Dear Editor,
I am writing regarding the piece by Dave Gutknecht titled “Russophobia Feeds War on Russia,” published in the September 2025 edition of Southside Pride. You have done a great disservice to our community by publishing this piece.
I take issue with this piece from the content and personal opinions of the writer but also as this opinion piece being presented on a “NEWS” page. Why an editor of a community newspaper would put such a piece in a neighborhood newspaper and present it as news I don’t understand. If you are looking for stuff to fill your pages outside the scope of our neighborhood concerns I suggest you take more care in what you publish.
Is Southside Pride not aware that Russia, under the command of Vladimir Putin, is the aggressor in this war he chose to wage on Ukraine? This blatantly obvious imperialist land grab is the culmination of two decades of efforts to systematically destabilize and overtake a sovereign country struggling to keep its democratic society. Mr. Gutknecht parrots Putin’s talking points that Russia is simply a victim of the U.S. and NATO. The idea that the existence of NATO is a justification for Russia to invade a sovereign neighboring country is understandable coming from Putin, an autocratic dictator hungry to expand his personal power and control over his subjects. This may resonate with Putin’s inner circle of criminal oligarchs but for anyone in a Western democracy to believe this line of reasoning is ludicrous.
The Ukrainian people do not want to be Vladimir Putin’s subjects. The Ukrainian people are begging and screaming for our help to defend themselves from being overrun by Putin’s war on their homeland. This is not “Russophobia.” This is self-defense. NATO exists as a defensive deterrent against aggression of larger, more powerful countries against smaller neighboring states. NATO countries request to be part of the alliance, they are not coerced to join.
Vladimir Putin is attacking Ukraine and killing its people. This editorial not once acknowledges that basic reality. Our president has tried to appease Putin and has even said that Ukraine is responsible for bringing this war on itself. Is Southside Pride saying that apologizing for Putin’s behavior is the path to peace and stability in the region? Maybe the writer should take a look at what Russia has done since our leader in Washington undermined the efforts to support Ukraine to fight for their existence. The daily attacks have only escalated to greater intensity, and the intentional targeting of civilians is only increasing the death and destruction.
Allowing Ukraine to be part of the NATO alliance is the only real way to assure that Putin’s aggression will not be encouraged and continue. It is time for Americans and Europeans to step up and do what is right to help protect innocent Ukrainian lives, and to help a sovereign nation struggling to maintain its democratic state. It is not time to get behind a power-hungry dictator who seeks to destroy anyone and everything in his way and impose his own will on the Ukrainian people.
Sincerely,
John Collins
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In reply to John Collins
BY DAVE GUTKNECT
Why discuss war and international relations here? Because alternative media are among the few venues open to critical views. Don’t ascribe my opinions to Southside Pride, but rather to the need for debate.
“Neighborhood concerns” include our nation at war and the enormous resources swallowed by our massive military-industrial, then spewed out as deadly pollution and destruction. Our country’s actions strongly affect our local well-being.
If this were a rural newspaper, we could be talking about this year’s catastrophic loss of farm commodity sales to China. Another columnist here, Ahmed Tharwat, brought war home this way: U.S. citizens are serving in a foreign country’s genocidal military campaign.
As for Ukraine, those who cannot grasp the security concerns of Russia, a peer nuclear power surrounded by U.S. bases and missiles, should ask themselves: Would the U.S. tolerate nuclear missiles that could hit U.S. cities in a few minutes from across the Rio Grande or from the Caribbean? (We demonstrated the answer to the latter scenario in 1962.) The U.S. is desperately fighting the multi-polar world and the weakening reliance on the dollar, using both military and financial powers.
Characterizing NATO as defensive and upholding national sovereignty is obsolete, propagandistic. The U.S. has expanded NATO through wars of aggression against non-NATO countries and has variously attacked the sovereignty of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and more. As for Europe, through longstanding economic and coercive means the U.S. suborns the military and political leadership of “ally” vassals.
Ukraine was described before this war by an EU body as the most corrupt European nation. It certainly has not been a democracy since 2014, when the U.S., having already invested $5 billion in the project, oversaw a coup that forced out the democratically elected government, helped launch the civil war, and took over Ukraine intelligence and war planning. To review:
The new Kiev regime prohibited Russian—the majority language! In Crimea, the people then voted overwhelmingly to join Russia. Russian-speaking_eastern Ukraine was attacked by Kiev and neo-Nazi forces, after which the Donbass region declared independence and asked for Russian assistance. Although the 2015 Minsk Agreements would have left Ukraine intact, Merkel/Germany and Hollande/France later admitted that the West instead used the following period to arm Ukraine and prepare for expanded war.
Just today I heard added confirmation of this history from a surprising source: former German military chief of staff and chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, Harald Kujat, interviewed by Glenn Diesen (available on YouTube). Kujat reminded listeners of key points: that in March, 2022, Zelensky himself warned in The Economist that some in the West wanted a long war in order to weaken Russia; that the U.S. Secretary of Defense stated that war in Ukraine supported a strategy of weakening Russia politically, militarily, and economically; and that the West deliberately ruined the Istanbul 2022 peace agreement.
Ukraine was neutral in its 1991 constitution, a return to neutrality was agreed to in Istanbul 2022, and what is left of Ukraine could again be neutral. But the desperate, warring stance of the U.S. means that matters will be settled, if ever, on the battlefield—after immense losses, admitted only later.
New Russian regions will not be going back to Ukraine. But it is nonsense to assert that Russia seeks what would be a nightmare of governing all of Ukraine. And describing Putin as aiming to conquer Europe, “to destroy anyone and everything in his way,” illustrates the propagandized mindset—characterized in part by demonizing the enemy as criminal, evil, not quite civilized, and certainly not our equal.
Editor’s Note: Southside Pride supports an immediate cease fire and an internationally supervised plebiscite in the disputed Donbass provinces to allow the people of that area to determine whether they want to be Russians or Ukrainians.
