CREDIT: ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA
Fiery protests in central Kiev have Michael Veenema longing for a much more peaceful time.

Video clips of United States President Obama speaking out against Russia have not been hard to find lately. He says that Russian President Putin should not be forcing his will on the people of the Ukraine while they look down the barrel of a Russian gun. He also says that invading the country of a neighbouring state is no way to enforce stability.

A few snapshots from the past, though, make me wonder if he can really mean what he is saying. The United States has a history of interfering with its neighbours to enforce stability. It attacked Cuba in the 1960s. It invaded Grenada in the early 1980s. It disrupted the government of Nicaragua that same decade and has played dirty tricks in other regions of South America.

Obama also seems to be not well informed about Russian history. That history has often been dominated by incredibly ruthless leaders. Here also, a couple of snapshots may help. Check out Peter “the Great” on Wikipedia. Active in the early 1700s, and famous for his battles and heroic exploits, Peter had his own son tortured and killed for disobedience. Closer to our own time, Joseph Stalin murdered millions of his own people through the widespread use of labour and concentration camps. Many Russians of the past have typically admired such “strong” leaders, and in that context, Putin's tough-guy posturing from time to time makes its own kind of strange — albeit destructive — sense.

Or consider another shot, this one of Russia ringed by nuclear missiles. During the ColdWar the United States, helped by its NATO partners, established nuclear missile bases within striking distance of all of Russia. It patrolled the edges of Russian airspace with B-52s loaded with atomic bombs. And in the seas, submarines carrying nuclear missiles were never far away from Russia. In the light of that kind of history, the United States appears to have little credibility, and no moral ground, for telling the Russian leadership how it “should” behave.

My own feelings about the people of the Ukraine are connected with some of my own snapshots — photos I took when I visited the Ukrainian city of Kiev many years ago. In one of the pictures a Ukrainian young man stands with one of the members of our tour group. They are standing in front of a decommissioned tank. The young man was a proud Ukrainian. He explained to us that the site where the tank sat was a park dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian soldiers who died to keep the Russians out (they lost).

Another snapshot is a memory of going underground below a famous church. We walked down into a labyrinth of caves. And inside the caves, mummified bodies of monks whose remains had been preserved for centuries by the dry air of the caves.

Then there is the photo taken in the apartment of Val, a student we met in the city. He walked us to his home where I took a picture of him with his sister and four or five others in our tour group. Val told us that his dream was to travel, to get a passport out of Russia (Ukraine was part of Russia at the time) and to see the world, especially to come to America.

But I think my favourite snap shot from the Ukraine is of just Val and me. Between us there is a wine bottle. We are raising a toast, probably made to friendship. Maybe it was also to seal the deal when I traded a pair of blue jeans for a Russian flag — which, judging by the quality of the flag, was probably a better deal for Val than for me, though I got the better souvenir out of the exchange.

Hopefully tensions in the Ukraine will ease. It would be better if events there will result in more snapshots than gunshots, and more toasts to friendship than celebrations of victory over enemies.
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