A blending of the Ukrainian flag and the watermelon that has become a symbol of Palestine.
A blending of the Ukrainian flag and the watermelon that has become a symbol of Palestine.

I have a placard I take to marches for Palestine. One side says, CEASEFIRE NOW. The other, From Ukraine to Palestine Occupation is a Crime. 

Two occupations. Two catastrophes. Sometimes, they seem to be mirror images of each other. Mariupol, Ukraine; Gaza City, Palestine. Maternity Hospital #3, Al-Shifa Hospital.

It’s been two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whether it’s The New York Times or Facebook pundits, folks are debating whether Ukraine should lay down its arms. This is due many argue, to a successful amped-up and highly sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.  While the EU last month approved a 54 Billion aid package to Ukraine, the right-wing-dominated U.S. Congress has been delaying a similar package. Meanwhile, Russia is gaining ground. 

But it’s actually been 10 years of war, eight of which were ignored by the rest of the world. The 2014 Russian invasion of Donbas and Crimea was Putin’s violent response to Ukrainian resistance against former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt Russian asset, overthrown via a people’s revolution. Ukrainians call it The Revolution of Dignity (then known as the “Euromaidan Revolution”). For four cold months, citizens from every walk of life congregated in the hundreds of thousands in squares across Ukraine. As a filmmaker, I observed the revolution through the lens of 2SLGBTQIA+ activists from Donbas who fled certain imprisonment at the hands of Russian government functionaries in Donbas (standard and left media called them “separatists“). Less known is the fact that, in 2013, rich oil reserves were discovered off Crimea’s shores, what the New York Times reported as “underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars.”

So here’s why it’s important, and also cool, to continue to support Ukraine, and to link the struggles for self-determination of Palestine and Ukraine.

1. Russia’s ‘de-Nazification’ propaganda is a smokescreen for large scale plunder. 

Let’s get this out of the way: Ukraine is no more  ‘Nazi’ (and in fact, far less so) than Italy, or Alberta. During its last democratic election  in 2019, less than three per cent of the population voted for the far-right;  while the  U.S., and later Hungary, Italy, Brazil and many other countries at the time acquired far-right governments. In 2021, Ukraine passed a law penalizing anti-Semitic acts. 

According to The Washington Post, “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” At this point, Russia has stolen over $12.4 trillion worth of Ukraine’s natural resources. This is a market-driven war, instigated by a federation whose own riches have been plundered by a culture of oligarchy and theocracy.

2. Ukraine has become a model of civil society, despite and even because of, the full-scale invasion. 

While military and humanitarian support from the West has been crucial, Ukrainians themselves have mobilized. For example, as Kateryna Zermebo writes in Carnegie Europe, “After Russia shelled forty Ukrainian cities on October 10, 2022, volunteer foundations raised $5.6 million in just twelve hours thanks to public donations.” Hundreds of volunteer organizations and NGO’s – mostly led by women -have sprung up: bicycle couriers delivering food and basic necessities to various areas of occupied Kherson, risking death; feminist organizations in Lviv gathering and sending menstrual and infant supplies to women in the occupied east. 

Civil society is defined, in Ukraine, less as participation in civic institutions (there’s been too much Russian backed corruption for that), and more as mutual aid, common action, and a sense of belonging to the people; citizenhood rather than nationalism. Mykhailo Zhernakov and Oksana Huss of the journal New Eastern Europe  observe that in Ukraine, civil society organizations (CSO’s) do  work generally thought to be the government’s job, including keeping a close eye on corruption. In some Ukrainian cities and towns, CSO’s vet municipal expenditures, ensuring that city funds go to rebuilding rather than into oligarchs’ pockets. 

Masha Gessen, in her recent piece for the New Yorker, admits that it is unfair to expect a wartime government to remove all corruption from its ranks. She quotes Armenian -Ukrainian parliamentarian Mustafa Nayem, who points out: “So.. you are telling me that you don’t have the resources to seize [Russian] assets on your territory, in London or New York? And we are supposed to have the resources to arrest people engaging in corruption?”

3. The persecution of 2SLGBTQIA+ & trans movements under Russian occupation should be a global concern. 

Conservative governments and left media pundits (like the problematic Code Pink) seem united these days, in calling for ‘peace talks’ and the ceding of occupied territories to Russia. Here’s what that would mean, not just to queers, but to anyone calling themselves Ukrainian and claiming the right to speak their own language: interrogation, torture, death, and/or deportation. 

