I was born and raised in Ukraine and lived in Kyiv for my entire life before moving to Hanover in 1992 with my husband and children. We decided we had to leave the country after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
We are extremely worried about Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine. We have many friends and relatives still in Ukraine and we are closely following all developments in this terrible war. Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom and the right to live in a democratic society and determine the future of their own country.
A member of the Ukrainian parliament, Ludmila Buimister, reported on Channel 5 (Ukraine’s TV channel) that on Feb. 26 there was a Russian missile attack on the dam of the Kyiv reservoir. This dam holds a lot of nuclear waste accumulated on its bottom after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Luckily, the missile was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
If such an attack were successful, it would pose a threat not only to millions of Kyiv’s citizens but also to millions of people in Europe and the whole world. Damage to the dam would flush poisonous and radioactive mud from the bottom of the water basin down the whole Dnieper river, depositing nuclear waste on the soil over a very wide area. When this mud dries out, nuclear waste could be blown by wind into Europe and other regions of the world.
Ukraine is a big food exporter and any such nuclear contamination can affect food supply worldwide as Ukraine exports food to over 1 billion people, including in the U.S. This is ecological terrorism from the Kremlin!
Russian forces are controlling the area around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which has radioactive waste buried on site. If any bombing happens in that area, even by accident, it can start another nuclear disaster.
Other Ukrainian nuclear power stations (Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe), are also under air strikes from Russia. As Russian forces surround the city of Enerhodar, hundreds of people are blocking Russians from approaching the nuclear power station.
Not only this, but Russia has started indiscriminately bombing civilian areas. More than 30 planes were bombing Ukrainian cities yesterday destroying buildings, schools, residential areas and civil infrastructure. Ukraine needs help from the world to protect its airspace.
The Ukrainian parliament and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are asking to create a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine as the only way to protect civilians and prevent possible nuclear catastrophes. In just six days, more than a million people around the world have signed a petition to NATO to close the airspace over Ukraine.
As a person who lived in Kyiv, only 40 miles from Chernobyl, I witnessed firsthand the enormous health hazards from nuclear disasters that can linger for decades. We need to prevent such ecological disasters any way we can for as long as Russian troops remain on Ukrainian land.
Please, support the “no-fly zone” over Ukraine.
Irina Kalaida
Hanover
There’s an epidemic of stupidity happening in North America: people doing stupid things for stupid reasons. Millions of Americans refuse vaccinations and to follow simple protocols to protect themselves, their families, their communities and their country from virulent disease and thus avoid illness, deaths, disability, the spread of contagion and the destruction of society’s health systems. They choose to spend their time and energy angrily demonstrating against such measures, rudely assaulting neighbors at school board meetings and other public forums. Mass stupidity was recently displayed in the “freedom demonstrations” of truckers in Canada, praised by American Republicans and planned to resume in Washington, D.C., on March 1, timed to disrupt President Biden’s State of the Union Address.
These people claim to be acting on their personal freedom to do whatever they want. One example of the stupidity of this “freedom” reasoning lies in comparison of COVID-19 deaths in New Hampshire (with its asinine motto “Live Free or Die”) and Vermont: New Hampshire, with twice the population of Vermont, has four times as many deaths because of the refusal of its Republican-dominated legislature and many of its Republican residents to get vaccinated and follow public health protocols.
Vermont’s state motto, “Freedom and Unity,” emphasizes the importance of community as well as individual freedom. I think the over-emphasis on “freedom” in America stems from its origins in a revolution from the autocracy of being ruled by a king; how ironic that the freedom-fighting Trump followers seek to replace our presidency with an autocratic king figure.
Complete freedom never exists. From childhood, individuals learn to follow rules to live within groups: family, community, country. I wish these deluded freedom fighters had to live within truly freedom-restricted countries (North Korea, Russia, China, Myanmar) and learn how stupid they are.
Alice Morrison
Newbury
With consummate hypocrisy, Vladimir Putin has charged the would-be “neo-Nazis” of Ukraine with perpetrating “genocide” against “the millions of people who live there and who pinned their hopes on Russia.” But in thus rationalizing his decision to “liberate” the would-be victims of a genocide for which there is not one shred of credible evidence, Putin revives the tactics of Adolph Hitler, who used almost the same words to justify his invasion of Czechoslovakia on Oct. 1, 1938. Addressing the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg on the previous Sept. 12, Hitler claimed that Czechoslovakia had brutally persecuted the three and half million ethnic Germans living within its borders, and that “if these tortured creatures can find neither justice nor help by themselves, then they will receive both from us.” Like Hitler’s charge, Putin’s is totally false, and the only real neo-Nazi here is Putin himself.
James Heffernan
Hanover