A rest from China this week, although I spent last week in Chengdu and Chongqing and will post a summary of the trip together with some new thinking in the next few days.
Today, instead, something on the Ukraine. My interest in this was piqued by the decision of many world leaders to stay away from Russia’s WWII 70th-anniversary rememberance ceremonies citing Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine as the reason. Personally, I have no strong views on Mr. Putin and no first hand information that allows me to confirm or refute the persistently negative reports about his adminstration in the Western media.
That the Russian people suffered horribbly though in part to provide me today with a life of peace, liberty and freedom is an indusputable historic fact and so I thought the decision to not attend by many world leaders who represent people with a similiar debt seemed a petty insult to the Russian people (that won’t be forgotton quickly). I could only see harm in this decision and that it let Mr. Xi Jinping take the limelight so spectacularly seemed like a perfect own-goal.
Rant over. The link below will take you to an unashamedly partisn view of the situaton in the Ukraine in an essay from Ms. Chrystia Freeland, a journalist who has recently found herself on a list of banned persons by the Russian authorities.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2015/myukraine
I hadn’t appreciated how complex and nuanced the situation is. What emerges from Ms. Freeland’s writing though is a picture of the kind of intractable and sad situations we see in some other parts of the world. In reading this my thoughts drifted through Northern Ireland, Palestine and parts of the Balkans.
Although Ms. Freeland wants to follow the Beastly-Russians-Plucky-Ukraninans narrative popular in the Western press, for me at least, she ends up painting a picture of a very old, possibly impossible to fix, problem that’s just going through another hearbreaking iteration.
Happy Sunday to all; which it surely is for those of us lucky enough to live in the wonderful world that the sacrifice of tens of millions so recently has made possible.