There are many possible terms for the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Some are completely inaccurate, some are clearly politicized Western nonsense. Others are close to the truth, but they too are inaccurate.
The YouTube corollary is when some content creator, usually with Western financial backing, or being outright state media from the EU, has some long-winded term, like “the naked, unprovoked, aggressive invasion of free and sovereign democratic and independent Ukraine by the forces of darkness from Russia,” I heard one proclaim. My reaction was immediate: “Gee, do you need to take a breath in the middle of that speech, and would you like to maybe get some water, stretch a bit, and do you need to rest, or can you go on with the rest of your pack of lies?” The hyperbole employed by the paid propagandists of Western globalist media is matched only by the theatrics of their rhetoric.
I am not wiling to grant validity to the Western or Ukrainian view that “Russia has invaded Ukraine” because while physically the case in a very technical physical sense (Russian forces have crossed into Ukrainian territory), the term “invasion” fails to address the context, the reasons, the necessity, and the background that gave rise to the entrance of Russian forces into Ukraine. It was not an invasion in the classic sense of one nation sitting peacefully on their side of an agreed upon border and then being set upon by an aggressor who caught them by surprise during a period of mutual peace and respect.
I would say that Russian forces entered Ukraine but did not invade Ukraine, something that is a nuanced view that merits further explanation. I will offer an analogy and explain.
If Joseph and Robert live next to each other, with a common property line boundary, and Robert, while on his side of the common property boundary, throws scalding hot water over the boundary, aimed at Joseph’s livestock or his children, and then throws rocks and bricks, Joseph might reasonably be expected to cross the boundary line to address the situation of the threat posed by Robert. Technically Joseph is physically entering Robert’s property, but we would hardly call it a trespass, an invasion, or an aggression, because the entrance is being undertaken to resolve Robert’s aggression.
In the course of aiding the republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, at the request of the legitimate authorities and people of those territories, the Russian forces necessarily had to enter into Ukraine to address and resolve issues of Ukrainian aggression by neutralizing Ukrainian artillery positions, which were being used to shell and terrorize civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk. Since the term “invasion” has connotations of aggression and something being unjustified, unprivileged, or even illegal, what Russia undertook in February 2022 should not be viewed as an invasion because it is not accurate to call it an invasion, as only in a bare physical sense of Russian forces crossing into Ukraine was it physically an “invasion,” but not in the moral, psychological, legal, or historical sense. Words are important; “invasion” conjures up images of a 1940 Blitzkrieg attack, perhaps that by the Germans against neutral and non-aggressive Denmark, a scenario that is not comparable to the reality of 2022.
Western media portrays an image of Ukraine as a man sitting peacefully on a park bench when, for no reason, another man (Russia) walks up and throws boiling water in his face. This is the Western explanation for the conflict. The actual explanation is more along the lines of, a large, strong man (Russia) being in a park on a picnic with his wife and child, watching as nearby his young cousin and his cousin’s wife (Donetsk and Luhansk) are being harassed and slapped around by a group of a half-dozen young thugs (Ukrainian Azov terrorists) who have been instigated to do this by somebody who isn’t around on the scene (Western agitators and NGOs). After watching this undignified display and assault upon his cousin and his cousin’s wife, the man (Russia) crosses the park and puts his hands on the thugs and starts laying hurt on them. He did not start this problem, but he has come to the aid of his comrade who was in distress. Then the Western media cuts out all mention of what happened in the ten minutes prior to the Russian man laying hands on the young thugs, and they start their broadcast and narrative with images of the Russian man walking across the park and proclaim, “See this? He advances across the park to attack these unfortunate, peaceful young men who were minding their own business and enjoying their afternoon in the park.”
The standard Western narrative is not only wrong and false; it is an inversion and perversion of the reality and truth of the situation. In the Western narrative, the victims have been turned into the aggressors, while the aggressors and instigators have been transformed into victims who are simultaneously heroes of biblical and historical proportions. The modern West specializes in transforming men into women, so it should not surprise anybody that they are equipped to transform the actual victims into aggressors and aggressors into apparent victims.
In Russia some voices refer to the conflict as a Special Military Operation, which I understand the rationale behind this. No war has been formally declared, no full mobilization has occurred, and there is not a psychological or emotional aspect to this conflict similar to what would have been found in the Great Patriotic War. This is not an existential fight to the death in a war of annihilation against an intractable foe despised by the Russian people. In this sense, the Russian populace doesn’t see this as a “war” in the historical way, because they don’t view themselves as being at war with the Ukrainian people because they harbor neither hatred nor ill will against the people of Ukraine, even going so far as to take Ukrainian refugees into Russia. Only in Ukraine is there talk of “war,” “destroying Russia,” and “inflicting strategic defeat,” paired with dehumanizing propaganda of smearing Russians as “orks.” I have yet to hear one mainstream commentator or government spokesman in Russia refer to Ukrainians with ethnic slurs or dehumanizing language. I have not heard racist slurs from Russian commentators.
From my perspective as a (hopefully) honest and informed observer in the West, it is my belief that the Russians do not use the term “war” because of the simple fact that they do not hate the Ukrainians, no war has been declared, and they don’t want to wage war against the Ukrainian people. The purpose of their campaign is to remove the threat to their comrades in Donbas and remove the threat to Crimea. It was, after all, the Ukrainian Kiev regime that cut the water supply into Crimea.
It is my outsider perspective that the Russians view Ukrainian soldiers as “victims of Kiev” who are being press-ganged into fighting after being kidnapped off the streets by Zelensky’s security squads.
The Russians don’t actually despise the Ukrainians or view them through the racist, dehumanizing lens that Ukrainians are being brainwashed to view Russians with. The Russians don’t want to perceive the conflict as having risen to the level of war because they fundamentally like and value the Ukrainians for their shared history and common ancestry. Indeed, as an outside observer, I occasionally wonder whether Ukrainian is just a dialect of the Russian language and whether the Ukrainians are even a separate people or are just ethnic Russians who have been swindled into believing they are a separate ethnic group. It isn’t clear to me that Ukrainians are an actual distinct people. But I am an outsider, and that matter is best left in the hands of those with more knowledge. I leave linguistics and cultural anthropology to those better suited for such tasks.
As to the most neutral term in the West/USA, that is “war,” which is simply used to describe significant large-scale military operations, maneuvers, and political hostilities. That is the main reason why I and most of my close circle most commonly use the term “war,” not as a matter of being politically loaded or biased, as those who say “illegal invasion” show themselves to be, but simply as a descriptor, a matter of language.
Whatever term we elect to use, we still must face the tragic reality that the West spent years turning Ukraine into an armed camp, instigating the population, subverting the society, and causing a conflict that has devastated Ukraine and harmed Russia (the real Western goal). There is no selection of words we can elect that will change the reality of what the Western subverters have done in Ukraine, to Ukrainians, and the hardships and sacrifices their subversion and aggression have forced Russians to bear. The conflict, whatever you want to call it, was not sought by Russia, it was not started by Russia, and it was forced on Russia by an expansionist West seeking to encircle Russia from the Arctic Circle to the Caucasus region.
Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations
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