A war for the soul of humanity

Ukrainian-American Journalist-activist David Kirichenko’s account of a trip to the frontlines earlier in the Ukraine War to distribute donated aid goods appears in the More News section on the Asia Times homepage. In this opinion piece, he goes into his family background and explains his views of history and the war.

As a child, I had always known that I would play a role in helping the Ukrainian people. And the same spirit that I felt as a child I still feel today. Among nearly two dozen grandchildren, I was the only grandchild who would sit and listen to my grandpa, Vasiliy Kirichenko, tell endless stories about his life experiences. His father, my great-grandfather, had been executed by the NKVD, the precursor to the Soviet-era KGB.

The Soviet government murdered my great-grandfather because of his Christian faith and refusal to bend to the will of communist officials. He had been captured during World War I and converted by German Protestants while he was a prisoner of war.

Before and after his conversion to pacifism, members of my Ukrainian family were forced to fight for the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in such conflicts as the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, World War I, the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-40 and World War II.

My grandfather told me about the manmade Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 (the Holodomor), in which the Soviet Union starved millions of Ukrainians to death. Scholars debate whether that amounted to genocide, but the case is strong that it was no mere byproduct of Soviet economic policy. Rather, the killing was inflicted in whole or in part in order to crush the Ukrainian countryside’s opposition to Stalinist collectivization.

That was a resistance founded in Ukraine’s desire for freedom,