict/invasion/war), instead this is a place where I will share the information and resources that have helped me understand the absolute basics of this situation as well as some actions you can take to support Ukraine.

The below top-line rundown is a write up based on the below video series by Ros Atkin, using the same timeline and chronology, this deep-dive by The New York Times, and this timeline by the BBC.

Ros Atkins @BBCRosAtkins

THREAD 1/8: Many of us are watching Ukraine & asking 'why is this happening? We've made a series of videos to try and help - on Ukraine's history (below), the troop build-up, NATO, Russia's denials, sanctions, Putin's world view and Putin's justification.

The history

Ukraine became a sovereign (meaning independent) nation in 1990/1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is bordered by Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, three nations with communist pasts. To the east, is Russia. Because of this, Ukrainian politics has in the position of having to be either ‘pro Russia’ or ‘Pro Europe’ for a long time. During Ukraines first democratic election, in 1991 post independence, there were reports of electoral fraud, especially in a run-off vote between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych (one was pro Russia and the other was pro Europe) with growing concern that the election was rigged in favour of the latter, pro-Russia candidate Yanukovych. Protests and political pushback – known as the orange revolution – exploded across Ukraine. Yanukovych was elected, and re-elected in 2010. In 2013, a deal between Europe and Ukraine was set to be signed, but under pressure from Russia, Yanukovych declined to sign it, leading to huge political unrest across the country. Due to this, Yanukovych fled Ukraine. Years later he was found guilty of treason for trying to crush the 2014 pro-western demonstrations and protests that forced him to flee and toppled his government, as well as charged with asking Vladimir Putin to send Russian troops to invade Ukraine after he’d left the country. He has lived in exile in the Russia, since then. After he’d fled, in 2014, Putin saw it as an opportunity and began an offensive, seizing control of Crimea, a peninsula along the northern coast of the Black Sea. Pro-Russian rebels responded by seizing two regions east of Ukraine only weeks later.

The spirit of an independent Ukraine still stands today with a majority of Ukranian citizens in favour of joining the EU, but Putin believes Ukraine and Russia are “one people”. Something highly ironic, since he is now bombing those people. One might replace the word “people”, with “land”. Back in February he described Ukraine as “ancient Russian soil”. Russia, and Putin, has long been resistant to Ukraine’s move towards European institutions, the west, and particularly NATO – especially its expansion eastwards. The way the treaty works is that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members, of which there are 30 members; 50% of the world’s economic and military might. It creates a collective force against Putin’s nuclear war power. How much NATO “aims to keep the peace” as it claimed to do when set up in 1949 is highly contested. For example, after 9/11 the “you hit one of us you hit all of us” article was triggered, justifying the Afghanistan war with all members of NATO supporting the US sending in troops and funding a war. As we saw last year, the US pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving a country entirely destabilised and wrecked by the conflict, and under Taliban rule. NATO members had to follow. NATO isn’t about peace. NATO is a military treaty in response to Putin’s nuclear war power.
Russia doesn’t view NATO as a defence tactic. It sees it as American expansion of power therefore in competition with Russia, and Ukraine is in the middle. Literally.

Putin’s propoganda

Putin has a long history of promoting separatism. He believes the fall of the Soviet-Union – a system without freedom of speech or press, that criminalised dissent, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, propagated atheism in the schools and didn’t allow travel without government approval – was a huge geopolitical loss. He is very much a state head with only power in mind, proven by how he’s installed leaders in other countries to make his political mission easier, interfered in US and UK democracy and the invasion of Crimea.

Though it may, to us in the West, feel like this invasion happened over night, the last six months have seen Russia build up its military force on Ukraine's border in preparation. An estimated seventy thousand troops were photographed close to Ukraines boarder in December. Recently, Putin signed independence over to the two territories taken by Pro-Russian rebels back in 2014 live on television, before sending troops into those region and calling them ‘peacekeepers’, which of course, they were not. He repeatedly said claims from the US and NATO of an invasion were ‘alarmist’.

