While visiting Kyiv this month, my first trip to Ukraine since Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, I tried to get my exercise every morning by walking the grounds of St Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery. Its serenity, however, has been disrupted by a jarring exhibit of destroyed Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers.
During my walks, I’d poke my head into these jagged, rocket-pierced hulks, wondering what a terrible death must have come to the Russian soldiers operating them.
But the shock of this tangled mass of rusting steel, sitting in the middle of this grand, whitish-stone piazza, evoked a different image in my mind’s eye: a meteor.
It looked as if a giant meteor had plummeted from space, disrupting life as we knew it — nearly eight decades without a “great power” war in Europe, a continent where centuries of invasions and conquest had given way to security and prosperity.
Now we have this ugly pile sitting here in our midst, smoldering, and we, Ukrainians and the world community, are struggling with how to deal with it.
Nearly every Ukrainian I spoke to in Kyiv was at once exhausted by the war and passionately determined to recover every inch of their Russian-occupied territory — but no one had clear answers about the road ahead, the painful trade-offs that await, only certainty that defeat would mean an end to Ukraine’s democratic dream and a smashing of the post-World War II era that had produced a Europe more whole and free than ever before in its history.
What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies.
What he is doing is evil. He has trumped up any number of shifting justifications — one day it was removing a Nazi regime in power in Kyiv, the next it was preventing Nato expansion, the next it was fending off a Western cultural invasion of Russia — for what ultimately was a personal flight of fancy that now requires his superpower army turning to North Korea for help. It’s like the biggest bank in town having to ask the local pawnshop for a loan. So much for Putin’s bare-chested virility.
What is so evil — beyond the death and pain and trauma and destruction he has inflicted on so many Ukrainians — is that at a time when climate change, famine, health crises and so much more are stressing planet Earth, the last thing humanity needed was to divert so much attention, collaborative energy, money and lives to respond to Putin’s war to make Ukraine a Russian colony again.
Putin lately has stopped even bothering to justify the war — maybe because even he is too embarrassed to utter aloud the nihilism that his actions scream: If I can’t have Ukraine, I’ll make sure Ukrainians can’t have it, either.
“This is not a war in which the aggressor has some vision, some outline of the future. Rather, on the contrary, for them, everything is black, formless, and the only thing that matters is force,” Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian, remarked on a panel we did together at a conference in Kyiv last weekend.
Being in the city has been clarifying for me in three regards.
I understand even better just how sick and disruptive this Russian invasion is. I understand even better just how hard, maybe even impossible, it will be for Ukrainians to evict Putin’s army from every inch of their soil.
Perhaps most of all, I understand even better something that former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed almost 30 years ago:
“Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Most Americans don’t know a lot about Ukraine, but I say this without any hyperbole: Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West, for better or for worse depending on the war’s outcome. Its integration into the European Union and Nato someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Ukraine is a country with impressive human capital, agricultural resources and natural resources — “hands, brains and grains,” as Western investors in Kyiv like to say. It’s full-fledged integration into Europe’s democratic security and economic architecture would be felt in Russia and China.
Putin knows that. His war, in my view, has never been primarily about countering Nato expansion.
It has always been much more about stopping a Slavic Ukraine from joining the European Union and becoming a successful counterexample to Putin’s Slavic thieving autocracy.
Nato expansion is Putin’s friend; it allows him to justify militarizing Russian society and to present himself as the indispensable guardian of Russia’s strength. EU expansion to Ukraine is a mortal threat; it exposes Putinism as the source of Russia’s weakness.
And the Ukrainians I met seemed to understand that they and Europe were bound up together in an epochal moment against Putinism — a moment, though, that cannot succeed without a steadfast United States. Which is why one of the most frequent — and worried — questions I got on my visit were variations of “Do you think Putin’s pal Trump can be president again?”
One need only look into the eyes of Ukrainian soldiers back from the front or talk to parents in the streets of Kyiv to be stripped of any illusions about the moral balance of this war. I was in the country for just three days — far shorter than my New York Times colleagues and other war journalists who have borne remarkable witness to this fighting and suffering. But my relatively brief interactions brought to life the photos we see of bomb-ravaged cities and villages in Eastern Ukraine, and the chilling findings we read from the United Nations documenting cases in which children have been “raped, tortured and unlawfully confined” by invading Russians.
This is as obvious a case of right versus wrong, good versus evil, as you find in international relations since World War II.
Yet the closer you come to this conflict and think about how to resolve it, that stark black-and-white moral balance sheet doesn’t offer an easy road map to a solution.
It is clear as day what defines a just outcome. It’s a Ukraine that is whole and free — with reparations paid by Russia. But it isn’t at all clear how much such justice is attainable, and at what price, or whether some dirty compromise will be the least-worst option, and if so, what kind of compromise, just how dirty, when and guaranteed by whom.
In other words, the minute you step out of the justice framework of this war — and into the realm of realpolitik diplomacy — the whole picture turns from black-and-white to different shades of gray, because the bad guy is still powerful and still has friends and therefore a say.
On Tuesday, Putin told an economic conference in Russia that the 91 felony counts filed against Donald Trump in four different US jurisdictions represent the “persecution of one’s political rival for political motives” and show “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach democracy to others.” The hall erupted in applause for a leader renowned for using poison underwear, an exploding airplane and Siberian labor camps to “teach democracy” to his rivals.
The shamelessness is breathtaking. And while his beseeching of North Korea for military help is pathetic, the fact that he’s prepared to seek it underscores that he intends to continue this war until he can come away with some chunk of Ukraine that he can hold up as a face-saving success.
I went to Kyiv to participate in the annual meeting of the Yalta European Strategy, organized in partnership with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The first speaker was Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who right from the top argued that if we abandon considerations of justice and do a dirty deal with Putin, we will sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
“Human morality must win this war,” Zelenskyy said.
“Everyone in the world who values freedom, who values human life, who believes that people must win. And our success, the specific success of Ukraine, depends not only on us, on Ukrainians, but also on the extent to which the entire vast moral space of the world wants to preserve itself.”
But securing justice in war almost always requires the total defeat and occupation of the aggressor. Russia has more than three times the population of Ukraine. And when you listen to Ukrainian soldiers speak, you hear a cocktail of Zelenskyy-like defiance mixed with admissions of exhaustion.
Don’t get me wrong: This is a Ukrainian army ready to fight on — and any politician in this country, including Zelenskyy, who just hints at a territorial compromise will be run out of office. But the math is cruel. Everyone who volunteered, right after the invasion, has gone to the front, which means more and more Ukrainians will have to be drafted.
While many show up, they often look to join drone units — not the trench warfare infantry — and more and more have been trying to bribe or flee their way out of the draft. That is why Zelenskyy recently had to fire the entire top leadership of his regional military recruitment centers.
It gets back to that meteor. No one in this modern European country was ready to have his or her life turned upside down by this kind of all-out war that, despite all the threats from Russia, always seemed a remote possibility. One mother remarked to me that her social life now is occasional dinners with friends, kids’ birthday parties “and funerals.” That was not the plan.
You know a country has been at war a long time when the fight starts spawning its own language. When the Ukrainian fundraising platform United24 seeks donations to buy the army more drones, it now asks for a “dronation,” and everyone knows what it means.
The faster Putin faces a collapse of his forces in Ukraine, the more he might have to either flee or be ready to negotiate a face-saving deal today and not wait to see if Trump is reelected and throws him a lifeline. - The New York Times
The writer is an American political commentator and author
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