Who will explain to this little girl why her father died?

Vladimir Putin started the war, but many others - in the West, even in Ukraine - enabled him. Lest we forget them and their role. Let's build a monument of shame for them.

(screen grab from video: Iван Токар / UKRINFORM)

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

This is a Ukrainian girl singing for her dead father, who was killed defending their country against the Russian invasion.

This little girl will never be able to share her thoughts, achievements, problems, laughs, and tears with her father. Her father will never again be able to be proud of his daughter or help her. He will never see her grow into a woman, get an education, or have a family of her own.

(video: Iван Токар / UKRINFORM)

Russians killed her father — one of perhaps 80,000 soldiers killed since the big invasion in 2022. They were sent to Ukraine by a bitter, corrupt, and brutal old man in Moscow because he wanted to hold on to his power and his loot. And millions of Russian are too afraid to tell him no, to tell him to go.

But Vladimir Putin and the Russians are far from alone. Starting 25 years ago when he took power, many in the West, all over the world, have happily been working with his horror regime. Maybe they could justify this earlier, but you would have thought that his invasion of Georgia in 2008 would have made them hesitate. You would be wrong. Many Westerners continued to deal with Putin - in business, politics, culture, and sports - even after he invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014. And it simply beggars belief that even after his full-scale invasion in 2022, there are some, and they are not few, who continue to deal with his regime, even break sanctions to do this, who continue to close their eyes and their mouths, who continue to believe that you can trust his regime. I would like them to explain their trust in Putin to this little girl and to explain to her how they can have any dealings with him at all.

I want to ask you all: What will we tell this little girl?

What will we tell her when she will be a young woman watching us once again happily trading with Russians, happily accepting their dirty, stolen money, happily accepting that they again will be buying palaces and luxury cars and diamonds and football clubs in the West, sponsoring our art exhibitions, sending their kids to our best universities and boarding schools, inviting our best sports people and artists to sing and dance for them?

How will we explain to this little girl what her father died for? Will we tell her the truth? That yes, Putin killed her father, but that he was aided and enabled by decades of our greed, our lack of ‘cojones’, that our political games were much more important than than her growing up having a father. And for this man to grow old having a daughter.

As a journalist and a political scientist who have lived a good part of my life in Ukraine, in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, I have one strong hope. No, it would be more correct to say that I hope strongly, but I don’t really believe in it. But let me share it with you anyway: I would like a monument built on Independence Square in Kyiv.

A monument of shame, a monument of explanation.

A monument for this little girl to go and look at. To hopefully understand why her father died. To understand who killed her father.

I hope that we will learn from this conflict – which did not start in February 2022, but in 2013-14 when the Ukrainians threw out (most of) their own corrupt leaders, demanding democracy and freedom, and freedom from corruption. Putin saw that, and he couldn’t allow that. The only way he knew was lies and wars, wars and lies.

My hope is that we for once will actually go back and look in detail at events, motives and actions of all involved, look at what people actually did during these 10 years and before: Look at the people who stood up and defended democracy and freedom and their country, look at the people who were quiet for as long as they possibly could be, sitting on the fence because they were benefitting from the old, corrupt system (in Russia and in Ukraine), either directly working for it, or using it to steal, or indirectly supporting it by trading with the corrupt oligarchs and with Russia.

The world needs to know who you are. This little girl deserves to know who you are.

Many of these people—politicians in the East and West, businessmen and women, pundits, think tanks, journalists, oligarchs, mini-oligarchs, artists, sports people—thousands of them in Ukraine, Europe, the U.S., all over the world—were happy to trade with the Putin regime, to sing and dance for the dictator—for decades—long, long after we for certain knew who and what he was.

I wish that somebody would make a monument with the names of all these people chiseled in stone: the open, the silent, and the hidden collaborators, the business people collaborators, the artist collaborators, the enablers from all walks of life, the people who lied on behalf of Putin and his ilk.

I hope that somebody would make a monument with all their names on – so this little girl can go and see their names, their positions, even photos, so she at least can get some sort of explanation for why she now will have to grow up without a father.

For once I hope that there will be reckoning on all sides. Because the cowards, the enablers, the collaborators, the oppressors – mainly in Russia, of course, but not only – are the ones who killed or helped kill her father. She and her father deserve that they are named for eternity.