The Long Night in Ukraine
Another year of life as a millennial, another international crisis…
…only this time it might involve nukes! As if Generation Suck didn’t live with enough anxiety, now we get to share in the same existential dread as the Gen Xers and the Boomers. (Was there ever really a reason to let that fear go?) I’m probably exaggerating, but maybe schoolkids should add duck and cover to their active shooter drills?
It’s been more than three weeks since Russia launched a nationwide “special operation” to purge the peaceful, democratically-elected governm — I mean a cabal of corrupt neo-Nazis — from their neighbor, Ukraine, and it has not exactly gone according to plan.
The Ukrainians have not been keen on their big bully of a brother since 2014, when Russia forcibly annexed the Crimean peninsula in the south and kicked off a low grade war supporting the “breakaway” districts of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas region in the east. Yet they have responded to this latest act of aggression against high numbers and low odds with a stiffer-than-expected resistance, no doubt aided by a bountiful supply of US-branded Stinger missiles and savvy, media-forward leadership by a former actor-turned-president with low expectations. What Russia no doubt expected to be a quick and painless takeover of Kyiv has now consumed hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles and tens of thousands of personnel.
The international response was swift. During a special emergency session, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Russia for the invasion, 141 for and 5 against, with 35 abstaining.
The US and Europe snapped into action and slapped Russia with heavy and unprecedented economic sanctions, and many businesses from Apple to Uniqlo to McDonald’s are now refusing to offer their services on Russian soil. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, pledged to wean themselves off a dependence on Russian gas, from which they imported more than a third of their total fuel in 2021, and also to dedicate 2% of their GDP toward buttressing their defense. Even Sweden and Finland expressed interest in joining NATO.
Rest assured, President Putin. You can still count on cheerleaders from the American far-right to have your back, because who needs morals when you can grift instead? Tucker Carlson just asked some questions in the most Tucker way possible, and Madison Cawthorn ranted that the Ukrainian government was irredeemably corrupt, evil, and maybe worst of all, “woke.” Nevermind that Russia parrots this shit in their own propaganda while shelling apartment buildings and hospitals to rubble in Mariupol.
What I would give for John McCain to still be alive. What I would give to not pine for John McCain.
One curious thing that I’ve noticed: It seems like no other major conflict before this one has been documented quite this much on social media.
Whether by demand or The Algorithm, for the past few weeks my Twitter feed has been dominated by long thread after long thread speculating on Putin’s motives, his perceived endgame (as far as there is one), and even the poor combat readiness of the Russian military judging by the state of their truck tires. (The comrades should have consulted someone from Vermont — Mud Season is not to be fucked with.) NATO analysts must be salivating at all the data they’re getting on the third largest military on earth, of course, if not for the dying.
On a more sobering note, the strange dissonance of watching Soviet-era tanks rolling through a landscape that could just as easily pass for suburban Connecticut in early spring is jarring, until you begin to wonder white. In my lifetime anyway, I’m not used to seeing war in a place that is not the Middle East, among people who are not brown and Muslim and poor.
Indeed, others in Ukraine’s neighboring countries seem to see the sudden migrant crisis through the same colored glasses. As of this writing, over 3 million Ukranians have fled the country for Poland, Hungary, and other nearby countries, and so far authorities and residents there are receiving them with open arms. Compare this with 2015, when right-wing governments in Hungary and elsewhere greeted migrants fleeing war in Syria and Afghanistan with riot cops and razor wire. Or when Russia-surrogate Belarus leveraged mass migration as a weapon to overwhelm and antagonize the EU. Why the difference?
From the words of Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov:
“These people are Europeans,” Petkov said. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people. … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists …”
WHITE. The real tell is the numbers of black Ukranians being turned away and harassed.
Opinions on why Putin chose to go this particular route falls into two different camps. The realist camp, represented by my favorite undergrad IR citation generator, University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, suggests that the US and NATO bear some responsibility for this because of NATO’s drive for eastward expansion after the end of the Cold War. We pushed too far into Russia’s sphere of influence, he posits, adding to their insecurity, cornering a diminished great power against a wall. This is an idea even the Russians themselves promoted in their own propaganda, and as reflected in their repeated assertions for Ukraine to pledge never to join NATO. The counterargument however takes into account the agency of the everyday Ukrainian’s right to have their own nation apart from Russia, and, you know, not be bombed.
Putin decided to invade because he wants to rebuild Russia as a great power reminiscent of its Soviet heyday, one where Ukraine as we know it does not exist. Either way, one of the first things I remember learning from my days as a polisci undergrad is that the theory of a rational actor is often bunk, and so far Putin’s behavior tracks with that assessment.
Rational or not, clearly the outcome we have been given is the opposite of whatever Putin intended. Putin miscalculated the resolve of the Ukrainian people and the rest of the West, and now Russia looks all the weaker because of it. Estimates suggest the Russian GDP will contract 15% as a result of sanctions, with the likelihood of deep economic pain for Russians up and down the income scale due to how globalized Russia has become. Yet many are clamoring for further action, namely the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, even though enforcing it would be nothing short of war. Sanctions being one thing, how far does the responsibility to protect go when up against a nuclear-armed, (former?) superpower?
Some, like Fareed Zakaria speaking on Ezra Klein’s podcast, suggest that Putin needs to be offered an off ramp to save face. But so far, despite negotiations Putin has responded by brutally doubling down, both in Ukraine and internally. As of this writing, Russian troops are fighting to capture the port city of Mariupol with increasing deadliness for civilians sheltering there. In Russia, the government shuttered any remaining vestiges of independent media, and clamped down hard on popular dissent, to the point where anyone who refers to the war as, well, a war is subject to 15 years imprisonment.
As we lurch into Week 4 of the conflict, Putin is becoming even more of a tyrant than he once was, and even worse, a cornered, embarrassed one. Faced with the possibility and indignity of a defeat, we risk a repeat of the Russian military’s work in Syria, a version of total war where whole cities are flattened indiscriminately while Ukrainians of course suffer the most.
Meanwhile, China looks on, weighing carefully which side to play, originally offering signals of support for Russia, but now equivocating with statements of “regret” and calls for peace.
Taiwan is watching too.
