‘It makes us ill,’ says Grand Forks’ Verigin as Ukrainian conflict stretches into third week

Three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Canada’s largest Doukhobor community steadfastly maintains its non-violent struggle for global peace, according to the community’s spiritual leader, J.J. Verigin, Jr.

“We will never, ever justify the taking of human life,” Verigin said from Grand Forks Wednesday, March 9.

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The war in Ukraine has hit home hard, especially because Boundary Doukhobors share cultural bonds reaching across both sides of the firing line. Some of Verigin’s own cousins live in Russia and Ukraine, he said.

For roughly 45 minutes, he laid a thoughtful and highly nuanced indictment not just on the conflict in Ukraine, but on war as an institution.

“It makes us ill … It violates all of the principles that we as human beings hold dear. And it’s threatening to destroy our environment forever. And yet we can’t seem to shake it,” he stressed.

Noting that “the first casualty in war is the truth,” Verigin said the West had missed vital opportunities for a peaceful resolution between Moscow and Kyiv before Russian tanks crossed the border. Subsequent coverage by Russian and Western media has been one-sided and self-serving, he continued.

Drawing on the historic Cuban Missile Crisis — which very nearly brought the United States to war over Moscow’s October 1962 bid to put nuclear missiles on America’s doorstep — Verigin criticised Western leaders’ “hypocrisy” leading up to last month’s invasion of Ukraine.

NATO, a military alliance formed for the express purpose of containing Soviet Russia, has long since kept missiles in eastern Europe, inflaming Russian security concerns Verigin said were perfectly understandable.

None of this justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s so-called “special military operation” is plainly illegal.

“It might be that I’m misinterpreted as saying, ‘We are on the side of Russia.’ So, I want to unequivocally state that, anytime we pick and choose a winner that we should side with in any conflict, we lose the peace.”

“A mediator goes in to mediate a conflict, not on one side or the other,” he explained, questioning Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ability to get weapons to Ukraine while apparently ignoring top priorities at home.

“We can’t provide clean water to our Indigenous peoples, but we have the funds to arm people overseas?” he asked.

Verigin had been to a dialogue for peace at the Mir Centre at Selkirk College’s Castlegar campus Sunday, March 6, where he said emotions ran high. He hopes people in Grand Forks will attend Thursday evening Peace Cafés hosted by the Grand Forks & District Library, which holds the meetings via Zoom.

“We have to stop this madness,” he said, underlying that, “The ultimate triumph is the power of love and not the love of power.”

Verigin is the executive director at Grand Forks’ Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ and president of the Kootenay Region United Nations Association.

Many Doukhobors speak a Russian dialect that hearkens back to their expulsion from Imperial Russia by Czar Alexander III. The Doukhobors were exiled to parts of the Ukraine and Georgia before settling on the Canadian prairies in the late 19th-century, Verigin said.

— With files from Betsy Kline

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laurie.tritschler@grandforksgazette.ca
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