Every day we hear more news about military movements and lives lost in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We might feel distanced from the conflict, or hopeless to do anything to help people caught in the crossfire. Nevertheless, local students decided to take a stand in support of Ukraine and ending Russian aggression. 

The Friends School Russian Club organized a protest on April 6 along Charles Street. Students from Friends and the Tri-Schools held signs reading HET BOЙHE (“No War” in Russian). They provided the text of the Ukrainian national anthem, which protesters sang during the demonstration. The organizers said that the late 1980s  “Singing Revolution” protests against Soviet occupation in the Baltic states inspired them to sing. 

Friends Russian Club leader Alex Assoufid, who’s been taking Russian since the beginning of the program in 6th grade, said that students started talking about the conflict in Russian class after the invasion. Club co-head Margaret Valle helped organize a bake sale of Russian goods to raise money, which teacher Lee Roby said went to World Kitchen and Razom for Ukraine. The Russian program also worked to foster conversation about the war. Fellow club leader Julia Mammen said that they organized “current events discussions talking about the situation and history behind it.”

Following weeks of military buildup, Russian president Vladimir Putin addressed Russians on February 20 with an impassioned speech to justify a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Putin wanted to recognize the Russian separatist regions Donetsk and Luhansk, which declared independence in 2014. Max Fisher argued in the New York Times that Putin’s narrative had far bigger implications. Putin presented a distorted history of Ukraine as a state that the USSR falsely created from Russian territory, made unfounded claims of Ukrainian aggressions and civil conflict, and promoted imperialistic Russian nationalism. Oleg Sukhov wrote in the Kyiv Indepenent that Putin exaggerated the presence of extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as well as claiming that Ukraine is highly corrupt, “under ‘foreign management’” and lacks an independent judiciary, which are ironically major problems in Russia. In the article from February 23, Fisher suggested that Putin “may in fact have been articulating what amounted to a calculated series of justifications for a further invasion of Ukraine aimed at the Russian public, whose support he will need to maintain it.” Sure enough, Russian troops rolled into the eastern Donbas region on February 24 and almost immediately attacked Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. 

Mammen says that though Ukraine and Russia’s relationship isn’t “necessarily a positive history, a lot of it is joint…they think of Kyiv as the birthplace of their civilization.” Putin emphasized Russia’s claim of Ukraine in his speech (translated from Russian): “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our history, culture and spiritual space.” But  Ukrainians have frequently resisted Russia’s efforts to prevent Russia’s impositions. Since its independence from the USSR in 1991, Ukraine has had to balance its relationship with Russia and its increasing connections to Europe. The 2004 Orange Revolution protested the election of then-prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, which the Supreme Court of Ukraine later ruled was rigged. During the revolution, opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned and suspected Russian involvement. Yanukovych was president in 2013 when the Ukrainian government caved to intense pressure from Moscow and ended an association agreement with the European Union a few days before it was supposed to be signed. This sparked the Euromaidan or the Revolution of Dignity, months of violence between government police and protesters. These events led to Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, further political turmoil in Ukraine, and ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine, which killed over 14,000 people from 2014 to early 2022 according to the International Crisis Group.  

Ukraine’s current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for US and European aid during Russia’s 2022 invasion, and in March delivered what Politico called an “emotional” and “highly personalized pitch for his war-torn country to join the EU.” The European Council offered sympathy but assurance that Ukraine could ever gain EU membership. And though Finland and Sweden applied in May to join NATO, Zelenskyy has acknowledged that it is unlikely that Ukraine could join the alliance anytime soon given member countries’ hesitancy and Putin’s strong opposition. Sukhov wrote that though “Putin claimed that the US and NATO are using Ukraine as a potential tool of aggression against Russia…this is the other way around. Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were an inevitable result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014.” 

Mammen, who wants to go into the Russian field, thinks we need to educate ourselves as much as possible about opposing perspectives. She said that we may have to accept that “Ukraine’s probably not going to become a NATO country,” and said that many Americans don’t understand Russia’s resistance to NATO. In her opinion, NATO was never really effective. The Warsaw Pact and the USSR no longer exist, but she says “Russia feels like it’s been stepped on a lot, which goes against its ideals because they still believe that they’re a great country.”  

As with all media in Russia, Putin’s February speech mixed some facts with personal belief and heavy propaganda and distortion. Mammen said that the state-controlled media makes it difficult to study how Russians understand the world. “I don’t mean to say that [their view] is correct, but it is something we have to take into account when we’re dealing with this situation…and how we can meet them where they are in Russia,” she said. And despite deep-seated propaganda and anti-western views in Russia, Mammen thinks “a lot of young people [in Russia] who are able to go on social media and get more accurate information…don’t approve of the war” and question why they should be fighting their Ukrainian brethren. Though they may not be entirely pro-NATO, they don’t necessarily see Ukrainian independence and the West as threats. 

President Biden signed a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine on May 21 as Russia advances in the country’s eastern regions. Despite Ukraine’s democratic resistance and strong leadership in Zelenskyy, it’s unclear whether diplomacy could bring peace anytime soon, or what Putin’s end goal in Ukraine really is. Is he simply trying to increase his popularity in Russia, and prevent Ukraine from ever joining the EU or NATO? Or does Putin want to encompass all of Ukraine in a novorossiya or “new Russia,” reducing Ukraine’s leadership to a puppet government? As the decades-long unrest between Russia and Ukraine continues, the students at the protest expressed their hope that Americans will continue to discuss the conflict and provide relief for its civilian victims.