there is not a single European country now which is afraid of the current wave of refugees.”Īpparently I’m not the only one conflicted. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people. Why this transformation? I’ll let Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov tell it: “These are not the refugees we are used to,” he said in February. Poland and Hungary, recently accused of using tear gas and water cannons on Syrian refugees, now welcome hundreds of thousands of fleeing Ukrainians. Why did we not respond this way for Syria when the same tyrant bombed their cities into rubble? Or for the Afghanis, the Rohingya, the Rwandans? The hypocrisy is stark. Putin, who worked so hard to divide us, has given us our most unanimous cause since 9/11 - at the mere cost of destroying a country of 40 million people.Īnd yet on the other side of the veil there are ominous signs. Now we’ve awoken from our slumber, to things thought impossible only weeks ago: Putin a pariah oligarchs scrambling to save their yachts an outpouring of money, arms and volunteer soldiers for Ukraine. Yet despite this long rap sheet, many in the West chose not to believe that Putin was who he had been telling us he was all along.īut history was not dead, just sleeping. The names of his atrocities are infamous: Grozny, South Ossetia, Crimea, Aleppo. However, I also find cause for deep questioning of what this war has revealed about our so-called “western values.”Īs Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has never hidden who he is. Some will be recognized by most westerners: horror at the destruction, and admiration for the Ukrainian people. I look at the current violence in Ukraine with a conflicted mix of feelings.
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