Choosing Between Romanticizing Ukraine And Common Sense

The latest front in the war between Russia and Ukraine is being fought with a classic painting. As The New York Times reports, a photo in which present-day Ukrainian soldiers assume the poses of the Cossacks in Ilya Repin’s 1891 painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey” has become an icon of patriotism.

According to the Times, the painting is “familiar to most Ukrainians, with reproductions adorning many family homes” and often in “a place of honor” next to Christian Orthodox religious icons. They see the feared mounted “freebooters”—the meaning of the word in both Ukrainian and Russian—as reflecting not just part of the history of their country but the essence of Ukrainian nationalism. And they deeply resent the fact that Russians see the Cossack spirit as part of their patrimony, too, which Ukrainians claim is a form of cultural appropriation.

The question of which side in this bloody conflict truly owns the heritage of the Cossacks may not be one that anyone outside of either Ukraine or Russia may care about. But the way the Ukrainian cause has been romanticized by many in the West, including a significant portion of the Jewish community, does matter. That’s especially true when you consider that this group’s history—and in particular, that of the Zaporozhian Cossacks—was largely characterized by bloodthirsty antisemitism and involvement in some of the worst massacres of Jews from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

A relevant discussion

This is just one aspect of the discussion about Ukraine. Corporate liberal media outlets are quick to probe for and allege antisemitism when it can be linked, however dubiously, to political figures they oppose, like President-elect Donald Trump. But their lack of interest in the long record of Ukrainian antisemitism that stretches from the Middle Ages through the Holocaust to its echoes in our own time is nothing short of remarkable. Indeed, one can only wonder why those who wrote or edited the feature about the importance of the painting never bothered to do even the most cursory form of research into the association of the Zaporozhian Cossacks with the word “pogrom.”

Whether or not Ukrainian nationalism is indistinguishable from American ideas of liberty or no different from Israel’s efforts to defend itself against terrorism is increasingly relevant to the discussion about the conflict. It’s a major element in the debate about Trump’s interest in ending this costly stalemate once he takes office on Jan. 20.

Any discussion about the Russia-Ukraine war must start with an acknowledgement that the blame for its start is solely the responsibility of Russia and its authoritarian leader, President Vladimir Putin. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, was as illegal as it was brutal. That effort to extinguish Ukrainian independence was deplorable, and Kyiv’s resolute and successful resistance, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, rightly earned the world’s admiration.

But once Ukraine had repelled Russia’s initial invasion, the priority for world leaders should have been to seek to end the war. Instead, the Biden administration, abetted by some in the Republican establishment, embraced the war as—in the words of former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell—“the most important thing” happening in the world. Both Democrats and some Republicans have dismissed any criticism of their stand on Ukraine as Russian propaganda and smeared the growing number of dissenters on the issue as, at best, dupes of Putin, or at worst, his agents.

U.S. involvement in Ukraine

The United States has given at least $175 billion in aid to the Ukrainians since the war began with more on the way. That’s a total that dwarfs the amount of assistance Israel has received—both since Oct. 7, 2023, when it was infiltrated and attacked by Hamas terrorists, and even the supposedly controversial annual military aid package it received before then. It should also be noted that unlike most of the money sent to Kyiv, almost all American aid to Jerusalem is spent in the United States on armaments. Nor should it be forgotten that, unlike the situation with Israel, there is no existing system of accounting for exactly where and how American taxpayer money is being spent in Ukraine.

The conflict quickly degenerated into a horrific stalemate, replete with World War I-style trench warfare. At that point, Ukraine’s goal was not a return to the status quo of February 2022. It became a drive, nominally backed by the United States and its European allies, to take back territories Putin seized in 2014 at a time when neither the Obama administration nor the American people cared much about it.

Whether Ukraine ought to control the Donbas region or the Crimea (neither of which is historically Ukrainian) is of great interest to both Kyiv and Moscow. Forcible conquests of land across internationally recognized borders ought not to be sanctioned. Still, the notion that this particular issue is a matter of American national security is risible.

Many on the left have embraced the war because they identified Ukraine with the first attempt by Democrats to impeach Trump in 2020. Some on the right did so out of what can only be described as nostalgia for the simpler bipolar world of the Cold War in which the forces of the now defunct Soviet-run Warsaw Pact were poised to overrun Western Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This sort of alarmism about Putin’s Russia as the reincarnation of the Soviet Union or as part of a new Axis of evil was ludicrous. Putin may dream of recreating the empires of the tsars and their Soviet successors. But if the Russian army couldn’t conquer Ukraine, how can it possibly even consider war with NATO countries, let alone constitute a potent threat to them?

A war that should end

Trump’s desire to end the war is laudable since it has resulted in terrible suffering to the Ukrainians and great loss of life on both sides. It is derided, however, by those who assert that victory over Russia is more important, even though no one is able to define what exactly a victory over a nuclear power would look like or why the inevitable chaos of a theoretical post-Putin Russia after a total Ukrainian victory would be in the West’s interest.

The terms of a peace deal have been obvious from the start. International guarantees of Ukrainian independence will be renewed, and Putin will have to accept that he will never be allowed to install a puppet regime there. But Kyiv will have to content itself with that and pledges of aid for post-war reconstruction. Zelenskyy’s fantasy of a return of Crimea and the Donbas. So will NATO membership for Ukraine, which would ensure that the conflict would continue to simmer and create the potential for an unimaginable war with the West, possibly involving nuclear weapons.