Meanwhile, Putin’s Government have seeded anti-Ukrainian propaganda throughout Russia’s state-controlled TV and Radio stations, claiming he was launching a “special military operation” the role of which is to “protect people subjected to bullying and genocide for the last eight years” aiming for “demilitarisation and de-Nazification" of Ukraine, strongly implying to Russian citizens that there was a Nazi threat. There has been no genocide in Ukraine and it is led by a newly-appointed pro-democracy president who is Jewish. What Putin wants are two things: Ukraine to never join NATO, and for NATO to withdraw its military resources in Eastern Europe. The reality is, he will get neither of these, but he will take down everything and everyone he can in his attempt to get it.

The impact of the invasion

At the time of writing almost 1 million people from Ukraine have become refugees, fleeing the country in just over a week. Black and brown people fleeing Ukraine have faced far harder access to safety, being denied access at boarders due to the deep-rooted racism apparent in Eastern Europe.

The Ukrainian government has put the number of civilian deaths at more than 2,000, but Ukraine’s emergency services agency later called that figure “approximate,” and said: “It is unknown how many people are actually still under fire and debris. There is no exact figure.” The United Nations has recorded at least 752 civilian casualties so far across Ukraine, with 227 killed and 525 injured.

Moscow acknowledged a death toll of 498 of its own troops in seven days of fighting — the largest in any of its military operations since the war in Chechnya.

This is an invasion driven by a tyrannical war criminal, controlled media perpetuating false information, and an administration who will kill and detain as many Ukranian’s and Russians it takes for them to retain power and grab land. I don’t know if anyone knows what the future holds, but what I do know is that solidarity comes in many forms. Here are some things you can do today to help Ukraine:

1. Sending donations is a wonderful thing to do, but make sure you’re effort doesn’t go to waste by sticking to these rules:

- goods are high quality and specifically what has been asked for
- goods are not food or medicine unless working with an specialist company who work with those types of donations (i.e insulin etc)
- consider taking one item from a list asked for and send many of that item, instead of a mixed donation. It will be sorted and processed faster and easier.

If you’re unsure of what’s needed and where, donate to The Disasters Emergency Committee. They are a coalition of 15 charities set up for emergency response. The Government match funds up to £20m.

2. Consider supporting communities in Ukraine who are being marginalised by their race or gender.

African and Caribbean students account for nearly a quarter of the more than 76,000 foreign students in Ukraine. Ukraine is also home to about 20,000 Indian students. All have also reported discrimination and hostility in trying to escape since the invasion.

You can donate to Black Women For Black Lives, a coalition set up to provide Africans and Caribbeans in the area with information on the safest routes through areas where they might face discrimination while trying to flee.

LGBTQ+ Ukrainians fear increased repression from Russia, citing the country’s ban on gay marriage and anti LGBTQ+ “propaganda” law. LGBTQ+ Ukrainians who might flee to the neighbouring nation of Poland are not guaranteed safety heading into a conservative, predominantly Catholic country. Donate to Insight Ukraine, who are currently collecting funds “to cover needs in shelter, relocation to safer places, food, basic needs” for LGBTQ+ civilians.

An estimated 54% of people in need of assistance from the ongoing crisis in Ukraine are women. Women and girls are consistently disproportionately affected by conflict. More than 1.5 million people – two thirds women and children – have been internally displaced since the start of the conflict in 2014. Women and girls are a high-risk group, exposed to heightened risks to their human rights. An increased number of them caught in the conflict will experience exacerbated forms of violence. Please donate to UN Women UK‘s fund to help continue their work protecting women and girl’s on the ground.

3. Be mindful of what you’re sharing on social media
This is an invasion based on disinformation, but misinformation online can exacerbate issues, especially when social media is being looked to as a place to find the ‘truth’ away from unilateral narratives and propaganda that the Russian state is pushing. First Draft shared a great thread on responsible use of social media, how to reverse image search, and how to verify info. See it here.

4. Pressure the UK Government to waive visas and accept refugees. Sign this petition, then use this easy search tool to find your MP. Email them asking that they accept refugees fleeing the crisis. You can use this template from Ukranian Events in London, but be sure to change it enough that it doesn’t get binned for being flagged as duplicate!

I hope this, super accessible overview and, more importantly, the actions helped you today. If there’s anything I’ve got wrong here, language i’ve used that isn’t helpful etc, please do call me in constrictively in the comments section. And if there’s any resources, charities, initiatives you want to signpost to, you can do so in the comments section too.

Thanks for reading and look after yourself and those around you.

Gina x