When not to follow the leader...

Here's an addendum to my previous post about Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: in the introduction to that 2024 book, O'Brien muses about what Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine might reveal about the Russian's capacities as a war leader.

... As this book is being completed, the greatest example of this reality of personal grand-strategy-making is playing out before us.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to create a greater, more powerful Russia, shows once again that grand strategy can be hijacked by deeply flawed individuals over bureaucracies or structures. In no rational world could the Russian invasion of Ukraine be seen as something well thought out or in the Russian national interest. It was poorly conceived, based on a hopeless misreading of Ukrainian intentions and capabilities. The Russian Army was also constructed in such a way that it was far less than the sum of its parts.

While Putin might have had an ends-ways-means plan in his own mind, we can say now that he had poorly constructed means, which he employed in wholly unrealistic ways in a vain attempt to achieve completely unrealistic ends. Yet just before the invasion he was considered perhaps the most savvy and intelligent leader of a major power in the world.

Putin’s grand-strategic performance has in many ways combined the worst strategic traits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In a rational world, with a sober evaluation of the Russian Army, one would have imagined a state’s decision-making bureaucracy would have tried to halt his invasion of Ukraine—as one would have imagined the Italian state might have restrained Mussolini from invading Greece, or German influences might have kept Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union with Britain still fighting.

Like the Axis leaders of the 1940s, Putin made war on the Ukraine of his imagination with a military greatly debilitated by corruption and incompetence of which he was either ignorant or unconcerned. Russia ran into something unanticipated in Ukraine. O'Brien's substack chronicles the consequences. It's my go-to source on the Ukraine war and seems honest, though not objective. He knows who he supports.

Of course, Putin is not the only contemporary leader of a powerful military and country who ignorantly substitutes his fantasies for any coherent plan or strategy. 

 

History goes on ...

So Victor Orbán and his illiberal government have gone down to overwhelming electoral defeat in the Hungarian election. 

If most of us notice Hungary at all here in the USofA, it's as some little eastern European country that buddies up to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, keeping other European Union countries from fully getting on board with Ukraine against Russian invasion. Or something like that. Oh, and that all our domestic American fascists seem to dote on this Orbán guy who just got beat by popular vote

That student of Eastern Europe Timothy Snyder published some philosophical ruminations on the Hungarian story -- and on us -- before today's vote:

... although Hungary might be a small country, we can draw some larger conclusions. The world has been plagued for a century by various “ends of history,” and those ends of history have arisen disproportionately in central and eastern Europe, in Hungary in particular.

The fascists of the 1930s, in Hungary and elsewhere, said that history was over, that all that remained was a biological struggle directed by a party elite. The communists, who came to power in Hungary after 1945 and elsewhere, said that history was over, replaced by scientific administration directed by a party elite. After the end of communism, speaking about Hungary and other post-communist states, too many of us declared that history was now indeed over, since fascism and communism have exhausted themselves, and all that remained was the imperturbable triad of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

From Hungary, Orbán showed that this was not true: capitalism could be corrupted; liberalism could be replaced by illiberalism (his word); and democracy could be turned into a ritual. Seduced by Hungary’s success, many on the far right came to see the Hungarian alternative as the next end of history, the way that things would be, the way that things had to be.

And they are wrong; history goes on. Just as Hungary once offered the international oligarchical far right the confidence that a formula had been found, it now offers to men such as Vance and Trump the anxiety that voting might actually make a difference, that democracy might actually turn out to be more than a slogan, that unpredictable change is still possible, that the future is open.

It's interesting to remember how my generation first become aware of Hungary. In 1957, when I was ten, there was a new girl in my small school who had arrived with her parents from somewhere far away. She was skinny and different. I learned she was from a country called Hungary where Russian tanks had put down a revolution and many educated people had fled. We were supposed to feel bad for her. I remember her as bright, speaking pretty good English, mostly notable because her parents made her go after our school day to language school to learn Chinese -- they feared the family would have to flee once again. Refugees learn caution. 

And, as Snyder reminds us, the future is open -- and we have some power to decide what direction it moves in.

Truth tellers: from embattled Ukraine

There remain among us people who insist on telling the truth -- the truth of Donald Trump et al.'s depredations and the truth of who some American people aspire to be. 

Consider, for example, Tim Mak. Based in Kiev, Ukraine, and ensuring through The Counteroffensive substack that Ukrainian writers can describe the war as they live it, Mak has carved out his own definition of the job of a war correspondent. 

Tim’s breakout in journalism doesn’t follow a known model. Born in Canada, he moved from academic institutions there to the forefront of American politics and cut his teeth reporting on the Obama administration and key political movements, including the rise of the Tea Party and two elections. But the intensity of the 2016 campaign season forced him into an unexpected detour, where he joined the U.S. Army as a combat medic, a role he believed at the time would strengthen his resilience to enrich his later journalism.  

Mak is an American citizen by choice; he could have just remained a Canadian observer of his big neighbor's follies. But he chose to come inside our bedraggled tent. He's also an observer of wars' horrors by choice; his talents could have won him other berths. But he persists because something about Ukraine's stubborn resistance to Russian imperialism reminds him of what he values. He views Trump's turn to enabling Russian conquests as betrayal of his adopted country as well as of Ukrainians.

... One of the reasons I wanted to become an American is that it meant something more than just citizenship in a country. Americans, even when the country failed to live up to its ideals, at least tried to uphold values of freedom and human rights.

America did not need to made “great again” because it was already good — or at least *tried* to be. America exemplified a place where immigrants could make it, fellow allied democracies were boosted, and bad actors were confronted.

... [Trump's new "National Security strategy] throws away any pretense of American exceptionalism or idealism.

It’s a Neanderthalish view of interacting with the world. We are great because we are powerful. We are powerful because we can kill or coerce, or otherwise manipulate you due to the threat of both. ...

Tim Mak thinks we can do better. Sometimes we have done better; sometimes we still do. 

