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Ukraine 2014 and For the Children

With the crossing of 32 Russian tanks and 30 armored vehicles into Ukraine a few days ago and the continuing influx of heavy arms and military personnel, Vladimir Putin has openly invaded yet another sovereign country. This, after many months of instigating instability, first in Crimea―which he then annexed―and then in the Eastern Ukrainian ‘oblasts’ of Donetsk and Lukhansk, resulting in the loss of more than 4000 lives since April, and the creation with sham elections of the Donetsk and Lukhansk People’s Republics. These statelets, much as the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia which earlier Russian intervention hived off from an independent Georgia, are now effectively parts of a larger Russian Republic controlled by Putin and his former KGB henchmen. Much as Hitler did when he marched into Czechoslovakia in 1938, Putin is taking advantage of an international situation where the rest of Europe is weakened by internal economic and social problems and the United States is rightly going through a period of aversion to spreading its wings internationally.

It is against this sorry background of renewed Russian aggression that my memoir, FOR THE CHILDREN, is being published thanks to Guy Boulianne and Editions Dedicaces (watch for it!). The book tells the story of my family’s escape from Communist Hungary during the dying days of the 1956 Revolution and the search by my parents for the opportunity to raise their children in peace and freedom. Hungary’s search for freedom was crushed by the invasion of more than 2000 Soviet tanks and Soviet hegemony was re-imposed―much as a different version of Soviet style hegemony is being renewed in eastern and southern Ukraine and other regions on the periphery of Russia. While there is no easy solution, it is worth recalling that this kind of blatant aggression and adventurism does, at the very least, result in the negation of freedom and peace for many, and if emboldened through no response, in large scale conflict, as was the case with Hitler’s successive transgressions against neighboring European states and the several iterations of Soviet Russia pursuing hegemony over its periphery.