The alternative is an endless unwinnable war that is bleeding both nations, especially Ukraine, dry. The idea that the United States should be doing anything but seeking to end this conflict that distracts the West from its primary geostrategic threat, which comes from Communist China and not a weak authoritarian Russia, would be a terrible blunder.

The Biden administration failed to see this and continued to double down on funding a pointless struggle while often decrying the need to work for peace. A major factor was the romanticization of the Ukrainian cause that became an unchallengeable orthodoxy in the West.

A central feature in this was the questionable claim that Zelenskyy was a 21st-century version of Winston Churchill. While his leadership of the Ukrainian war effort in its early stages was exemplary, the notion that he is the equivalent of a figure who saved Western civilization—let alone the contemporary avatar of the fight for democracy—doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Zelenskyy has his virtues, but he is the leader of a nation that is every bit as corrupt and dominated by shady oligarchs who dominate politics and the economy as every other post-Soviet republic. He has suspended democratic rights of dissent and elections, closed churches and is presiding over a security state apparatus that rivals that of Putin.

Denying Ukrainian antisemitism

Among other factors, his Jewish origins have allowed him to present himself as a clean break from Ukraine’s dark past. And that is where the discussion of the ongoing Ukrainian veneration for its vile history of antisemitism comes in.

Jew-hatred plays a despicable role in Russian history and culture, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries; denial of this was endemic during the Soviet era and has continued under Putin’s authoritarian regime. But antisemitism has been inextricably tied to the cause of Ukrainian independence for centuries, and denial of that has been central to the effort to boost Kyiv’s cause.

Zelenskyy has been at the heart of that effort.

It was fully on display in his 2022 address to Israel’s Knesset when he had the chutzpah to scold the Jewish state for not enthusiastically joining the war against Russia. He not only claimed that Putin’s war was no different from the German Nazi quest for the conquest of Europe and the annihilation of the Jews but falsely asserted that Ukrainians stood in solidarity with the Jews then and that this obligates Israel to aid Kyiv now. The truth is that the Ukrainians were among the most ardent collaborators with the Nazi regime and took an active part in the rounding up and the mass murder of Jews, including the infamous Babi Yar massacre outside Kyiv in September 1941.

The speech could only be described as Holocaust denial. Since he had already been anointed as the new Churchill, however, the Western media gave him a pass for it.

If the antisemitism that was integral to Ukrainian nationalist movements in the past were disavowed by contemporary Ukrainians and their state, their history would not be an issue. Yet while Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 is represented as a repudiation of the country’s past, Ukraine continues to laud those who participated in the slaughter of Jews, such as the Zaporozhian Cossacks, as heroes.

The Ukrainian state honors the memory of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the 17th military leader of Ukrainian Cossacks who led an uprising against the Polish/Lithuanian kingdom that then ruled much of the country. Khmelnitsky is best known to Jews for the massacres of Ukrainian and Polish Jews, which he organized and led, and which are immortalized in modern literature by books like Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave. This was the worst disaster to befall European Jewry from the Crusades to the Holocaust; historians estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were slaughtered by Khmelnitsky’s Cossack followers while thousands of others were enslaved or held for ransom.

Even so, the Ukrainian Republic named its highest military honor after Khmelnitsky in 1995, and its current Jewish president, who is protected by a unit that is named after the Cossack murderer, has awarded it to his soldiers. Khmelnitsky also appears on Ukrainian currency.

The Ukrainians also embrace the memory of one of the leaders of the republic that was declared in Ukraine in 1919 after the collapse of the tsarist empire. During the course of the war that it lost to the Russian Bolshevik regime that absorbed Ukraine, Symon Petlura, the head of Ukrainian forces, led pogroms that were responsible for the deaths of as many as 70,000 Jews.

Another Ukrainian hero is Stepan Bandera, a nationalist who led forces that collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. The Nazis would ultimately treat the Ukrainians with the same contempt and brutality as other non-Germans. But like many Ukrainians, Bandera was eager to ally himself with anyone who opposed the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin, which had murdered millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor terror famine. Approximately 250,000 Ukrainians joined collaborationist forces that fought with the Nazis or served as guards in the death camps where Jews were exterminated.

A dishonest appeal

Ukrainians can honor anyone they like. So can the Russians, many of whom (including Putin) venerate the memory of Stalin, who murdered millions and was a vicious antisemite.

But can a nation that considers the Cossacks as its role model credibly appeal to Americans to treat their national cause as akin to that of George Washington? Can a country that won’t come clean about its antisemitic past lecture Jews about their obligation to come to their aid? The same can be said about misleading arguments that Ukraine’s efforts to regain the Donbas and Crimea are comparable to the post-Oct. 7 war the Jewish state is currently waging to stave off the efforts of Iran and its terrorist proxies to enact a second Holocaust.

None of this means that Americans should hand Ukraine over to Putin, as some of Trump’s critics claim he will do. Washington should work to achieve a stable settlement that will not deprive Ukrainians of their right to self-determination.

The problem is not the argument in favor of efforts to ensure that an independent state is not destroyed.

Rather, it is the dishonest way that supporters of Ukraine and Zelenskky have not only covered up or ignored the wide gap between Kyiv’s version of democracy and that of the West, but also their stubborn clinging to their antisemitic history and its symbols. A willingness to tell the truth about this shouldn’t be treated as Russian “disinformation.” Trump’s embrace of a common-sense realist policy toward Ukraine and Russia is not a betrayal of American values. A nation that still believes that Cossacks who treated the murder of Jews as their favorite pastime are heroes is in no position to pretend that they deserve the unquestioned support of the West or of the Jewish people.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.