We could use some truth telling

 

It seems a waste of pixels to post this (from the Guardian UK) but I'm feeling intolerant of foolishness and will not resist. This headline is false, absurd, and based on lies. Why do otherwise semi-sane media continue to play along with the game?

 

There is NO evidence that any party to the war being fought by Ukraine against Russian aggression wants "peace."

• Putin wants to erase Ukraine from the map; it's all Russia in his fantasy.

• Trump wants Russian minerals and whatever additional payoff Putin is offering. Oh yeah -- and a peace prize.

• Ukrainians want Russia to get the hell out of their country and must wander through whatever convoluted byways are required to keep that hope alive. While suffering.

• Europeans wish the whole thing would stop impinging on them; though on alternate Tuesdays they understand Russia threatens them all.

Ukraine is the Spanish Civil War of our era, a messy contest between more-or-less democracy and fascism in which the unfortunate Ukrainians provide a plaground for big bullies.

This time as deadly farce ... 

The future of war -- no limits

No wonder Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a TV talk show bully, is threatening to attempt to punish the Congresscritters [gift] who have reminded our military that its members have an obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Hegseth is reported to have ordered Seal Team 6 to ensure that any survivors in his boat sinking binge in the Caribbean were assuredly dead [gift link]. He offers no proof that the US government had any intelligence which justified any strike at all, much less a killer hit to ensure no victims remained alive.  

The secession of the Trump regime and the United States generally from any attempt to uphold the idea that there are such things as "war crimes" marks a terrifying breach with the last 80 years of the development of the international law of armed conflict. We aren't recognizing any limits any longer. This way portends unimaginable carnage.

Phillips P. O'Brien, professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews University and an acute observer of the Russian war on Ukraine, saw this development coming. In the world being launched into being under the axis of Trump, Putin, and Xi, what had been defined as criminal acts are returning as the definition of a successful means of waging war.

... what we are seeing now around the globe is the disappearance of any restraint, what we might call the normalizing of war crimes. Yes, I know war crimes have always been committed. However it was notable that during the period of the International Rules Based Order (now arguably over) states at least wanted to act like they were not committing war crimes. Now that pretense is over—and that means that the reality will be worse. 

As ranged weapons become more numerous, accurate and effective, and as restraints on what can be attacked lessen or even disappear, this will mean the great incentive will be to try and achieve strategic effect through devastating attacks on civilian infrastructure. 

Fighting on the battlefield will be seen as a slow, bloody slog through death zones—while ranged war crimes will be seen as faster and more effective. So when we add up what we are seeing, its terrifying and ethically bankrupt, but also strategically rational. It may very well represent the future of war. 

Russia in Ukraine, with United States encouragement, is now executing a law-free pattern of unbounded murder. All to satisfy the greedy desires of fanciful oligarchs. 

O'Brien today still points out something we should remember. Faced with invasion and internal corruption, nonetheless...

... Ukrainian democracy has proven itself now to be more resilient than American democracy...

For Ukraine, it's search out the future -- or die

Environmental and climate advocate Bill McKibben points out that the planet-wide shift to harness energy from the sun is not only transforming how we produce heat and power cars. It is also changing how war is waged.

It's hard to drone a solar panel. 

The war in Ukraine may be adding resilience to the list of clean energy's virtues. 

As I write this, the Orsknefteorgsintez refinery in Orsk, Russia is ablaze. It sits 1,400 kilometers from the border with Ukraine—in fact, along the border with Kazakhstan. The refinery has a capacity of 6.6 million tons of oil yearly, and among other things it’s one of two refineries capable of producing the jet fuel used by the country’s strategic bombers.

The best reason for nations to switch to power from the sun and wind is that it will reduce, by some degree, the severity of the climate crisis (and save millions of lives lost each year to pollution). The second best reason is that it’s cheaper than fossil fuel, and any nation who doesn’t shift will be stuck with an economy running on expensive energy. But it seems to me—not a military analyst, but a fairly good tea-leaves reader—that the war in Ukraine may be adding a third to the list: its comparative invulnerability to attack.

As the world has begun to figure out, something important has happened amidst the carnage of Russia’s immoral invasion: warfare has changed forever, with the small drone quickly replacing much of the military hardware we grew accustomed to in the 20th century. 

Drones have been ubiquitous along the front lines, where the no-man’s zone between the armies is lethally patrolled by squadrons of drones able to take out tanks, troop transports, and pretty much anything else—that explains much of the stasis of the last two years; the competing forces are largely pinned down. 

The Russians, of course, have also been using drones to attack civilian assets—every night a new sortie, mixed in with missiles, seems to take out kindergartens, hospitals, and old folks homes. An early target was Ukraine’s energy sources, in an effort to freeze the fight out of the nation. (Currently the Russians seem to be playing dangerous games with the offline nuclear power plants not far from the front lines). But as we head into yet another war of winter, Ukraine hangs on—and more than hangs on. 

Over the course of the war, by sheer necessity, Ukraine has developed a formidable drone industry, and increasingly it is using them against a singular set of targets: the oil refining and transport infrastructure spread out across its sprawling foe. Russia has formidable air defenses, of course—Ukraine couldn’t fly a bomber across 1,400 kilometers of the country’s airspace to bomb a refinery. But the small and comparatively slow drones have proved equal to the task. ...

Russia can, and does, shoot rockets at the centers of Ukrainian civilian life. But Ukrainians, motivated by necessity and determined courage, have found, at least for the moment, an answer that sustains their embattled nation with sun power they have developed themselves. The war is making oil refining and coal burning obsolete and perilous technologies to depend on.

...The general lesson to be drawn from this, it seems to me, is that centralized and complex energy facilities are now sitting ducks for drone attack, and that that will certainly alter military calculations going forward. A refinery, for instance, is one of the most complicated machines humanity has ever constructed, often covering hundreds of acres. It’s filled with highly complex equipment and highly flammable hydrocarbons; hit one corner with a drone and the flames and the damage are likely to spread quickly. Not far behind—as Ukraine has learned to its sadness—are coal and gas-fired power plants—expensive infrastructure that can take months or years to rebuild as your citizens shiver. 

