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Orders to Target Ukrainian Civilians — A Brief History of Russian Violence in Ukraine

Jakub Ferencik
5 min readFeb 20, 2023

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Putin has purposefully targeted civilians to break their spirit.

And by doing so, he’s proven once more that he knows nothing about the Ukrainian people.

We won’t be able to make sense of Putin’s endless artillery strikes on Ukraine. But we can understand the context of these horrendous acts, and Ukrainian opposition, when we look at history.

“Without Ukraine’s population, industry and agriculture, early-20th-century Russia would have ceased to be a great power.” — Dominic Lieven

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

I am a history graduate student at McGill University in Montreal. So, I would be remiss not to mention some history of Russian repression of Ukraine on my blog from time to time.

Putin is merely acting in line with the example set by his predecessors.

By now we know that Putin’s intentions in Ukraine are clear; they are to eradicate the concept of ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Ukrainians.’

He does not care about Ukrainians and any semblance of Ukrainian nationalism is treachery in his view since he believes that Bolsheviks invented Ukraine.

A Legacy of Suffering

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Jakub Ferencik
Jakub Ferencik

Written by Jakub Ferencik

Journalist living in Prague | Author of “Up in the Air” and “Beyond Reason” on AMAZON | MA McGill Uni | 750+ articles with 1+ mil. views

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