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.

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.

Żubrówka

Sometimes, when you least expect, you encounter at the suggestion of a friend, more or less by accident, a token that makes you think, makes you rethink that token, its symbolic value in your life. In this case, that token is Żubrówka, the Polish vodka scented, enlivened with bison grass. Żubrówka, for me, is comic—and it is a family comedy—of being completely buffaloed on the bathroom floor, prostrate after a long day of shots and apple juice and love in Małe Śwornegacie; or, it is the memory of golden-tinted evenings in the pubs and dessert cafés of Kraków, with my friends, Monika and szarlotka.

In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, or rather, the movie by that name I’ve just watched at the recommendation of a friend and colleague, Żubrówka is described as “music by moonlight.” Chopin, perhaps, if you’re in that kind of mood, a melancholy, even a dangerous melancholy. In this story, a bottle of Żubrówka, scented like “newly mown lavender” returns the recently abstinent Sophie to her alcoholic depths, to her wayward life, and ultimately to her murder. Żubrówka, the vehicle to multipronged tragedy. I thought, at first, that this was just a movie, just a novel, and that what happens in such fictions doesn’t matter. The main character says as much, twice, about life even. But that’s not quite true. If it were a truly bad novel, or a bad movie, that would be true, but good books and good movies do matter. The problem is, they don’t matter much, they don’t matter enough. At least on their own. One needs a steady diet of them to affect one’s life for good—or bad.

And in this case, the disastrous role played by Żubrówka in The Razor’s Edge does not affect how I think about it, how I remember it, how I experience it, much. For that I am thankful.