I’m a bit late sharing this, but on March 17, I published an article in Bloomberg CityLab. It’s a one-year follow up to an article I published immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when several US sister cities, among them Chicago, severed their relationships with their Russian counterparts.
It was an honor to interview local people driving and contributing to US-Ukraine sister city relationships in Tacoma, Baltimore, Cincinnati and Chicago. The people with whom I spoke were raising money, educating their neighbors, shipping food and medical supplies, and delivering ambulances from Germany and Israel to Ukrainian cities and children’s hospitals.
Most gut-wrenching to me was an example from Cincinnati, where the Kharkiv Red Cross used funding received from the Cincinnati-Kharkiv Sister City Partnership to provide small holiday gifts to 750 local children whose fathers were dead or missing.
Their dedication is deeply moving, and a dogged demonstration of the belief that even in the face of geopolitical turmoil, the actions of individuals can make an impact.
As Cincinnati-Kharkiv Sister City Partnership president Bob Herring wrote in a recent op-ed, “We will support our Sister City until the war is over and continue to support it when the rebuilding begins. That’s what family does and what the free world must do.”
As the war drags on, continued US support for Ukraine is — distressingly and predictably — dividing along partisan lines. From March 2022 to January 2023, the portion of Republicans who believe the US is providing too much support for Ukraine increased from 9% to 40%. While that figure increased from 5% to 15% among Democrats, the swing among voters who identify as Republicans or lean-Republican is notable.
One of the most critical points in the article — which merits further exploration — came from Dr. Sohaela Amiri, who wrote in a blog for the RAND Corporation that “A sister city relationship can on one hand facilitate people-to-people exchanges and aid, and on the other it can ensure a two-way exchange of information. This could be crucial in the face of growing disinformation.”
Russian disinformation has continued to gain air time in certain corners of the US media ecosystem. As political polarization continues to fray the fabric of American democracy and political discourse, the actions of US sister cities in support of their friends in Ukraine offers a vector for information transmission that we would do well to publicize, and to heed.