By contrast, solar farms and wind turbines are scattered, which makes them harder to hit, and relatively simple to fix. Silicon doesn’t explode when it’s hit: a drone may take out some panels, but they are easy to switch out for new ones. And individual rooftop installations are too small to be systematically attacked. ...

I'm sure McKibben would agree that it would be far better if Russia hadn't made war on its proud, self-reliant neighbor. But since Russia has, we can marvel at how Ukrainian innovation is showing how a small nation can preserve its independence by adopting the energy source of the future. 

Too often, war midwifes scientific advances that only kill more efficiently. There is so much death in Ukraine, but also so much life. 

Might Ukraine be winning its war against Russia? We wouldn't know.

The last few weeks of "diplomacy" over Russia's intent to destroy the independent nation of Ukraine have been pretty nauseating. Serious Americans should concede the obvious: our president gets his jollies from acting as Putin's ventriloquist's dummy, while Ukrainians struggle to stay alive and keep a weak and divided Europe on side. It's all just noise, empty noise for Ukrainians for whom the war is about life and death. Meanwhile the American media deliver up the nonsense as if it were meaningful.

Retired Australian General Mick Ryan studies wars, visits wars, and is the sort of guy who makes speeches at international "security"  conferences. His serious view of the Ukraine war is quite different from the common blather: 

Russia’s ability to convince certain foreign politicians that it is winning the war greatly exceeds its ability to actually do so.

There is an often-used metaphor that is employed to challenge Russian narratives about success in this war. It goes like this:

Imagine it is 2006. It is three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. After three years, America has only succeeded in taking 20% of the country, has not yet toppled Saddam Hussein, and has suffered over one million casualties. Would we view this as ‘winning’?

I think it is a useful framework for examining military and strategic success and failure in this war. But I would add another layer to this metaphor which, I believe, really brings home the precarious position that Russia is in. The additional layer is this:

Imagine again that it is 2006, and in addition to the ongoing operations in Iraq with the conditions described previously, that Iraq is undertaking a widespread serious of strikes against oil and gas production, refining and storage facilities across America.

Do we seriously think that this would not have a massive impact on American politics, war policy and the economy? It would certainly have an influence on domestic views of winning and losing and would objectively indicate that America was not winning.

This is the situation that Russia now faces. It is making only minor gains on the ground for massive human and material losses. It is facing an expanding series of Ukrainian strikes against economic and military targets in Russia that it appears powerless to stop.

Let me restate my hypothesis: Ukraine’s long-range strike operations reinforce that Russia cannot win this war.

Yes, our media breathlessly report the U.S. is blocking Ukraine from using U.S.-supplied missiles to attack Russian oil depots.  But Ukrainians, fighting for their lives, have developed their own sophisticated arms industry; Ukraine [is] becoming the ‘Silicon Valley’ of defense as startups develop long-range drones and missiles.

“Fighting in the air is our only real asymmetric advantage on the battlefield at the moment. We don’t have as much manpower or money as they have,” said Iryna Terekh, head of production at Fire Point.

Terekh spoke as she surveyed dozens of “deep-strike drones” that had recently come off the assembly line and would soon be used by Ukrainian forces to attack arms depots, oil refineries and other targets vital to the Kremlin’s war machine and economy.

Spurred by its existential fight against Russia — and limited military assistance from Western allies — Ukraine has fast become a global center for defense innovation. The goal is to match, if not outmuscle, Russia’s capabilities...

Maybe Trump can kill off this development for Putin. But it's going to be hard. The U.S. can no longer count on being able to tell other countries to jump and having them ask "how high?" And the intellectual habits of the U.S. "defense" establishment make Ukraine's increasing independence unimaginable among Trump's lackeys.

Paul Krugman recently shared thoughts about elite mind rot among U.S. "intellectual experts" with Phillips P. O'Brien. Krugman is a Nobel prize winning economist who remains broadly curious; O'Brien is an historian of strategic studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland who watches wars. They agree that conventional wisdom can be both extremely durable and simply false.

O’Brien: ... it's a fraternity of failure. So many people were so wrong that it's much easier for them to defend each other and keep hiring each other and keep referring to each other than admit that they all screwed up and don't know what they're talking about. So it was a community that failed, not just a few people, a whole community failed.

And that community existed in the analytical community, it existed in the intelligence community, it existed in the Pentagon and the ministries of defense. And instead of having a real introspection—like what the heck have we got wrong?—they have gone into self-defense mode. Everyone got it wrong. And that somehow makes it okay. We all got it wrong. And all that means is that the same people who got it wrong to begin with are getting it wrong now, but they're being treated as if they have any idea of what they're talking about when they don't.

Krugman: The parallel in economics is there were a lot of people predicting that getting down from the high inflation of 2022 would require mass unemployment which was utterly wrong. And, you know, we all make bad forecasts, but it was clearly analytically wrong. It just had the wrong model of what this inflation was about. And those same people are still out there, you know, talking to Bloomberg every couple of days and making confident pronouncements. So, yeah.

O’Brien: I mean, we’ve all seen community behavior where a community would rather defend itself than actually look at its own methods, it seems to me. And that's what we're seeing now. Protection of reputation is all. In towns like Washington, New York, Boston, whatever, it's so important to be smart, and to be seen to be smart.

Meanwhile Trump sucks up to Russia's mad nationalist dictator and Russia's killing machine grinds on.

Stuck between Trump and Putin

I too stand with Ukraine, rule of law, and freedom. Just saying.

• • • 

In response to Donald Trump's announced suck up session with Vladimir Putin on Monday in Alaska we should remember that when the Russian dictator steps on US soil, our international obligation is arrest him and convey him to answer the indictment of the International Criminal Court. 

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

Charges

Allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute). The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, (i) for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others (article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute), and (ii) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility (article 28(b) of the Rome Statute).