Human rights observers from around the world were invited to Bucha to see the aftermath of occupation: mass graves; torture basements; the unburied dead on the street. Sofia Lapina, head of UKRAINEPRIDE notes that Vladimir Putin has denounced what he calls “ illegal “propaganda of homosexuality.” The Russian dictator characterizes the war in Ukraine as an existential struggle against the alleged Western practice of gay marriage, the spread of pedophilia and the legalization of gender-neutral pronouns. Ukrainian 2SLGBTIA+ organizations as well as my own film, “This Is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine” (2015) have documented how lesbians and gays in Russian occupied territories were persecuted. “Transgender people in the occupied territories are afraid to go out,” says Liapina. Why? Because they would be killed.

Russia recently strengthened its already brutal Gay Propaganda law, increasing its scope to include any expression or even mention of homosexuality. Putin has publicly described support of 2SLGBTQIA+ rights as “Satanism.” Gessen reports that  Ukraine, meanwhile, demonstrates “increased support for L.G.B.T.Q. rights: seventy-two per cent, compared with twenty-eight per cent in 2019. Unlike many other societies at war, Ukraine seems to have become more, rather than less, tolerant during the past two years.”Let’s not forget that Ukraine, the first post-Soviet country to legalize homosexuality, has never had an anti-gay law. 

Ukrainian feminist historian Oksana Kis writes about the sophisticated networks of feminist organizations across Ukraine. Women and queers are engaged not only in the war effort but in future work: revisioning and rebuilding a democratic, non-patriarchal Ukraine.

4. Race does not explain everything. 

Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book Caste, urges us to think beyond race, and to stop using it as an explanation for everything. The fact that Ukrainians are a white-majority country does not erase the fact of thousands of years of exploitation as a low-caste ethnicity in Eastern Europe. 

Ukraine has experienced colonization for some 800 years. During most of the 19th century they were known as “Little Russians’ and had almost no sense of national identity, not even a national language – all of that had been suppressed by the major colonizers – Austria, Poland and Ukraine. Putin is banking on this abject version of Ukraine. Fat women in babushka scarves endlessly cooking perogies? Men with handlebar moustaches and baggy pants doing comic little dances? If that’s your default image of Ukraine, it’s because of a powerful twentieth century Soviet propaganda machine. But these representations have serious consequences. “Genocide” argues former war crimes prosecutor Howard Morrison,” is often rooted in the way that one nation or one ethnic group views another and how it describes them,” 

Gessen reports that “an estimated four to six million Ukrainians are living under Russian occupation. At least four million are living in EU countries, a million more are living in Russia, and at least half a million are living elsewhere outside of Ukraine. Another four million have been internally displaced.” Disability, PTSD, poverty, divorce, and suicide are rampant in Ukraine. The relative privilege that Ukrainian refugees experience upon arrival in western countries reveals that countries can find the resources to support refugees. Instead of criticizing Ukrainian refugees, we should be demanding these rights for all refugees.

5. Ukrainians are not their government.

An increasing number of Ukrainians support Palestine. Al Jazeera reports that Ukrainian scholars, activists and artists recently expressed their solidarity with Palestinians in an open letter. Until October 2023, Ukraine consistently backed Palestine at the UN. Ukraine has urged the ICJ (International Court of Justice) to weigh in on the legality of Israeli occupation of Gaza. In 2016, Ukraine passed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestine. Last December, Zelensky recognized the independence of both Palestine and Ukraine. As Daria Subarova writes, Zelensky’s current “catastrophic” declaration of the right of Israel to defend itself makes little political sense, and Ukrainians know this. Indeed, Israel abstained from a UN vote denouncing the invasion of Crimea, and has never militarily supported Ukraine.

Ukrainians are starting to see the similarities between the genocides of Palestine and Ukraine; it is important that the progressive left be aware of this as well. We are stronger, more impactful, when we work together.

As for the cool part, even Bono supports Ukraine. At a concert last week, he said, of Ukrainians: “They’re fighting for freedom, not just theirs…Next week it’ll be Poland, Lithuania, East Germany…”

Let’s unite the struggles. From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime.

Marusya Bociurkiw

Dr. Marusya Bociurkiw is the author of 6 books and dozens of articles and essays, a longtime activist, and an award-winning filmmaker. She is Professor Emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University. She...