“You Can’t Trust the Russians”

In 1957, the Soviet Union shot a battery-operated satellite into outer space that circled around the earth 326 times during a period of about three months and then fell out its orbit and burned up in earth’s atmosphere. It was a shiny, silver-colored ball only about 18 inches in diameter, and it was called Sputnik. That was the first time humans had ever shot anything into outer space.

The Soviets were so proud of themselves. It made them look very scientific, like they might win a race against the U.S. to conquer space. But some people didn’t believe it had happened. One was my grandfather Zarley.

I was sixteen years old when Sputnik was orbiting our planet Earth. I then had a conversation with my grandpa Con Zarley about it at his house, in Portland, Oregon. He had always impressed me as a kind and rather wise man even though he didn’t have much education. He had been a farmer in Iowa before losing his farm in the Depression and moving his family out West, to Yakima, Washington. After first working in the fruit orchards picking fruit, the rest of his working life he spent as a carpenter building houses.

So, I expressed to my Grandpa Zarley how awed I was about Sputnik. But he retorted, “I don’t believe it. You can’t trust the Russians.”

That’s the way a lot of elderly Americans were who had lived through the era of Soviet Communism from its beginning and then into the Cold War. That was largely an arms race with atomic and then nuclear weapons between the superpowers of the time: the Soviet Union and the United States.

The Communist Soviet experiment lasted nearly 70 years. It ended in December, 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and was no more. Following WWII, it had imposed its will upon Eastern European countries by invading them against their will and annexing them to the Soviet Union. Now, they were free from the strong arm of the Soviet Union, with the larger Russia standing alone.

Ukraine, on the southwestern border of Russia, had been the largest of the Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe. It also housed a huge portion of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapon arsenal. And Ukrainians didn’t like that at all, especially when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred, the biggest in world history. So, through negotiations between the Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., most of nuclear weapons were either destroyed or transported to Russia until Ukraine was completely free of those types of weapons. Nowadays, some Ukrainians probably wish they had never forfeited that arsenal because it could be used now as leverage against Russia.

In the past several months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed 150,000+ Russian troops mostly along its shared border with Ukraine, but some of them on the northern Ukraine border with Belarus, which is presently an ally of Russia largely due to it president. Putin keeps saying he has no intention of invading Ukraine and thereby seizing Ukraine territory. But he did just that in 2014, taking and annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. So, it appears that a person would just about have to be stupid to believe Putin is telling the truth, that he does not intend to invade Ukraine. If not, why has he amassed the large military force on another nation’s border in Europe since WWII? I’m pretty sure if my Grandpa Zarley was alive right now to see this he’d say, “You can’t trust the Russians.”

That is what U.S. President Joe Biden said to our nation today. He said he is “convinced” that within the next few days, Russian President Putin will order his 150,000 soldiers to invade Ukraine. It seems obvious that he is saying this because that is what U.S. intelligence is saying. For instance, President Putin said this week that he was having a significant number of Russian troops on near the Russia-Ukraine border withdrawn back into Russia’s interior. But U.S. intelligence says it’s just the opposite, that Russia continues to gather more troops on the border since Putin said that.

I think President Joe Biden might agree with my Grandpa Zarley by saying, “You can’t trust the Russians.”