"You can meet with your friends... If you don't understand something you can raise your hand and ask... The teacher can make sure you understand… You can be together..."
Snyder asks some nine year-old Ukrainian students attending school twenty miles from the front in the war with Russia, learning in basement-bunker classrooms, why they preferred going to school in these circumstances as opposed to distant learning on computers. The above quote compiles some of their responses.
The funny part of this, amidst so many unfunny tragic sad parts, is a realization that kicked in for me teaching remotely in the spring of 2020. There are exceptions, maybe as high as 20 to 25% of kids that actually like the remote setup and got more done that way, and that got ignored in the illiberal spasm about remote learning in the aftermath of peak Covid, but for super majorities of students remote learning exposed the fact that a basic school motivation for most high school students was going to school to be together, in person, with their friends, classmates, and teacher. Zoom wasn't cutting it.
Here the rule seems to be holding up 20 miles from the front of a brutal war!
Some deep world history context on Ukraine's long-standing connections with western Europe:
"The Dnipro River itself has a Scythian name. The Scythians were a great power of antiquity, respected by Herodotus for having defeated the Persians. The military power of the Scythians, at its height, would have been greater than all of the contemporary Greek city-states put together. And Greeks and Scythians did fight; this is the source of our cultural memory of Amazons, who were, in reality, Scythian female warriors.
In Greek myth the great heroes encounter Amazons. In the Scythian side, the story seems to have been that Hercules had an encounter with their snake goddess (on Khortytsia) that founded the Scythian people.
That generative story suggests the mainstream of Scythian-Greek history. What we recall as classical Greek civilization existed in an economic and cultural synthesis with the Scythians, people who inhabited the lands north of the Black Sea, what is now Ukraine. Insofar as we see ancient Greece as part of our tradition, we should also see the Scythians, Khortytsia, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.
The Scythians were succeeded in the lands of Ukraine by the Goths, a Germanic people we associate with the fall of Rome. After centuries of apparent dominance and prosperity, they were driven west from what is now Ukraine by the Huns in AD 376. Soon thereafter however the Goths defeated a Roman force, killed a Roman emperor, and sacked Rome (although, St. Augustine tells us, they spared the churches).
Thereafter Goths founded and ruled states in what is now Italy, France, and most notably Spain. The state that the Spanish regard as foundational, that is, the state that Ferdinand and Isabella "reconquered" in 1492, was a Gothic kingdom, ruled by people whose descendants came from Ukraine.
[But]...as with the rise of Greece, so with the fall of Rome: the history of Europe and the world is incomprehensible without peoples from what is now Ukraine.
The main thrust of the Scandinavian exploration than began c. 700 AD was actually not the west but the east. For almost half a milennium Vikings raided and traded across a huge swatch of eastern Europe and western Asia. Perhaps their greatest achievement was the establishment of a state in Kyiv. Its most ambitious ruler was the also the greatest Viking warlord, Sveinald or Sviatoslav. He made war across a huge range of territory, from the Balkans to the Volga. He seems to have been killed, returning from the Balkans, trying to cross the cataracts that can be seen from Khortytsia.
Sviatoslav was the father of Valdamar, remembered by Ukrainians as Volodymyr. The history of Kyiv is thus an integral part of the history of Scandinavia as well as that of Ukraine.
Once again, though, the history is stronger than the memory. How many Danes know that their great medieval king, Valdamar I, was a direct descendant of Valdemar/Volodymyr of Kyiv? And it is not only history but story. The Norse myths, like the Greek ones, have much to do with these lands."
Timothy Snyder & Thinking About
In other words, why shouldn't Ukraine want closer security ties with NATO? Has NATO ever threatened Russia's territorial sovereignty? No. Has Russia threatened the independence of Ukraine and its other European neighbors? Yes. Multiple times. Why did Finland and Sweden move to join NATO as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine?
The great powers/great game global politics of the 19th century that Grump & Leon are trying to revive, military buildup, an arm's race, fighting over the spoils of global empire, led directly to two world wars in the early 20th century that killed at least 75-80 million people.
This is history we ignore at the world's peril.
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