Is it pro- or anti-Ukrainian to criticise Ukraine?

UKRAINE. Which Ukrainians are Ukrainian?

I can’t refer you to the post on LinkedIn, because I’ve been locked out of it. I used an expletive and I think the time was right to use an expletive.

The post concerned the honour bestowed by the Jerusalem Post upon Volodymyr Zelenskiy as the “most influential Jew of 2022” - there’s poetry there, in all senses. A contributor asked “When will a Ukrainian ever be the President of Israel?” and someone who knows more about this than I do replied that Golda Meir, who was prime minister and not president of Israel, it has to be said, came into the world in Kiev (as then was).

This was insufficient for the author of the question, a person from Ukraine, who insisted that a Ukrainian is someone who has Ukrainian blood in them, and not someone who had “citizen of the USA” written in her passport.

That was when my expletive came into deployment, as I asked “How the **** (we don't want it to happen again) do you expect Mrs Meir to be a national of a nation that had not even extricated itself from Soviet hegemony while she was alive?” (She died in 1978.)

In that, I recognised Ukraine’s statehood, which I have staunchly defended since 23rd January this year. Before that, I was unaware that it needed defending. I never knew Mrs Meir was born in Kyiv, but I saw her on the news as a boy. However, does the correspondent want to contend that all those who were born before 1991, grew up in his country and live in his country or even have emigrated to other places since are not, therefore, Ukrainians? Does blocking someone who contends that this is not so resolve the debate or even banish the question I raise myself? [It doesn’t - it’s here now.] You may answer those yourselves, but I have yet another question for you, again as a staunch defender of Ukraine, but for how much longer I do wonder:

Ukraine is a nation of martyred saints. But, even saints had faults. Sainthood is not perfection. After all, Peter denied Jesus on the night of his arrest, and yet became the rock upon which the church was built. Does Ukraine have no chinks in its armour through which we can see its spiritual fallibility?

By some Ukrainians’ standards, he isn’t, it seems.

No, it appears not. There is no fallibility. There is sainthood. They may disown those born in Soviet times and express disdain on young men who do not wish to fight them. And express hope that ardent Putinists, when refused exit from their land for fear of their lives, will return to their homes and bring down the very political system they are accused of being so ardently in favour of. I defend Ukraine because they reasonably asked me to. But some there will not listen to reason that I believe makes every bit the same sense.

The Queen of England had the job of warning and cautioning her government. But, when she did so, she wasn't anti-British. She was pro-British.

Here are some non-Ukrainians explaining to the non-Ukrainian president of Ukraine what happened to them when other non-Ukrainians came and raped their sons, daughters and city. Not one person in this Ukrainian scene is, according to some Ukrainians, a Ukrainian. And I have been banished from Ukraine for saying they are. What does that start to tell you about some Ukrainians in Ukraine?