Not likely, but this is who Donald fawns over. I guess Donald is about to make himself an accessory to Putin's crimes ... That would be on top of the many Trump crimes against the US Constitution and us here in this country.

From the Department of Plain Speaking Politicians

 

A career foreign service officer, Bridget Brink served as US ambassador to Ukraine under Biden. Now she's running for Congress in her home state of Michigan. It seems possible that having been witness up close to a genuinely existential struggle leaves this observer with "no fucks to give" in a political race. 

Over images from the Russian assault on Ukraine, Brink declares: "Appeasing a dictator will never achieve a lasting peace..."

The House district is competitive. There will be other Democratic contestants. I have no idea whether this approach will "work" for Brink, but I find it refreshing.

• • • 

As we watch helplessly while Donald Trump playacts the strongman in the most volatile arena in today's world, it doesn't hurt to be reminded of what war, even a "small" war, looks like.

Checking in on Ukraine's war

Donald Trump may blunder about, mostly just licking Vladimir Putin's ass, and pretending he's ending the war of the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- but as in most things Trump, the reality is elsewhere. And there are multiple reports that indicate that 1) Europe knows it must step up in order to defend itself from the smothering Russian offensive and 2) Ukraine is far more united and able to fight on without much US help than we've been told.

On the first point, Finnish security expert Minna Ålander explains: 

What often escapes the public’s notice – partially because so much is happening and it’s hard to keep track of all the news items – is that Ukraine’s defence industry is being swiftly integrated into the emerging European Defence Industrial and Technological Base (EDIB). Most importantly, it is not just charity but a win-win situation: Ukraine’s self-sufficiency is improved by increased own production and European defence companies get in on the latest innovations from the Ukrainian battlefield. A year ago, in May 2024, the EU hosted the first EU-Ukraine Defence Industries Forum in a series of multilateral defence industrial events that the government of Ukraine launched in 2023. In September 2024, the EU also opened a Defence Innovation Office in Kyiv.

In a proper Orwellian sense, the EU has mobilised €11.1 bn from the European Peace Facility for military support for Ukraine, and has an additional €50 bn Ukraine Facility to bolster Ukraine’s resilience, to support its EU integration process, and de-risk investment in Ukraine. The support is both grant- and loan-based, including a €35 billion loan to be repaid with revenue from the frozen Russian assets. ...

By working together with Ukraine, European companies are not only increasing Ukraine’s own production capacity but also learning directly from Ukraine’s battlefield experience – something that will help Europe not only to replace US capabilities, but to think ahead.

But what of the long suffering Ukrainians, now engaged in a war in which their longtime US backers are changing sides? Because they have no choice -- no chance of national or even personal survival if they back off -- they fight on. The Atlantic reporter Anne Applebaum has made the pilgrimage to Ukraine recently. 

... Ukrainians believe the war will continue, and the prospect no longer scares them. Partly this is because they have no other choice. Unlike the Russians, who could withdraw from the battlefield and go home at any time, the Ukrainians cannot withdraw from the battlefield. If they do, they will lose their civilization, their language, and their freedom. Under Russian occupation, the mayor of Lviv and the journalists at the Lviv Media Forum would end up in prison or dead, just like their murdered and imprisoned colleagues in Russian-occupied Ukraine today.

More to the point, Ukrainians are confident that they can continue fighting, even without the same level of American support. The Ukrainian army is not retaking territory, as it did in the autumn of 2022, nor does it have plans for a major new counteroffensive. But neither is it losing. The tanks and heavy equipment that Ukraine needed from others don’t matter as much as they did two years ago. The Ukrainians still need American intelligence and anti-missile defenses to protect civilians in their cities. They still get weapons and ammunition from Europe. But on the frontline, this conflict has become a drone war, and Ukraine both produces drones—more than 2 million last year, probably twice that many this year—and builds software and systems to run them. In February, a Ukrainian unit deployed the first of what it hopes will be several hundred fighting robots. Last month, a Ukrainian sea drone took down a Russian airplane. One brigade has designed a drone that can reliably take out a Shahed, the Iranian drones that are used to kill Ukrainian civilians.

... The results are visible on the ground. Remember, if you can, the panic that accompanied news reports from Ukraine nine months ago: The city of Pokrovsk was about to fall, a calamity that many believed might precipitate the collapse of the whole front line. But Pokrovsk did not fall. The Russians continue to attack that region: On May 15 alone, Ukrainian soldiers based on the Pokrovsk front line repelled 74 separate assaults and offensive actions. But in recent months, the front line has hardly moved. ...

This is a gift link to Applebaum's story of her visit. Well worth your time.

Motherhood in Kyiv in war time

Ukrainian journalist Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova is choosing to have a child now, in the midst of war and air raids.

Why I’m giving birth in a warzone:

... Andrii, my husband, and I had talked about having a child for a long time. But no one prepares you for what it's like to wait for new life while others are dying every day.

At first, I was silent, even to him. It seemed better to keep it to myself – a secret, small light in the great darkness. But I knew I couldn't stay silent for long. This news, so big and so fragile, was about to break.

That evening, I prepared dinner — something tasty and homemade: potatoes baked in clay pots with meat and sour cream (I would say it's a traditional Ukrainian dish). ...

That evening, there was silence in the candlelit apartment, with no sirens – a miracle in itself. I handed him the box, holding my breath as if I were about to jump into an abyss. He opened it... and remained silent.

The silence seemed to last forever. Then he looked up: "Is it true?"

No, I'm f**king kidding, I thought, but instead I nodded in the affirmative.

His face conveyed it all – joy, shock, but mostly fear. Not just of becoming a father, but of raising a child in a war-torn country.

This wasn’t just two lines on a pregnancy test; it’s a vow – to protect our child, and to endure. And that vow feels even heavier than the emergency suitcase we usually grab during an air raid. ...

Read it all here.  

Smoke rises in the sky over Kyiv after a Russian missile strike on Sunday morning. Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

I now have only two months left before I give birth... I just hope everything works out — that I make it to the hospital, that Andrii is there, and that there are no Russian attacks that day.

