Most of us don’t know much about today’s Ukraine. One point is certain: Ukraine’s story today cannot be disentangled from Ukraine’s history since it became a part of the Soviet Union in 1922 – shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German revolution of 1918-1919 between right-wing Freikorps military and left-wing communist and socialist parties.

These events and conflicts are one hundred years old but as alive today as at any time. They’re burned into the hearts and minds of contemporary Ukrainians, Russians and Germans. US policy is dangerously and unnecessarily greasing the fires.

There’s a reason Russia doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO. And there’s a reason Germany sent 5,000 military helmets to Ukraine instead of posting several thousand troops to Poland on Ukraine’s border.

Germany, sensibly, doesn’t want war or any military action between NATO and Russia. And it’s not just because of an oil and gas pipeline, which in itself is a ridiculous reason to go to war in a time of climate change. Haven’t we had enough of those wars anyway?

Germany sensibly doesn’t want to go to war across Poland and into Ukraine to fight Russia because it did that from 1941 to 1945 with disastrous results for every country in the path.

Ukraine, like Poland, is one of the geographically and economically disadvantaged countries between western Europe and Russia. It’s been the stomping ground of the French in the Napoleonic Wars and the Germans in World Wars I and II. Ukraine was starved out by Stalin in the 1930s in his industrialization policy that forced collectivization of Ukraine’s agriculture to feed Russia’s burgeoning industrial centers.

Ukraine has never been lucky. Its people probably thought they hit the nadir when Germany’s Wehrmacht burned its villages to the ground, stole its wealth, and slaughtered its populations – including millions of Jews on its way to Moscow in 1941. But no, Ukrainians then experienced the retreating Wehrmacht burning more villages, stealing more wealth and slaughtering more population on its retreat in 1943.

Germany, eighty years later but still in vivid and immediate memory of those who re-built Ukraine after the war, has much to regret and much to remember as it forms today’s policies. The Russians experienced the same German brutality that didn’t end on its territory until Germany’s expulsion from Stalingrad with the ignominious surrender of the Wehrmacht’s 6thArmy and the retreat of its remaining fighting forces into Crimea.

Ukraine’s luck, of course, didn’t turn for the better after the war. It became the storage site for the Soviet’s nuclear arms and Chernobyl, the Soviet’s blown up and exceedingly toxic nuclear power plant. Anyone alive in 1986 remembers the radioactivity floating west over Scandinavia, western Europe and then to the United States.

Ukraine has good reason to distrust Europe to the west and Russia to the east. Russia has plenty of reason to distrust NATO, organized to contain its communist economic system that has since broken down. Why is NATO still in existence, even? It’s here because the US has never given up its resistance to Russia, continues to see Russia as an existential threatand is doing everything possible to ensure that Russia becomes an existential threat.

Is it in the US interest to encourage Russia and China to partner up? Russia and China, who were enemies not so long ago, are enjoying each other’s company immensely at the Winter Olympics.

Meanwhile, the US throws more grease on the fire. It accuses Russia of a “false flag war,” that old Nazi trick in Poland that started World War II. It claims that Russia’s accumulation of military presence on Ukraine’s eastern border means imminent invasion at the same time as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was being entertained in China. Does that make sense to anyone?

There is a policy that can change this dynamic. Finland and Austria are examples. They are neutral in the east-west competition and they are thriving. Russia hasn’t been in either country since after World War II. Both countries trade in both directions.

Even Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, does not want a war with Russia. What would that do other than ruin his country one more time? The US needs to lower its guns and its temperature toward Russia.

Anyone for world peace?

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.