Ukraine

Morality is above politics. At this point it is necessary for Russia to stop the war. The deliberate targeting of civilians in war is a war crime. American and NATO criticism of Russia is enormously hypocritical considering the targeting of American bombing of civilians in Serbia and Iraq. Regardless, two wrongs do not make a right.

There is conflicting information about what is happening in Ukraine. The existence of bio labs seems to be a fact despite denials by Washington. The biases of the western media against Russia is also a fact.

On the other hand, it is also a fact that Russia invaded Ukraine. The war must end and this will give both parties the opportunity to make their cases. Politically, the political leanings of this blog have been expressed very often over the past two years.

What matters first and foremost are the lives of people on the ground in Ukraine who either been killed or have left their homes. It should also matter to the Russians that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has condemned the war and there is a serious movement in Ukraine to break away from the Patriarch of Moscow. Russia’s claims to political leadership in Orthodoxy (which this blog champions) is being seriously compromised by the unceasing war in Ukraine.

Orthodox Christians were correctly outraged in 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia on Orthodox Pascha. Russia is bombing another Orthodox country during the great fast. It will not serve Russia well if the bombing of Ukraine continues into Pascha.

The war needs to end now and deescalation should be the goal of an Orthodox leader. The example of Byzantine Emperors who usually tried to avoid wars should have been the example of Russia. War making has usually been the love of western aggression and imperialism.

The Crusader genocide and crimes against Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem filled the Greek Orthodox with disgust and revulsion. Now, there are certain similarities between the subsequent Crusader attack on Constantinople in 1204 and NATO’s expansion to the Russian border in our own day. Ukrainian civilians however are not responsible for the acts of aggression emanating from NATO.

The Russians should learn from the self destructive actions of the Byzantine Empire which devoured itself in its final centuries through repeated miscalculations and civil wars. The inter Orthodox war in Ukraine is similar to the civil wars between Orthodox Greeks in Byzantium and the wars between the Greeks and the Serbs and Bulgarians.

The major beneficiary then was the Ottoman Empire. The war in Ukraine strengthens NATO and Turkey over the long term. Russia should end the war now.