Ukraine

 

  Ukraine is calling for ammo and spare parts. Jets are nice as are systems to shoot down missiles, but tanks and bullets are what is really needed to stop an invader. 

  It was on this day in 1919 that Ukraine asked for help from the victors of WWI to fight off the Bolsheviks. Russia had fallen into civil war two years earlier and the Ukrainians took the opportunity to declare their independence. The Bolsheviks won the war and reattached Ukraine to the new Soviet Union.

  Seventy years later Ukraine got another chance, and things went better until last year when Russia decided to start empire building again. Ukraine is an interesting place.  It's name means borderland. The horse was first domesticated there and its thought to be the point of dispersion for the Indo-European languages. 

  The early settlers were migrants out of the Caucasus Mountains. Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians came and went. The Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines built colonies along the Black Sea and traded with the natives. The Goths and Huns came and left to sack Rome. The Slavs, ancestors to the Ukrainians and Russians of today, did not arrive until the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. 

  President Putin says Russians and Ukrainians are the same people. He has a point. Western Russia was ruled from Kyiv (Kiev) for much of the 10th and 11th centuries. The first ruler of this kingdom was Vladimir the Great after whom Putin must be modeling himself. But much water has flown down the Dnieper since those days. 

  What Putin is doing is as though the South had won our Civil War in 1865 and Grover Cleveland came along in 1895 and invaded the Confederate States in order to reunite the Union. "We're all good Anglo-Saxons," he might have said, and he would have been condemned by the international community. But would the international community have sent help to the South? Perhaps if the Allies had helped Ukraine back in 1919, we wouldn't be having this tragedy today.  

Putin Go Home!