Support Ukraine because of the numbers

The world woke up after World War II horrified by the Holocaust. Because of its failure to prevent genocide, the United Nations and the West backed the formation of a Jewish nation to be a safe haven. Unfortunately, Israel has had to fight to protect their homeland with continued backing from the US.

I argue that we must do the same for Ukraine.

Why should the World support an independent Ukraine with the same vigor as Israel? Simple, it’s because of the numbers.

In the 1920s, there were approximately thirty-five million¹ Ukrainians and seventy-eight million⁴ Russians.

In the 1930s, to break the will of the Ukrainian farmer and implement collectivization of farms across the Ukrainian SSR, Stalin created a man-made famine called the Holodomor, which killed close to six million² Ukrainians.

In the 1940s, approximately two million³ Ukrainians were kidnapped by Nazis to work as slave laborers in Germany with some not returning home. Many of the most vicious and life-extinguishing battles of World War II were fought on Ukrainian soil with a loss of ten million³ Ukrainians between 1939 to 1945 leaving thirty-seven million¹.

By the mid-1990s when I lived in Ukraine, there were fifty-million people living there and one-hundred-fifty million⁴ in Russia.

In February 2022, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there were only forty-million³ people living in Ukraine. Many had left because of the chaos caused by the Russian-supported civil war in the Donbas.

Now there are estimates that there are perhaps thirty-million Ukrainians in Ukraine, less than in 1920.

How many Ukrainians will the world let die or leave before we realize Russia has been committing genocide against this nation for over a century? When will the United Nations and the West wake up like we did after World War II and admit a strong homeland for Ukrainians is as vital as one is for Israel?

With the world meeting this week at the United Nations General Assembly and the petty US House of Representatives squabbling over defunding Ukraine, I say enough!

Give Ukraine all the air support and long-range missiles they need to win this war over Russia already!

If not, then maybe in a few years, there will only be fifteen million Ukrainians, or maybe none as they’ll all be Russian by then. Does anyone care anymore?

¹ Population of the Ukraine — 1900/2022 — (statisticsanddata.org); Censuses in Ukraine — Wikipedia

² Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History Second Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 415

³ Did Hitler or Stalin Kill More Ukrainians in World War II? — Ukraine Today .org

⁴Demographics of the Soviet Union — Wikipedia; Russia Population 1950–2023 | MacroTrends