Join Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc as they look at some recent news stories on Biden, Ukraine, the Democrats, ActBlue, city mayors before Congress, and on Syria. VDH talks about the significance of World War I for the middle segment of this Saturday edition.
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Your assertions about language and religion in Ukraine are in the same vein as your statements calling for elections in Ukraine. That professor Hanson is an outrageous demand for several reasons:
1. The Ukrainian constitution prohibits holding elections during a state of war or martial law.
2. Russia occupies one-fifth of Ukraine, and 10 to 12 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced or fled the country.
3. If an election were held where only a fraction of Ukrainian citizens voted, the results could be disputed by those who did not like the outcome.
4. Since the unfortunate 28 February meeting in the White, President Zelensky’s rating shot up to nearly 70%, according to a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. This marks a 10% increase from the previous month.
Dear Prof. Hansen
In your ART19 interview, you covered many topics, but the one that interested me was your opinion on the war in Ukraine. Although you seem to be changing your views on the war, you continue to repeat canards straight from the Kremlin playbook.
You talk about US experts poring over maps of Ukraine to determine which areas are Russian-speaking – Orthodox. The problem with such an exercise is that it equates Russian speakers with Russians. Surely you must be aware that over 80% of Ukrainians speak Russian—a legacy of the Soviet occupation. However, not only do they not consider themselves Russians, they are ardent Ukrainian patriots. Before the war only 12% of residents of Ukraine identified themselves as Russian. After three years of war, that percentage slipped to 2%. It is the Russian speakers living in eastern Ukraine that have suffered most from the ravages of Russia’s genocidal invasion and have become the most vocal foes of Putin and Russia.
You also mistakenly equate Orthodoxy with the Russian Orthodox Church. It ignores the fact that based on surveys most Orthodox in Ukraine are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate and only a small part associates with the Moscow Patriarchate. The Moscow branch of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine has become a fifth column controlled by Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB agent who tells Russian soldiers in Ukraine to kill as many Ukrainians as they can.
[More to come]