ON THE BRINK

 

There’s no reasoning with a crazed beast. Putin is like a rabid dog backed into a corner. We’re on the brink of some really horrible things happening in Ukraine.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Bill Browder said last week (on “Inside the Hive” podcast), regarding what comes next:

“There’s no question it escalates from here. This has to escalate. Because Putin is not a guy who can do humiliation. He can’t be a weak, humiliated leader. He has to be the strong man. He has to be the feared man. And that’s not how he’s looked at by us now. So what is he going to do? Something truly awful. Whatever awfulness we’ve seen, and we’ve seen some awfulness, is going to pale in comparison to what he’s going to do going forward. He doesn’t want to be liked. He doesn’t want to be even accepted. He just wants to be feared. At this moment in time, we don’t fear him. We watch him and we just think this guy is a failed, corrupt, tinpot dictator. He has to change that narrative. He has to change that impression. He’s going to do something really horrible.”

What will be Putin’s next move, when his invasion inevitably stalls again? Chemical weapons? Probably. Tactical nuclear weapons? Why not? 

And then what? Events are spiraling beyond our capacity to understand. It's hard to recognize when you’re in the middle of history. But that’s where we are, and the ending is impossible to know. It’s coming quickly, however, and it will affect all of us.

A year from now, will we look back at today as the last calm before this Russian cataclysm surged out of control? Will all our angst about Covid, inflation, “don’t say gay,” political dysfunction – will today’s anxieties seem quaint by comparison?

Early on, I thought that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notwithstanding the Ukrainian president’s heroic, brilliant leadership of his country, was being hyperbolic when he insisted that Putin won’t stop with Ukraine. I figured that not even Putin is so crazy as to challenge a NATO country, such as Poland. But I’ve come to understand that Putin’s own history (Georgia, Chechnya, Syria, our own 2016 election), and the horrific history of Ukraine and surrounding nations, ensure that the worst bloodbath for Ukraine is yet to come. And as Zelenskyy warns, if Putin is successful there, where does it end?

In the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead wrote (“The End of Russia’s Empire?”):

“[A Ukraine victory] would challenge the idea of Russian exceptionalism and fatally undermine the view that despotism is the form of governance best suited to the Russian soul… Putin and those around him know that in Ukraine they aren’t fighting only for an adjustment of frontiers. They are fighting for their world, and it may be psychologically impossible for them to accept defeat until every measure, however ruthless, and every weapon, however heinous, has been brought into play.”

The brilliant Russian-American journalist, Masha Gessen, wrote a moving piece about the conflict in this week’s The New Yorker. Gessen told the story of the war in context of the Holocaust, and efforts to come to terms with its horror in Ukraine. I learned that in a place called Babyn Yar, in Kyiv, thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-one Jews were murdered in thirty-six hours. It was the biggest single mass execution of World War II. German Nazis did the killing. But Ukrainian citizens brought sandwiches to the killers. Ukraine has a violent, complex history.

The Russians, who desecrated Babyn Yar for decades after the war, nearly bombed the site last month in their current “special military operation” to rescue Ukraine from imaginary, modern-day Nazis. Now it’s the Russian citizens who are bringing “sandwiches” to the killers – supporting their own sons, fathers, brothers, who are torturing, raping, and murdering Ukrainian women and children. Every Russian is complicit in the atrocities underway in Ukraine.

Of course, many Russians must be horrified at what’s happening to Ukraine. I believe, however, that it’s a country of true believers: the vast majority of Russians accept the Kremlin’s propaganda because it’s what they want to believe, no matter any “fake news” to the contrary. It reminds me of Trump’s true believers: Are Putin’s absurd lies about his war crimes and genocide all that more fantastical than Trump’s Big Lie, which is believed by most Republicans?

Putin is right about one thing: Ukraine has a long and complicated history of being part of Russia, though not necessarily by choice. Only after the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991, did Ukraine become an independent nation.

For at least seventeen centuries, its land was regularly drenched in the blood of invasions and wars, its peoples savaged, its cities razed. For example, a Viking leader in 882 took over Kyiv, murdered the city’s rulers, and created the first capital of the new Russian state. But its land was a magnet for invaders, including occupations by Mongols, Lithuanians, Tatars, Cossacks, Poles, and Germans.

My paternal ancestors immigrated from Ukraine to Kansas in 1874. They were part of the Dutch-Prussian Mennonite community that settled in Ukraine in the late 1700s. Their migrations to America and Canada were driven, not by war, but in large measure by their pacifism in order to avoid supporting Russia’s military. Though living and farming in Ukraine for nearly a century, the Mennonites never were truly Ukrainian, and certainly not Russian.

And through the centuries of Ukraine’s violent occupations, including the decades of Soviet rule, most Ukrainians were never truly Russian, and always sought their own national identity and independence. That’s why the inspired, unified defense they have displayed in this current war shouldn’t be surprising. Ukrainians have always wanted freedom, and since their independence, they were just starting to find that a democratic style of life was as good as they had hoped.

Last month, a few days after Putin invaded Ukraine, I discovered while out for a walk that on Facebook you could add a Ukrainian flag to your profile pic. Seemed like a thing to do, so I stopped and did it, and started to resume my walk. But suddenly, I had to stop. Tears were streaming down my face. WTF? Then it hit me, that this was such a small, pathetic gesture, so immeasurably minute, in light of the suffering and sacrifices going on right that moment in Ukraine.

But what else can you do?

I’ve since added the sky-blue/ sunflower-yellow flag stickers to my truck, our front door and mailbox, and my N95 mask. It’s my silent scream to the world around me: pay attention!

The New Yorker’s Gessen wrote:

“When this war is over, Europe will no longer be defined by the history of the Second World War. The next era of European history, whenever it begins, will be the aftermath of the war in Ukraine.”

What about us? As horrific events in Ukraine tumble over the brink, as the world confronts unimaginable horrors yet to come from Putin and his heinous thugs and murderers, what will that aftermath mean for us?

 

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