All wars claim victims beyond the battlefields. As they drag on and show its devastating effects Regarding civilian populations, public opinion tends to react in a binary way, for or against the peoples concerned, as if they were responsible for the deaths caused by the armies. The result usually translates into philias and phobias that simplify the causes of the conflict and they create the conditions for racist outbreaks that are as unfair as they are dangerous. The first symptoms of this drift around the war in Ukraine have already appeared, which must be combated by public authorities and the media. The barbarities committed by the Russian army in several Ukrainian towns, the images of civilian neighborhoods destroyed by bombs, the difficulties that these troops pose to the evacuation of civilians and the threatening determination of Vladimir Putin in using all the means at their disposal to occupy a sovereign country have created a logical alarm in world public opinion. However, this alarm should not fuel prejudice towards the Russian people, as if they were responsible for the barbarism that is falling on Ukraine.
The manifestations of stigmatization of Russians, and of what is Russian, that have occurred in various European countries, constitute an alarm that must be combated from society and from public powers. Highlighting the opposition to Putin’s war expressed by many Russian citizens – at the cost of his imprisonment -, and among Russian migrant communities. In Spain, and in Catalonia itself, some of the Russians who live among us have participated in solidarity actions with Ukraine that constitute the best response to the barbarism unleashed by Putin.
So absurd and pernicious are the displays of Russophobia as the Russophilia traits that nest in some political attitudes of the Spanish extreme left based on stereotypes that settled in European public opinion around the decisive role played by the Red Army in the defeat of Nazism. It is certainly not easy to accept that the same army has gone from liberating to occupying or from fighting fascism to doing so against a sovereign people, under the orders of an increasingly isolated and autistic dictator.
This is not about preventing discussion of Russian aggression, its complex background and how best to deal with it. And even less to cut freedom of expression in the name of war. To do so would be to compete with Putin’s methods, which imprison protesters, shut down independent media and see an enemy of the fatherland in any citizen who does not agree with his methods. However, in some of the reticence that has been expressed in Spain against sending weapons to the Ukrainian army lies the idea that a Russian aggressor deserves a different treatment than he deserved, let’s say, United States during the Vietnam War. The effort to maintain ‘not to the war’ from the times of the Iraq war, without singling out Putin, is significant. The Russians are not responsible for what happens in the Ukraine, but the actions of Vladimir Putin must be treated with the same determination that the actions of any invader deserved. Putin is not heir to the Russians who defended Stalingrad. It is a product of Stalinism that massacred millions of Russians and that has given birth to a despotic regime, contrary to democracy and the sovereignty of the peoples.