If you need confirmation of how connected the world is, consider that here in Columbus, we have Ukrainian students, Ukrainian immigrants who make their homes and businesses here, and local clergy who have done mission work in Ukraine and vow to return when this horrible war of aggression launched by madman Vladimir Putin is over.
The Republic staff has brought you many stories of Ukrainians in Columbus and local people with ties in Ukraine. Their experiences connect to our own love of freedom.
For instance, Ivan Bondar is a foreign exchange student at Columbus East High School from Odesa, Ukraine. He told The Republic’s Jana Wiersema that each day begins with a call to his mom back home.
“You can hear the words ‘I love you, goodbye, please pray for us’ almost every day, because it’s just a nightmare,” Bondar said. “They’re shooting the city buildings, not even only the military stuff … schools, hospitals, buildings — like city buildings, where people just live — are getting exploded because of the bombs dropped from the planes or just from the missiles.”
“I’m looking only at the facts,” he said. “And the fact is, right now, Russia is invading my country.”
That’s a fact. Let’s talk about facts. Fact is, the international community sees this for what it is: a ruthless dictator’s unprovoked war of choice that is killing innocent civilians. Nearly every nation in the world has condemned and isolated Putin’s Russia.
Facts. Plain as day.
But if you’re a typical Russian citizen, you won’t hear those facts.
Putin, like any authoritarian thug, perversely reads George Orwell’s “1984” as a how-to manual: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Rather than being repulsed, Putin embraces such “doublespeak.”
Fact is, in Putin’s Russia, the words “war” and “invasion” are outlawed in media coverage describing Russia’s war and invasion of Ukraine. Use them and you face 15 years in the gulag or worse. Putin’s propagandists must say “special military operation” to describe the invasion and war.
Behaving like Hitler, Putin calls the Ukrainians the Nazis. The New York Times recently documented how Russian media twists reality. On Russian state media, which is all that’s left, “Putin himself referred to the government in Kyiv as Nazis about 10 times, … and the word is repeated endlessly on every broadcast,” the Times reported. “To reinforce the idea, news channels frequently show black and white footage of actual Nazis.”
How wretched. Yet how typical of Putin’s sociopathic rule.
The Times found a sliver lining, though: Russia’s young people. Empowered by connection, they know from history and experience to trust their own eyes and ears. Defying Putin, they are using their phones to spread videos of the war and invasion in Ukraine, as well as speeches by its heroic president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Fact is, Putin notwithstanding, Russians share strong fraternal bonds with Ukrainians. The Times reported an anecdote of an ordinary Russian on a bus talking on her phone with a frightened friend in Ukraine, “with sirens wailing in the background. She put the call on speaker phone and the whole bus went silent to listen. Nobody complained.”
Fact is, truth and righteousness is on the side of the brave people of Ukraine, here and abroad. We stand with them.
