My view on the deadliest war in modern history would likely be different had I not lived in Ukraine — probably one of indifference.
But I have.
The first time I set foot in Ukraine in 2020, having spent years in the entirely different atmosphere of Thailand (appropriately nicknamed “The Land of Smiles”) I was taken aback by the stoic disposition of the people.
Ukrainians are kind and giving when you break through the exterior, but exceedingly hard on the surface.
And why would anyone expect it be any other way?
The land has soaked in centuries of blood right into the rich black soil, and you can see it in its people’s faces.
These are noble people; these are entirely decent people; the amber waves of grain could easily be mistaken for my home state of Kansas; its women are arguably the most beautiful in the world.
They didn’t deserve to be plunged into a devastating proxy war between rival global powers and its graveyards turned into a labyrinth of Ukrainian flags marking dead soldiers’ graves.
In my wife’s home village, there is a small hill with a hut overlooking the vast steppe that has probably been there as long as the village itself — a historical lookout for the familiar hordes marauding across the plains to kill and conquer.
The road to the current tragic state of affairs was laid long ago, and none of the involved parties are blameless.
It’s entirely possible — likely, even — that, had Bill Clinton not forced Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal when the Soviet Union collapsed, the 2022 war, which was really just an extension of a smaller-scale war that began in 2014, would never have broken out.
Via The Brookings Institute (emphasis added):
“When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. When Ukrainian-Russian negotiations on removing these weapons from Ukraine appeared to break down in September 1993, the U.S. government engaged in a trilateral process with Ukraine and Russia. The result was the Trilateral Statement, signed in January 1994, under which Ukraine agreed to transfer the nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination. In return, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Russia and Britain.”
“I feel a personal stake because I got them [Ukraine] to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons,” Clinton conceded to Irish broadcaster RTE in 2023.
Whatever ongoing military support from the United States that justifies, if it does at all, is a matter of legitimate debate. But it’s not an insignificant landmark in the long series of events that led to the current tragic state of affairs.
At any rate, counting on American or European largesse in perpetuity would be strategically foolhardy; Ukraine is going to have to stand on its own feet or else be subjugated, whether nominally sovereign or not, indefinitely.
Related: Polish High Court Rules National Sovereignty Supersedes EU Authority, EU Sues
I have heard from Russian apologists the argument that many right-wingers in the West like to offer: Ukraine was historically part of Russia and therefore Russia has a legitimate claim on its territory.
First, the claim that the whole of Ukraine was always essentially a Russian outpost is ahistorical. Western Ukraine was historically not part of Russia but changed hands numerous times, including being held by the Austro-Hungarian empire beginning in 1772. (If you visit Lviv, it looks like a European city, not a Russian one, dotted with Catholic cathedrals rather than Orthodox).
Anyway, what happened to all that brotherly love when the Bolsheviks were genociding Ukrainians, just as a political move? Using food as a weapon of war to feed the growing industrial base that had displaced the agricultural one but also — and this is undeniable — to get the Ukrainian nationalist farmers (the kulaks) under control by any means necessary while bleeding them dry of their agricultural produce via state requisition.
Via Britannica (emphasis added):
“The result of Stalin’s policies was the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33—a man-made demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Of the estimated five million people who died in the Soviet Union, almost four million were Ukrainians. The famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivization; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated. At the same time, a law was passed in August 1932 making the theft of socialist property a capital crime, leading to scenes in which peasants faced the firing squad for stealing as little as a sack of wheat from state storehouses…
The famine subsided only after the 1933 harvest had been completed. The traditional Ukrainian village had been essentially destroyed, and settlers from Russia were brought in to repopulate the devastated countryside. Soviet authorities flatly denied the existence of the famine both at the time it was raging and after it was over.”
(Even though millions of Ukrainians died — by some estimates, up to ten million people — how curious that almost no one in America or the West learns this history? Perhaps because the ideological heirs to the Bolsheviks currently enjoy a stranglehold on Western culture and politics as they did in the Soviet Union, who see no issue whatsoever with taking the screws to their political opponents, no matter how unjust the means.)
But even if were granted that all of Ukraine belonged to Russia since the dawn of time and that the benevolent Russians had treated them as equals and brothers, so what?
What gives Russia the right to claim Ukraine despite the popular will of the people who live there?
If, dispensing with moral arguments, the answer boils down to: because it can and we’re going with the law of the jungle, then that’s a stupid answer anyway.
Whatever threats it might issue, short of mass extermination, Russia could never fully conquer Ukraine. If, short of launching nukes and guaranteeing a global extinction event, it tried to occupy Kyiv or Odessa or Lviv, it would have an unending insurgency on its hands that would drain its national treasure beyond tolerable limits. Millions of people would die.
So, again, what gives Russia the moral claim to Ukraine?
Because they have a shared ethnicity, cultural heritage, and their languages are closely linked?
In that case, the United States had no right to buck the British king in 1776.
At least where I’ve been in Western Ukraine, popular opinion is unanimous that Ukraine is a separate entity from Russia and there is no desire for “reunification” or whatever Kremlin propaganda.
My radical position is: Ukraine should be sovereign and free from any undue foreign influence — from the west or the east. Were I in charge of running the Ukrainian state, radical and total national sovereignty would be my north star. I would have no desire to see it subverted either by Moscow or unelected EU bureaucrats in Brussels — or, for that matter, transnational corporations that have their own designs on the country.
Of course, I understand that the current geopolitical reality of the Eurasian steppe renders that easier said than done.
But things can’t go on like this forever.
A negotiated settlement is the only way forward without sacrificing millions of soldiers in an intractable struggle for inches on the front.
Geopolitical realities aside, the noble Ukrainian people deserve far better than their current fate, to be used as a slaughterhouse by opposing powers to the west and east that don’t have their best interests in mind.
I understand not everyone shares this vision or passion, which I can respect. But if, like my unborn son, this were your land and your people dying, you might see Ukraine as something greater than a pawn in the geopolitical machinations of elite warmongers, and worth defending.