But despite everything, I believe that everything will be alright, and I will give birth in Kyiv.

... Being pregnant during the war presents another challenge. Have you ever been in a bomb shelter? If you haven't, I hope you never have to. The closest bomb shelter to my house is the subway. If you have ever been in the subway, you know that it is very cold, especially in winter. Additionally, there is limited seating space, making it challenging for pregnant women to stand.

Usually, my husband handles it — he wakes me when explosions shake our apartment in the night, checks how serious the attack is, and decides whether we need to rush to the subway. Last time, we drove because I was already walking slowly.

Carrying two cats, a blanket for warmth, and a chair to sit on makes getting to the shelter a struggle. I can’t imagine doing it all with a stroller.

... Having a child during a war isn’t just about fear and uncertainty; it’s about endless love. It’s the realization that, even though we are afraid, we are also ready to protect a whole new world from all the bad things out there. ...

Brave woman; brave nation.

Warning: Trump is doing his best to get Ukrainians killed

The Trump administration has accomplished something I didn't think would be where I'd dwell any longer -- thrown me back into my lifelong, all too familiar, posture of opposing a US imperial adventure. I was always a peacenik because our wars seemed so manifestly unjust -- until I saw a little country fighting for its very life against a relentless bully. I knew if I were a Ukrainian, I'd know which side I was on. And, I hope I'd be willing to take risks for my choices.

With the change of regime in this country, the United States is making itself a party to Putin's imperial war against Ukraine's freedom aspirations. 

Phillips P. O'Brien is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a close observer of the Ukraine war. He writes:

Our Lady of Kiev

Trump Is Helping Putin Kill Ukrainians. The USA Is Running Down Ukrainian Air Defense in Coordination With Russia.

... Just in the last few days we have incontrovertible proof of how Trump is helping Putin kill Ukrainians—both some now and many more in the future. Its the combination of what the US will not sell Ukraine (even though Ukraine has the money to buy them), the Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians, and how the two come together ...

... Ukraine is desperate to purchase Patriot anti-air missiles, as the Ukrainians are running out of this vital system. These were provided (too late) by the Biden Administration in 2023. From the moment they appeared, however, they revealed themselves to be the most effective air-defense weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal.

... Having Patriots allowed the Ukrainians to keep the power on during the Russian Winter attacks in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. ... In sum, these are a very effective but expensive system. They have made Ukraine much safer than it would be otherwise. ...

... And the very effectiveness of the Patriots has provided Trump with a weapon to help kill Ukrainians. Even being sparing in their usage, Ukraine is running out. Patriots are an American system and the USA has been the source of most of the missiles. Right now there is no new US aid on its way to Ukraine. ...

... Trump, however, working hand in hand with Putin, is refusing to sell them—even though that would benefit US workers and help the US economy. Indeed, in the last few days he has started boasting about the fact that Ukraine is desperate to buy more Patriots, and he is refusing to make a deal.

... The USA (Trump is the duly elected president with the support of Congress—so this is the official position of the US government) is now working together with the Russian government to see more Ukrainians killed. The USA is encouraging a Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians by letting the Russians know that the US will deprive Ukraine of the means to defend those civilians and no longer provide Ukrainian Patriots.

So, the next time a Russian missile lands in a Ukrainian city and bodies litter the streets, realize this is an act that is being encouraged and supported by the USA. The USA is no longer a defender of democracy in Europe, it is an enabler of dictatorship and death.

Phillips' post is much more detailed and unlocked. Take a look.

"These are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew ..."

Timothy Snyder is the preeminent English-language historian of what he has labeled the Eastern Europe Bloodlands. Modern Ukraine, the western frontiers of what is now Russia, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states were all places and peoples engulfed in human barbarism throughout the 20th century. These lands were where Nazi Germans attempted their "final solution," aimed to erase living Jews from Europe. 

Snyder's reaction to the Trump/Vance ambush of Ukainian president Zelens'kyi is long, heartfelt, and deep. Here's a taste; click on the title to read it all.

Anti-semitism in the Oval office
A confrontation seen with a historian's eye  

... The encounter in the White House was antisemitic. I am an historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. ...

... Some forms of what [Jerzy] defined as antisemitism had to do with his memories of occupation. Jews had to show deference. Germans mocked the ways Jews dressed. That was before they were sent to the ghetto and murdered. Jews were scapegoated, made responsible for what the Germans wished to do anyway.

Some characteristics of antisemitism as he described it were more abstract. Jewish achievement was portrayed as illegitimate. Jews only gained success, antisemites say, by lying and propaganda. If a Jew was prominent, that only proved the existence of a Jewish conspiracy, and thereby the illegitimacy of the institution where the success was achieved. A prominent Jew was always, went the antisemitic assumption, motivated by money. 

Some of what Jerzy said had to do with his experience after the war. Non-Jews will deny the courage and suffering of Jews. They will claim all heroism and martyrdom as their own. ... there was after the war a Soviet antisemitism, with a broader and longer heritage, that claimed that Jews had somehow all remained at the rear while others fought and died. The facts were no defense.

... all of this should help us to see antisemitism in real life. Some cases are so overwhelming in scale that we find them difficult to confront and name. As Orwell noted, it can be hard to see what is right in front of your face.

Much has been said about the evils of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Its antisemitic element, however, has been underestimated. Russia's major war aim was fascist regime change, the overturning of a democratically-elected president in favor of some sort of collaborator. The premise is absurd: that Ukrainians do not really exist as a nation, and in fact would prefer a Russian.

But it was also antisemitic: that it is unnatural that a Jew could hold an important office. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, the Ukrainian president, is of Jewish origin. Members of his family fought in the Red Army against the Germans. Others were murdered in the Holocaust. Although his Jewishness is not very relevant in Ukrainian politics, it is highly salient to Russian (and other) antisemites.

