:: from The Portland Red Guide ::
Nevertheless, this historic sister city relationship, twixt Khabarovsk and Portland, has persisted, even grown strongly in light of the world's need for citizen diplomats, crucial for restoring, or rather attaining, a new equilibrium.
Khabarovsk and Portland have the ability to share curriculum elements, both when it comes to recounting history, and when projecting forward towards a positive future.
In addition to that particular sister city relationship, I've been floating a new Portland - Mariupol sister city relationship. This proposal is more dicey given NATO is still toeing the party line by not recognizing the jurisdiction of ethnic Russians over their western borderlands.
There's currently a war on aimed at imposing the British narrative, that those referenda (by which various oblasts were transferred, including Crimea) were null and void.
For this reason, many Oregonians would approve of a Portland - Mariupol sibling relationship only if the latter were recognized as still a Ukrainian city, meaning no border changes since the coup in Kiev in 2014 would be recognized.
That feels like living in the past to other Americans. Borders in Europe have proved fluid and there's no reason to assume an end to all the VUCA in that region.
My suggestion is we continue the relationship with Khabarovsk and explore this new one with Mariupol, without rushing ahead to any new official declarations from the mayor's office.
We know from AI what a declaration might look like, should the time come.
In the meantime, the point is to encourage citizen diplomacy, not some burgeoning semi-irrelevant bureaucracy. Cascadia is already home to many native Russian speakers (the fourth largest language community by some accounts, after English, Spanish and Vietnamese), given America has been a melting pot for some hundreds of years.
:: a Portlandia classic ::
