ANDREW DARLINGTON’S PONTIFICATIONS…
Len Liggins in one of the good guys.
We’ve known each other a long time. He was a Sinister Cleaner. He’s also been a member of The Ukrainians, an Indie Rock band that evolved by curious ethnic devices out of The Wedding Present. The Ukrainians have just published a collection of essays, reviews and interviews charting the Leeds-based band’s history since their first tentative steps in 1986, as part of a John Peel BBC Radio-One studio session. The book includes an interview that I did with the band in their rehearsal room. Lest we forget, that was way back in the bad old days, when there was still a USSR.
Now, it’s embarrassing to watch Prime Minister Keir Starmer grovelling to Donald Trump, as the President connives with Vladimir Putin to carve up the Ukraine between them. Russia gets to keep much of the territorial bits they’ve annexed, while the USA gets mineral exploitation rights to the part that remains. Putin’s ostensible justification for invasion is that the Ukraine is a fiction. It’s true that it was part of the USSR, and of the Tsarist Russian Empire before that. It’s true that it was fiercely contested for centuries, as regional powers expanded and waned, it was variously part of the Polish Kingdom, the Ottoman Empire, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Its borders were always vaguely fluid. But it has always treasured its own language and its own distinctive culture. That is a constant.
Geographical boundaries were redefined after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, when Russia was in a state of weakened turmoil. It was as a manifestation of Putin’s display of resurgent unity and confidence that Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. But it’s a symptom of uncertainty too. Russia fears that its former sphere of influence, the satellite states that it has traditionally considered a cordon sanitaire against the West, are slipping away, applying to join NATO or the European Union. Whereas the unilateral invasion of 2022 had the adverse effect. I watch TV in disbelief as Russian troops cross the border into Ukraine. This should not be happening in the twenty-first century! Nations do not wage undeclared war against another sovereign state, without a shadow of justification.
While, after a hundred years of isolation, just when ordinary Russian people were finally beginning to enjoy the advantages of reintegration into the global family, with all the trade, cultural and tourism benefits that come with it, including a McDonalds in Red Square! – the boycotts that came as horrified responses to the Ukrainian incursions had the effect of slamming Russia back fifty years, to the height of Cold War uncertainties. While the stalled war of attrition that resulted showed the supposed infallibility of the Russian military to be flawed.
Putin may see Trump’s intervention as a conveniently face-saving way of extricating Russia from its humiliating imbroglio.
As Len Liggins explains, there’s a Ukrainian emigrée community invisibly integrated in Leeds, you pass them in Briggate or the Victorian shopping centre without realising. But they continue to meet in their own churches and social centres to celebrate their shared culture and their collective identity, just as the Ukrainians Indie band continue to play their music through a Ukrainian lens, invigorating and energetically fun, as well as an assertion of the resilience of their heritage.
Len Liggins in one of the good guys.
‘THE UKRAINIANS: FROM KYIV TO THE KOSMOS’
Len Liggins & Peter Solowka
Spenwood Books www.spenwoodbooks.com
ISBN 978-1-915858-23-8, Hardback, 320pp profusely illustrated
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