Zelenskyy Lives

Every morning I check the news to see if President Zelenskyy is still alive. He remains so, thankfully. He represents as noble an effort, as principled and as dear in human value, as I have witnessed in my lifetime: the desire of a people to be themselves in the present and to be even better in the future—against the greatest odds. And not only has Ukraine fought the good fight, they have known remarkable success, even to the point where the world itself is now threatened by a humiliated despot who prefers to live in the past, or the illusion or delusion of one.

The public opinion of my own country begins to waver in its support of this effort given the enormous human cost and the scale of economic disruption. Winter portends, and the prospect, however remote, of a nuclear incident inspires both prudence and cowardice, sometimes disguised as pragmatic punditry. We have long since forgotten, as a nation, the meaning of real hardship and sacrifice and risk. (We dole this hardship out to limited populations here, often those least deserving additional hardship.)  We know nothing, have known nothing of the experience of war that Ukraine has faced these two hundred and twenty days. Their response to the Russian invasion has shown courage, intelligence, patience, and no little wit. I trust in those virtues and hope we continue to support them.

94 Days In

The war in Ukraine is reaching, some claim, its decisive moments. After much defeat, Russia is making small gains in the east, in Donbas, which may give them grounds to declare victory—that is, a disastrously destructive stalemate from which neither party can recover for maybe a decade. And, for those who have lost loved ones, never. Putin has revealed his version of Russia to be a Potemkin state, a vacuous polity, a sham superpower, a gas station with nukes and a teenage conscript military of second-hand, second-rate hardware with jowly bemedaled generals in oversized hats. A dozen fewer now. His mission, a soulless, heartless, and not mindless but egregiously mistaken failure.

May Luck Smile on Ukraine

The war in Ukraine endures, to the credit of President Zelenskiy and the Ukrainians, who resist with almost perfect underdoggian pluck and wit, winning hearts in the information war, as propaganda is now understood, and holding their own at the moment on the ground, at least in the north around Khiv. Sanctions applied by the West have had potent and immediate impact on the Russian economy. As wars, hot and cold, have a decided economic dimension, odds are not good for Putin and Russia in the long-term. They seem to have lost the short-term, with the mid-term to be decided. As once observed, there are no winners in war, but there are losers. Putin and Russia may yet be the biggest. Cutting that loss is the question—and who does the cutting. The heroism of the Ukrainian people fascinates and inspires, even as we feel the tragedy of young Russian soldiers sent to unwittingly subjugate their brothers and sisters.

Ukraine

Russian ordnance is raining down on Ukraine. Some years ago, a Polish friend voiced concerns about Vladimir Putin, portraying him as a Soviet imperial revanchist who cannot be trusted—as if tyrants ever can. Accurate as that description seems now, I find it too generous. It assumes that Vladimir Putin has visionary interests other than his own, that he has the national interests of Russia at heart, a mission on behalf of the Russian people. Absurd. A tyrant has only one interest, his own. Russia and the Russian people are but a means to that end, and sadly, now the Ukrainian people.

Хай живе незалежна Україна.