Letter: Want To Really Help Ukraine?

To the editor,

On the night leading into Feb. 24, my boyfriend and I happened to be up reading a transcript of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's speech announcing his "special military operation" had begun. We were bemused about him sounding off the rails and his incredibly offensive comparison of Ukrainian and Russian soccer hooligans fighting each other to tsarist pogroms. Moments after that I received a text message from a friend lamenting how saddened they were for Ukraine being attacked. In shock and confusion, I immediately went to Radio Free Europe where they announced in headlines that Putin had begun bombing Ukraine's major cities. My boyfriend and I barely slept at all that night switching between English and Russian language news sources as we witnessed the horrific nightmare unfolding. My boyfriend is a Russian immigrant himself and many of his parents' friends are Ukrainian immigrants, which is not unusual at all in most Russian-speaking immigrant communities like the ones in Stamford or Norwalk here in Connecticut. This makes watching this fratricidal attack even more devastating for them here.

One part that stuck with me from that fateful night was hearing Donald Trump say in a podcast interview that Putin's justification for his unprovoked attack on Ukraine was "genius" and that the same should be done at the U.S.'s southern border. He later tried to backpedal it when the court of public opinion swung heavily in favor of Ukraine's valiant resistance, but he and his lackeys like Tucker Carlson let us know a long time ago where they stand.

2019 feels like a lifetime ago nowadays, but that was when the name Volodymyr Zelenskyy became a big name in the news here. It was brought to light by whistleblowers that Donald Trump was threatening to withhold military aid from Ukraine if President Zelenskyy did not help concoct a baseless corruption investigation of the now-President Joe Biden's son to help his own reelection campaign. The whistleblowers were maligned by Republican politicians and right-wing commentators who also slandered Zelenskyy as a "corrupt Biden puppet." Donald Trump was rightfully impeached over this mobster-like blackmail but the GOP proved to be too afraid of Trump's cult of personality to throw him out of power.

While it is heartening to see a majority of the public rally behind a democratic nation fighting back against an authoritarian despot it feels incredibly insincere witnessing local Republican politicians once again do performative solidarity that is reminiscent of them using the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 as a photo-op and then not voting in favor of bills the protesters championed. Not to mention as their fellow politicians champion and pass into law hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills around the country not too dissimilar to the "homosexual propaganda" laws Vladimir Putin signed into law in 2014, make it harder for eligible voters to participate in the democratic process by voting, and endorse laws censoring the teaching of our nation's history in schools, which Putin did, too.

If people really want to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine and democracy at large I would tell them to make sure this November that the politicians who stood by silently as Donald Trump and his minions maligned Zelenskyy and our democratic elections be thrown to the trash heap of history.

Slava Ukraini! (Glory to Ukraine!)

Svobodu Naval'nomu! (Free Navalny!)

Rossiya bez Putina! (Russia without Putin!)

Leanne Harpin

Fairfield