SEBASTIAN — Taras Rud hasn’t slept well lately, staying awake until the wee hours to watch television news reports of the latest developments in his homeland – Ukraine.
“A lot of my family and friends in Ukraine were there, participating in the protests in the square in Kiev,” the former Seaquay resident and current Sebastian business owner said. “My father is 73 years old and he was hit by a flashbang grenade. So I’ve been on the phone every day, multiple times, making sure everyone is all right and asking people to help. I’d be there, too, except that I’m waiting for my visa status to be renewed and cannot travel.”
Rud, 39, is the founder and owner of Rud Aero Inc., a manufacturer of advanced, high-performance aerobatic aircraft and flight school based at Sebastian Municipal Airport.
Born, raised and educated in Ukraine, he said he holds Master’s degrees in civil engineering and international relations, and spent 10 years working for a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 1995 to 2005.
And, in 2006, he used those high-level contacts to create his own company, Ukrainian Defense Consulting, which he said provided logistical support for the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Rud said he moved to the U.S. in 2009, choosing the Vero Beach-Sebastian area because he wanted to learn to fly small airplanes – something he did at the Paris Air flight school at the Vero Beach Municipal Airport – and how to build them.
Fascinated by how these small planes were designed and built, he decided to venture into the business in 2010.
He bought a condominium at Seaquay and lived there for four years before moving last summer to the Washington, D.C., area for business reasons. He still rents a home in Sebastian.
“I come back to Florida every couple of weeks,” Rud said, “but once I get my visa status, I see my future traveling around the world and selling my products.”
He does expect to return to Ukraine, at least for visits, but he’s concerned that the recent invasion of the Crimean peninsula is merely the latest phase of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to rebuild the dismantled, Soviet empire of yesteryear.
He believes Putin incited the civil unrest in Kiev by strongly encouraging Ukraine’s now-ousted, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to seize more power and use it to crush his pro-European Union opposition in Parliament.
“Ukrainians want to be part of Europe, part of the free world,” Rud said. “We don’t want to be part of Russia. We don’t want to be slaves who cannot decide our own future, like we were under the Soviets. We made that decision a long time ago.”
“Ukrainians are different people,” he added. “We’re not Russians. We don’t want to be Russians. But Putin has been planning this for quite a while, at least the past three years. I believe Putin has a dream of getting back the territories Russia lost when the Soviet Union fell. And he was using a corrupt president to help him.”
According to Rud, the initial protests were sparked by the political and financial corruption that strengthened Yanukovych and weakened the nation’s economy. In addition to the then-president assuming more authority, he and his family members got wealthier by allegedly misappropriating funds from Ukraine’s treasury.
“For the people, the economic situation kept getting worse,” Rud said. “People weren’t happy. Then, when the president backed off the signing of the agreement to join the European Union, that’s what triggered the protests.”
“The protests began with students, who were born in an independent Ukraine,” he added. “The students envisioned themselves being part of Europe, free to travel throughout Europe. And when the agreement wasn’t signed in November, they gathered in the main square and peacefully protested. They were not doing any harm. They were not violent. It was the president, under Russian influence, who introduced violence and escalated the situation to what you’ve seen on TV.”
Instead of sending the “regular police who are unarmed and usually less aggressive,” Rud said Yanukovych mobilized a special, fully-armed police unit – “similar to a SWAT team here” – trained to fight terrorists.
Protesters were attacked in the middle of the night, he said, and many were beaten.
“The next day, you saw a half-million to a million people take to the streets of Kiev,” Rud said. “It was not a revolution. There is no civil war in Ukraine. People in my country do not expect the police to be violent. They came out to protest the police brutality. They wanted the head of the police and the officers responsible for the beatings to be punished, but nothing happened. So people kept protesting.”
“Then it got worse,” he continued. “First, the police used rubber bullets. Then they started shooting bullets made of lead against unarmed and unprotected people. That’s when people started throwing Molotov cocktails. You can’t blame the people for responding.”
Rud also accused Yanukovych of hiring former criminals to act as a “secret army” to kidnap, torture and kill injured protestors from hospitals in an attempt to scare other protesters into stopping.
It didn’t work: The protests continued and the Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office last month.
“There was no way a president with that kind of blood on his hands could stay in office,” Rud said, “even with the Russians backing him.”
As for the Crimea, where, according to news reports, thousands of Putin’s troops have been deployed, Rud is suspicious of claims that residents of the Black Sea peninsula want to secede from Ukraine to join Russia.
“If the people of Russian ancestry wanted to live in Russia, they would go back there,” he said. “It’s not like they are being treated poorly by Ukrainians. Like I said, there is no civil war. That’s just what Putin wants everyone to believe. He wants bloodshed and dead bodies so he can justify what he’s doing. He could say that he’s defending Russian people.”
“He’s trying to do that now, saying he sent the troops to Crimea to protect Russians,” he added. “But that’s what Hitler said when he sent German troops into Czechoslovakia – that he was protecting Germans.”
Rud is optimistic that Crimea will remain a part of Ukraine, “but I don’t know how much Ukraine will have to pay for it or how long it will take.”
Does he think Putin will eventually move into eastern Ukraine, too?
“If someone doesn’t stop him, yes, he will,” Rud said. “A lot depends on what the U.S. does. Putin isn’t afraid of the European Union at all. The only thing he’s afraid of is the United States. I understand that the U.S. isn’t going to go to war over Ukraine, but the U.S. and Europe could isolate Russia, diplomatically and economically.”
“This is a bigger issue than Crimea,” he added. “After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear-weapons arsenal in the world. In return for Ukraine giving up those weapons, the U.S., Russia and Great Britain signed an agreement to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. So if the U.S. and Europe now let Putin break this agreement and do this, what message does that send to Iran and North Korea?”
“We can all hope Russia comes to its senses, but if the West allows this to happen, the world may be headed back into the Dark Ages.”
