Bohdan Kukharskyy, Anastassia Fedyk, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Ilona Sologoub write:

Dear Professor Chomsky,

We are a group of Ukrainian academic economists who were grieved by a series of your recent interviews and commentaries on the Russian war on Ukraine. We believe that your public opinion on this matter is counter-productive to bringing an end to the unjustified Russian invasion of Ukraine and all the deaths and suffering it has brought into our home country.

Having familiarized ourselves with the body of your interviews on this matter, we noticed several recurring fallacies in your line of argument. In what follows, we wish to point out these patterns to you, alongside with our brief response:

Pattern #1: Denying Ukraine’s sovereign integrity

In your interview to Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept from April 14, 2022 you claimed: “The fact of the matter is Crimea is off the table. We may not like it. Crimeans apparently do like it.” We wish to bring to your attention several historical facts:

First, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 has violated the Budapest memorandum (in which it promised to respect and protect Ukrainian borders, including Crimea), the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation (which it signed with Ukraine in 1997 with the same promises), and, according to the order of the UN International Court of Justice, it violated the international law.

Second, “Crimeans” is not an ethnicity or a cohesive group of people – but Crimean Tatars are. These are the indigenous people of Crimea, who were deported by Stalin in 1944 (and were able to come back home only after the USSR fell apart), and were forced to flee again in 2014 when Russia occupied Crimea. Of those who stayed, dozens have been persecuted, jailed on false charges and missing, probably dead.

Third, if by ‘liking’ you refer to the outcome of the Crimean “referendum” on March 16, 2014, please note that this “referendum” was held at gunpoint and declared invalid by the General Assembly of the United Nations. At the same time, the majority of voters in Crimea supported Ukraine’s independence in 1991. [Continue reading…]