Dr. Taras Kuzio of the Atlantic Council and professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy writes,
…generations of Russian rulers have sought to erase the entire notion of a separate Ukrainian nation. They have employed a range of tools including settler colonialism, blanket russification, artificial famine, and the ruthless suppression of Ukrainian national identity. ( "Ukraine is Russia": Medvedev reveals imperial ambitions fueling invasion)
Meanwhile, Putin's Russia is engaged in extinguishing Ukraine using the same tools described by Kuzio of settler colonialism, blanket russification, and ruthless suppression of Ukrainian national identity, as well as deportations, including the brutal deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children, for which arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's Commissioner for Children's Rights.
Shaun Walker writing in The Guardian describes Russia's ongoing large-scale destruction of Ukrainian society in the areas Russia controls. and how it affects individual Ukrainians living through it.
Ukraine is not Russia. It was not NATO expansion. Russia was not provoked. It was not Ukrainian Nazis, Poles, Anglo-Saxons, or the US. Russia is engaged in an old-fashioned imperial war of conquest, with Russia's usual nasty practices intended to extinguish the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian people.
Alone Ukraine will suffer the same fate as generations of Ukrainians have suffered before. With Western support and global condemnation of /Russia's aggression, Ukraine can survive as an independent state.
