The publications of the National Library of Greece have a special way of attracting reader interest. In the most recent one, titled “About Russia’s War against Ukraine,” this can be seen from the first pages, where a black-and-white photograph is posted: it shows a bombed-out city and the only explanation for the caption is that it was taken in March in Mariupol.

A similar spirit seems to have pervaded an event at the National Library last April, from which three speeches formed the basis of the texts featured in this publication. The motivation for the entire project can be found in Stavros Zumbulakis’ Foreword: “We are making this event more of a gesture of friendship and support to our fellow citizens of Ukraine,” said the chairman of the National Library’s Electoral Council in April.

The first text is called “Introduction to the History of Ukraine” and was written by researcher and translator Giorgos Tsaknias. Going through Ukrainian history to counter Putin’s talk of an “artificial country,” Giorgos Tsaknyas gropes for the common Slavic origins of Ukrainians and Russians and attempts to illuminate the feelings of the former, given that their homeland is one of what historian Timothy Snyder called a “bloody country.”

The first Slavic civilization, according to Tsaknias, was located in the area of ​​today’s Chernobyl, between the 6th and 8th centuries AD.

Stalin caused a terrible famine in Ukraine, the millions of victims of which place it among the “bloody countries”: a trauma that remains open in the memory of Ukrainians.

Russian people came there, probably from Scandinavia, during the 9th century and created a caste of rulers who fell into slavery. Prince Oleg created in 880 AD. The Kievan state, which collapsed by the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. At that time, western Ukraine was separating itself from the eastern Slavs, and a hundred years later, Moscow, which was called the “Third Rome” in the 19th century, developed as the center of the region. Russian patriotism was then supported by Stalin, who caused a terrible famine in Ukraine, millions of victims of which rank it among the “bloody countries”: a wound that remained unhealed in the memory of Ukrainians.

In his own text, entitled “The Test Will Be Long,” Dimitris Christopoulos, Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Political Science Department at Panteion University, states the following: “The stereotypical perception of Russia,” he says, “as the ultimate Europe, in a long historical period heterodetermines and stigmatizes Russia. This, combined with the humiliation that the country experienced in the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, created favorable conditions for the growth of Russian fanaticism, crude nationalism, in the quiver of which is the continuation of politics by other means. namely with the war.

After referring to various historical examples that are today used to justify different attitudes towards the Russian invasion (for example, the Treaty of Versailles, which contributed to the rise of Hitler, he now refers to the failure of the pact after the Cold War, however, neither Nazi crimes are explained by the desire of the Allies to humiliate Germany in 1919 year, nor is international justice a scale on which Americans always find themselves on one side), Dimitris Christopoulos warns that the next day of war will not be easy: if Russia is not demonized, he writes, “it will remain what it has been for the West since the middle of the 19th century: the eternal “other” and, of course, in such a state as it is today, a beacon of inspiration for the ubiquitous anti-Westernism”.

Stavros Zumbulakis, in a text entitled “The Russian Way of Violence and War,” adds the Moscow Patriarchate to the discussion. Patriarch Kirill, says Zumbulakis, argued in his March sermon that Ukraine’s desire to join the West (whose decline is centered in gay pride) also poses a moral threat to Russia. On another occasion, he argued that Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova were inextricably linked to Russia through the Orthodox faith and therefore could not claim independence. And in a third of his sermons, where St. John the Baptist was mentioned, the patriarch emphasized that there was only one way for Russia: “up.”

“When the reader picks up and reads this little book, a lot will change in the military-political part of the war,” Stavros Zumbulakis writes at the end, confirming this peculiar way of publishing the National Library. “But one thing,” he continues, “will never change for a century: the unjust nature of Russia’s military attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.”