Mike Conboy: Blaming U.S. for war in Ukraine misguided

I applaud writer Patricia Greene’s efforts to support peace in the world wherever it is threatened [“There would be no war in Ukraine without the U.S.,” Recorder, March 23], but I am unconvinced of the claim stated in the headline of her column. I am not a scholar of Russian history, and do not even insinuate such a formal education, but I react to that headline as hyperbolic.

With regard to U.S. formal involvement in the present war in Ukraine, one might claim that that involvement officially started with the U.S. warnings to Ukraine of the Russian military buildup on its northern and eastern borders: the so-called Russian military exercises. I concede up front that there were probably political and other comments made by U.S. government and White House insiders beforehand, but this seems to be the first official involvement.

But is this really U.S. war-mongering? Did the U.S. not just recently warn Moscow of likely lethal threats coming its way? (seen in the Moscow theater massacre in recent days.) Is this not an effort at peace-keeping by the government the writer accuses of the contrary?And perhaps even more unfair is the lead-in sentence in her piece about the huge number of Russians living within the national borders of post-1991 Ukraine (borders agreed to by Russian central leadership). This Russian population was/is largely the residue of hundreds of years of, first, Russification (by seeding large ethnic Russian enclaves in non-Russian republics to solidify the Russian empire); and, later, Sovietization — that had the same purpose.

Even this long history of residency does not confer these Russian communities with any right to claims of independence from Ukraine, and right to Russian “protection.” The piece proceeds with other easily refutable statements about history: including an indirect reference to claims made in a Putin white paper about the “proper” history of Russia and its incorporated non-Russian parts. Please, keep up the peace-making work – but don’t be so over-zealous to the point of unintentionally becoming a Putin spokesperson. We (U.S.) have our flaws and our missteps, but I think blaming the outright, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on the United States is inaccurate and not helpful.

Mike Conboy

South Deerfield