Ukraine, says Putin, does not really exist. But another theme of the propaganda is that Zelens'kyi is not actually the president of Ukraine. These two bizarre ideas work together: Ukraine is artificial and can exist thanks to the Jewish international conspiracy. The fact that a Jew leads the country confirms — for Russian fascists — both the unreality of Ukraine and the reality of a conspiracy. This Russian regime perspective is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) antisemitic. Russian propaganda treats Zelens'kyi as obsessed with money and as subhuman. ...

• • •

Last Friday I happened to start watching the discussion at the White House between Zelens'kyi, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Brian Glenn towards the end, when Vance was already yelling at the Ukrainian president: "you're wrong!" I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reactions was: these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. A roomful against one. An antisemitic scene.

And the more I listened to the words, the more that reaction was confirmed. I won't speak for how Zelens'kyi regards himself. Ukrainian, of course. Beyond that I don't know. These things are complex, and personal.

But not for the antisemite.

It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. 

• • •

... I had a strong personal reaction to that scene in the Oval Office, and I checked it for a week with friends and colleagues, who confessed that they had had the same reaction. I reconsidered what I had learned as a historian. I looked at the scholarly definitions. Everything, sadly, lines up. ...

In writing about antisemitism here I am obviously making a moral point. I am asking us, Americans, to think seriously about what we are doing, about Russia's criminal war against Ukraine, in which we are now becoming complicit. That Russia's war is antisemitic is one of its many evils; taking Russia’s side in that war is wrong for many reasons, including that one. ...

... In the world of the antisemite, all is known in advance: the Jew is just a deceiver, concerned only with money, subject to exclusion, intimidated by force. As soon as he is humiliated and eliminated, everything else will fall into its proper place. Consider the smirks in the Oval Office last Friday: the antisemite thinks that he has understood everything.

But in the actual world in which we actually live, Jews are humans, perilous and beautiful like the rest of us. The United States has never elected a Jewish president, and perhaps never will. But Ukraine has; and that president represents his people, facing challenges that those who mock him will never understand.  ...

... About one thing I am certain. Our eyes have to be open to what we do not wish to see.

Yes. Too much, sadly, lines up as we watch the Donald betray friends and attack our best hopes and aspirations.

Probably misused, but still righteous

I have to admit I was gobsmacked to encounter several iterations of this photo on Facebook. The picture is of the lighted facade of the church in Washington DC which my Episcopalian comrades presumptuously call the Washington National Cathedral. It's the Protestant denomination's big diocesan church in the capitol, only by custom called "national." Episcopalians aren't "the ruling class at prayer" any longer. 

As far as we can tell, though many Christian nationalists intend to be our ruling class, broad based Christian nationalist attention to humble petition to God for the poor and suffering is pretty muted these days.

Nonetheless, I guess I'm happy to see being passed around what is clearly an affirmation of support for the brave and desperate people of Ukraine under Russian attack. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the image derives from an ecumenical prayer service held alongside the Ukrainian ambassador in July 2023.

Anyway, I'm a Christian fully in the camp of supporting Ukrainians in their war for their country and their lives. It has not been simple for me to find myself supporting one side in a war. I've spent a lifetime opposing the wars of the United States empire; I've explored pacifism and find it the better way to live. But not in the case of this conflict. Ukrainians deserve their own country if they want it enough to fight for it and they've shown they do. The Russian invasion is brutal and criminal; it aims at the erasure of a particular history and people. Insofar as the US has been supportive of Ukraine, I think that has been a good use of a tiny fraction of my taxes. 

And I know Donald Trump's infatuation with and capitulation to Russia's strong man is a betrayal of all that is decent in our complex land.

Foul Betrayal (2)

I bemoaned Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine and of this country last week. Our country is being disgraced by small empty men and the ignominy is just beginning.

Today I'll outsource commentary on the Trump/Vance boys bullying the brave Ukrainian President in the Oval Office to Phillips P. OBrien, an American historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. 

Just Say Thank You and Shut Up

... The key theme throughout is that Trump is a great man who can work with Putin, while Ukraine needs to shut up, show gratitude, and take what is coming to it. Trump makes that clear when he criticizes the Ukrainians for basically wanting to fight for their freedom and not cave in to Putin, which he terms being “very disrespectful to this country” (this country being the USA—in other words, himself).

Then Trump and Vance go on what can only be called the great gratitude rant. Even though the USA under Trump has approved not a single new dollar in aid for Ukraine, Trump and Vance want Zelensky to constantly say thank you to them. Its, as always, an attempt to be humiliate a democratic state and for Trump to take credit for something other people have done. As Vance finally snaps. “Just say thank you.”

And then Trump lets the cat out of the bag. This was not a meeting or disagreement over the minerals deal. He was trying to pressure Zelensky into agreeing a cease fire along Putin’s lines and Zelensky refused. Trump comes out and says that explicitly at the end.

“You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers. No, listen … And then you tell us, ‘I don’t want a ceasefire. I don’t want a ceasefire. I want to go and I want this… You’re not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest, that’s not a nice thing.

So there we have it. Ukraine should shut up and take Trump’s and Putin’s terms. It is not an independent, sovereign, democratic state, it is a dictator’s plaything which should be eternally grateful for the scraps from Trump’s and Putin’s table.

Thousands of Ukrainians didn't die for this -- and millions of Americans over three generations didn't fight fascism and for more complete democracy for this. As O'Brien goes on to say, it's now up to Europeans to step up and repudiate Trump's betrayal of all the European zone has stood for. Can they rise to their own defense?

The New York Times reports: 

European leaders quickly pledged their continued support for Ukraine on Friday after President Trump’s blistering criticism of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a meeting at the White House.

Leaders lined up behind Ukraine and praised its embattled president, the statements coming one after the other: from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Ireland. Canadian, Australian and New Zealand leaders added their voices to the Europeans’.

For once the paper got a headline right: 

The Orange Toddler defends his only friend. What a gaping hole for a soul that monster in the White House reveals.

Foul betrayals

A thoughtful description of Donald Trump's sell out of Ukraine to Putin comes from Kviv via David Rieff in The New Republic:

The Trump Presidency Is an Unmitigated Catastrophe for Ukraine 

Ukrainians aren’t shocked—they have a lot of experience in the betrayal business. ...

