Getting it Together

The world’s attention span in this media age is ridiculously short and specious. After less than two years of life and death struggle against the forces of a craven, cynical, and stoat-faced despot, Ukraine finds itself in danger of lost interest and sympathy, support and resources. Truckers in Poland and Slovakia and Russian assets in the United States—i.e. the Republican Party—have placed their own self-interests, particularly selfish ones, ahead of not only the dire existential needs of Ukraine, but ahead of the larger interests of Europe and the West. Shameful, discouraging but not altogether surprising. Human nature can be frail, easily distracted and divided, even with the noble example of the Ukrainian people available to us daily. To my fellow Americans and friends in Poland, I ask, “Can we get our shit together?” To Ukraine, I offer the hopeful Churchillian observation that America will do the right thing—after it has tried everything else.     

Fighting Ukraine

Five thousand miles from Kyiv, one cannot know with any kind of certainty how things are going in the war. I read daily, but not exhaustively, updates on the offensive, reports of modest gains, of casualties, and the shortage of ammunition. That Putin might hang on and the war become a long one should come as no surprise to anyone with any knowledge of history. Things always drag on longer than expected. Lightning victory—I cannot name one offhand, and I have read a lot of history. A war being fought in trenches will be slow going. Which is why the friends and allies of Ukraine must remember to be patient. The sharing of materiel and treasure is as nothing compared to the sacrifices Ukrainians make daily, nightly, hourly. We should honor their heroic example, their perseverance, with our patience and continued support.

Some weeks ago I read Edith Wharton’s account of France at the outset of World War I, Fighting France. “War is the greatest of paradoxes,” she wrote, “the most senseless and disheartening of human retrogressions, and yet the stimulant of qualities of soul which, in every race, can seemingly find no other renewal.” If your motives are noble, national self-defense among them, you are ennobled. The qualities of soul on exhibit in Kyiv and Bakhmut and Robotyne, on the streets, in the trenches, and aloft on the wings of drones—courage, ingenuity, resilience—deserve our fullest appreciation.  

Epigram, epitaph

 When you strike at the tyrant, you must kill.

Knives Out

A dagger rightfully belongs in the back of a tyrant.

Zdrowaś Maryjo

It would appear that the long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive has begun. The fortunes of battle being unsure, concerned old men in distant countries can mostly pray and read the news in modesty and with hope. It is one of those rare instances in which we know who is deserving of our prayers.

Release the Leopards

As the war in Ukraine reaches the one-year mark, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said last Tuesday that Russia has "lost strategically, operationally, and tactically." Which is not to say that the war is over or has been won—there are few winners in war, if any, really—but only that losers can sometimes be identified and named, Putin and the Russian Empire, first and foremost. When the Empire experienced a similar defeat in 1904-5, the Czarist regime collapsed into revolution. Futures are complexly contingent, so I don’t presume to predict the outcome of this war, the post-war, or its inchoate prospects for peace and reconstruction, but if all parties stay their current courses, we have cause for hope that all of this death and destruction can entail a better Ukraine and a better world. Supporters of the Ukrainian cause, however, must not slacken their efforts. Guns, treasure, and unity are still required.

A second loser: The Trumpian rump of the Republican Party, the so-called GOP, have been such tools of oligarchy and authoritarianism in general and of Vladimir Putin specifically, that they could more transparently express their call letters in the Russian/Cyrillic script—ГСП. Their (dis)putative House leader, Kevin McCarthy, has proclaimed that U.S. aid to Ukraine will not be a “blank check,” and the propaganda outlet of the ГСП, Fox Lies, continues to feature sycophants and apologists whom Russian media have taken to heart. They are losers, too, shameless appeasers, embarrassments. Donald Trump kissed, and continues to kiss, Vladimir Putin’s ass; Ukraine, and the global forces of more liberal and democratic values, interests, and institutions have kicked it.

Alas, Year Two

A year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a year of heroic resistance, a second invasion impends. Failed and desperate as Putin and his lackeys have been to date, they retain sufficient resources, if not to win on their original terms, sufficient to wreak further havoc on the Ukrainian people and state, to press the West in its support of Ukraine, and to issue nuclear threats. The pathology of Russian nationalism, insecurity, fatalism, and autocracy has weathered yet another year of history, promising a war of further attrition, squared, perhaps cubed.

 

No reports of Russia from Russia of dissent or critical thinking of any alternative sort encourage us to believe that anything but more of the brutal same—or worse—is in the offing. One reads of their public discourse only a vituperative hallucination. Apparent critics drop off of buildings like flies. The echo chamber of Russian media thrums a bass of doom and a treble of hysteria, the Fox idiot Tucker Carlson a darling. In the old Soviet Union, where the press consisted of Izvestia, “News,” and Pravda, “Truth,” it was said on the streets in Moscow that “there was no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.” Would that media consumers fifty years later were that savvy. Everywhere.

 

Zelenskyy still lives! My Polish prayers go out to Ukraine and Ukrainians, along with a few paltry dollars. Their efforts remain for us in the West an example of civic virtue and courage.