... the mood here in the days running up to the third anniversary of the start of the war has oscillated between despair and grim fortitude. It could hardly be otherwise, and for the obvious reason: With the rapprochement between Washington and Moscow, as exemplified by the U.S.-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia that excluded Ukraine, the presidency of Donald Trump has already been proven to be an unmitigated catastrophe for Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy apparently will be putting in an appearance in Washington this week to receive our Orange Toddler's ultimatum. There's plenty of speculation about how that will play out, but whatever results almost certainly will be horrible for Ukrainians -- and all of Europe now under the Russian imperial gun.

It's worth remembering the sort of figure Zelenskiy has been over the last three years.

Zelenskiy’s sang froid during his press conference, at what amounts to nothing less than the Trump administration’s betrayal of every promise and commitment the United States has made to Ukraine, both unilaterally and through NATO in concert with Washington’s European allies, was remarkable. It served as a gripping reminder of how important, for all his faults and both the military failures and failures of governance in Ukraine that have occurred during his watch, Zelenskiy’s leadership has been since, in the first hours of the full-scale Russian invasion three years ago, he declined the Biden administration’s offer to evacuate him with his family to Poland, defiantly saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

Even the many Ukrainians who are disenchanted with him in general terms accept that the country could not hope for a better war leader. In this, the oft-made comparison between Zelenskiy and Winston Churchill is anything but hyperbolic. Like Zelenskiy, Churchill before the war was considered something of a buffoon, a political dilettante who had changed parties several times and who had done everything but distinguish himself during various periods as a government minister. And then, of course, immediately after the war, in the so-called “khaki election,” in which the votes of the war veterans proved dispositive, the British public voted Churchill out of office. 

But although many Ukrainians are predicting the same fate for Zelenskiy in a postwar Ukraine, as long as the war goes on, like Churchill between 1939 and 1945, Zelenskiy has proven himself the invaluable man. ...

Donald Trump is going to get away with his crime against brave Ukrainians -- just as he has skated on his crimes from his last tenure and most likely will continue to escape justice for his current even more corrupt and vicious assault on us here at home. This Friday's meeting may -- or may not yet -- resolve the shape of the Ukrainian betrayal.

A vigil in Chicago this week. Ukrainians are not without friends in the States.

Rieff goes on:

... European political elites misunderstood and misunderstand the U.S. in a way their Ukrainian opposite numbers never did. Betrayal is a good teacher in that regard. And throughout its history, from the days of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth to the subjugation of Ukraine by the Russian Empire to the murderous days of Red Power and the Moscow-made famine of 1932–1933, the Holodomor, to the contemporary era in which Ukraine was constrained to give up its nuclear weapons in return for independence and security from Russian revanchism, through to the Biden administration’s consistently insufficient grants of aid, to Donald Trump’s monstrous U-turn, Ukrainians have the misfortune to be connoisseurs of betrayal.

... Then there’s the victory of the Christian Democrats in Germany, and, more importantly, the statements by the soon-to-be Chancellor Friedrich Merz ... Donald Trump, Merz went on, had made it clear that his administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” The message was clear: As far as Merz was concerned, the fate of Europe was inseparable from that of Ukraine. ...

... if Ukrainians continue to hope, what other choice—besides flight—do they have? Which is why this bitter defiant twist on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous theory of the five stages of grief—defiance, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—is now making the rounds in Kyiv. In the Ukrainian telling, the first four stages are the same. But instead of acceptance, the fifth stage is the polar opposite: It’s “Fuck you.” There are worse ways to prepare oneself for the ordeals that lie in store.

It didn't have to be this way. Biden got off to a good start against Russia's attack on Ukraine, but muffed the follow through. American elites of both parties never really warmed to defending Ukraine; perhaps they were always shamed by encountering a people that was so clear-eyed when it faced utter evil. This country -- so rich, so complacent -- basks in more muted colors.

For me, the historical analogy which the Ukraine war has always brought to the fore is of the European democracies' betrayal of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. Oh sure, Britain and France were (mostly) glad to see the Spanish monarchy give way to a multi-party Spanish democracy. But that democracy was messy and contained leftist, pro-Soviet elements. Better to allow a Spanish Christian Fascist with German Nazi support go on to murder, pillage, and eradicate this unsavory, short-lived Republic.

In the '30s, abstaining from supporting Spanish democracy only meant Britain, France, and eventually the United States had to fight the Nazis a few years later. This time around, Donald Trump is bringing us in on the side of the Nazis. We, the citizens of these United States, also have been betrayed this week.

War crimes accelerate in Ukraine

As the Trump regime settles in, it would be too easy to look away from horrors far away. But let's not.

Here's retired Australian general Mick Ryan reminding us why Ukraine cannot surrender to Putin's aggression:

Russian Executions of Ukrainian PoWs Continue.

The Prosecutor General's Office in Ukraine this week opened yet another criminal case against Russia for war crimes after a video emerged that shows Russian soldiers executing six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war. The events shown in the video, which include the Russian soldiers discussing who should shoot each prisoner of war, apparently occured in the Donetsk region.

The number of executions of unarmed Ukrainian POWs immediately after their capture has increased significantly in the past year. The Ukrainian authorities have recorded in excess of 180 executions of Ukrainian POWs by the Russians since February 2022. Given how much ambiguity there often is in combat operations, there almost certain to have been many more than this number. ...

The prevalence of these crimes in the Russian army indicates that their soldiers are either ordered or incentivised to shoot PoWs by their commanders, or that Russian commanders willingly look away from such events. Either way, it has been systematised now in the Russian system. And the fact that Russian soldiers video these crimes and post them online means they don’t fear any form of retribution from their own commanders.

As such, not only are the individuals who commit the crimes responsible but so is their entire chain of command that has ignored these events. There is simply no way now that any Russian officer can claim in the future that ‘I didn’t know this was occuring’.

For those interested in more details about the magnitude of Russian war crimes committed since February 2022, this report from the Congressional Research Service provides a good overview.

I have to wonder whether under the Trump regime, that government report will be trashed. Get it while you can.

I'm sure Trump's idea of "peace" in Ukraine is that the embattled country must surrender. Ukraine can't.

It's cold in Ukraine this winter

Here I pass along observations from Kateryna Kibarova, a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha, writing in Persuasion. 

If you live in Ukraine today, checking the news is your morning routine. You have to understand what is going on—how can you not?

You have to understand which direction the drones are flying from, whether it is dangerous to go outside. If you want to protect yourself, you have to constantly monitor the situation. When the air raid alarm goes off, immediately everyone’s phones in the office start howling. Everyone has the alerts set up.

The Russians have gotten more sophisticated with the air raids. Now they fly lower, at altitudes that make our air defense system operators fear that interceptions will hit houses or schools or kindergartens. They launch drones along the highways so low that they are almost level with cars, or along riverbeds so that they cannot be tracked and shot down. On the one hand, in Kyiv, the sheer number of drones—sometimes 150 per attack—makes it impossible to intercept them all. On the other hand, the cities closer to the front, like Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, are simply defenseless. They are in a constant state of fear—without air defenses, facing more complex attacks, tougher and more precise than ours in Kyiv. It’s an impossible situation.

The scariest thing is how cold-blooded you become. You're out there driving to work, and you’re turning up the radio, listening to YAKTAK and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk,1 in the car so you don't hear the suicide drones fly overhead. They’re launching the Shaheds2 in just incredible numbers to deplete our missile defense systems, so that we have no protection. And the Russians are constantly threatening to blow up the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. In my bag, next to my documents, I keep a special pill. In case of a nuclear explosion or meltdown, it has to be taken to neutralize the first of the waves of radiation. I carry it everywhere I go.

 ...  Many of my friends have gone abroad with their children. I think it’s the right decision because it’s so dangerous for kids to be here right now. This summer, 200,000 more Ukrainians left the country. Now that the winter blackouts are coming, more will leave.

But probably the strangest and scariest part of this situation is that there is already an abyss between us, between those who live in Ukraine and those who have left. Those who have left—even my friends who come here to see their parents or just to see their friends—aren’t embedded in the context of what is happening here anymore. I’m about ninety percent sure they’re not coming back. They have learned the languages of the countries where they live now; their children are going to school; they themselves have got jobs or are receiving welfare support.

Those of us who remain have become very wounded internally, in our spirit. For example: I feel strange when my girlfriend, who emigrated, comes to visit. She’ll make some ordinary comment and laugh, and I’ll get scared that I no longer have these simple, unburdened feelings. ...

Go read it all. Many Ukrainians seem to think something good could come for them from Donald Trump; I doubt this, but I hope they are right and I am wrong.

Ukraine thrown to Putin's mercies

Unlike many of my friends on the generally progressive side of things, I've long believed that US support for the flawed, but democratically legitimate, Ukrainian state was a right action. This is the first US intervention I've supported in a lifetime of rejection of US imperialism, yet support for Ukraine feels the natural continuation of a long trajectory. Russia's war is an imperial war, seeking to subjugate and absorb a people who want the freedom to define their own way. Yes, I'm something of a quasi-pacifist -- but Russia's crimes against an occupied population are heinous and should not be minimized.

The election of Donald Trump presumably means that Ukrainians are to be thrown to Putin's mercies. Europe is unprepared to step up and replace us. This is a crime much akin to western democracies' abandonment in the 1930s of the Second Spanish Republic to Hitler and Mussolini's pet local strongman, Francisco Franco. That betrayal did not slake the appetite of that era's fascists -- this abandonment won't today either. And we in the United States are even less prepared or even able to recover from our folly than we were then. Bad times indeed. 

• • •

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army. He writes a substack of military analysis.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?: The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

... when the combined wealth of NATO’s five biggest members (U.S. Germany, UK, France and Canada) is twenty times that of Russia, and their military outstrips Russia in technology, size and capability, is a searing indictment about the strategic thinking, execution and will in what is currently known as ‘the west’.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

There is an old Chinese saying: strangle the chicken and frighten the monkey. It is a saying that a PLA General used with a friend of mine one time. In essence, if you wish to shape the behavior of a big competitor, attack and destroy a small ally of the competitor.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO ‘strategy’ for Ukraine over the past three years, as well as their strategic impatience and inclination to enter into negotiations with a Russia that has the strategic initiative, means that the West instead has ‘fed the chicken and encouraged the monkey’.

We will regret this. And so, eventually, will our citizens.

• • •

In 2015, the British journalist Tim Judah, veteran observer of too many wars including the agony in the Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s, published In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. This is a little book of vignettes from the early stages of the war between Ukrainians engaged in forming their European national identity and others who supported the continuation of life within the Russian imperial sphere. Long before the Russian invasion of 2022, Judah shed light on the creativity and resilience of so many in this benighted part of the world.

Despite being such a big country, Ukraine, for most of us who live the western part of the continent, is, or was, somewhere not very important. ...The aim of this book is not to record a blow-by-blow account of the events that led to the Maidan revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, or the war that followed. ...

What I thought was that between journalism and academic books there was not much that explained Ukraine, that made it a vibrant place full of people who have something to say and tell us. Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy people were to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think. Often when they started to talk, you could hardly stop them. If we listen to people who can understand why they think what they do, and act the way they do.

In Ukraine ... people have been taken for granted for so long, as voters or taxpayers or bribe payers, that when finally the rotten ship of state springs leaks and begins to list, everyone is shocked. But they should not have been. ... This book is about what I saw, what people told me and also those parts of history that we need to know in order to understand what is happening in Ukraine ...

Judah might not find the same openness to conversation today, two years into a devastating, existential war. Or perhaps he might. Ukraine has long surprised us. We do not know yet how the next chapter plays out.

We have been here before ...

Let's not forget Ukraine. I can't. I see a people who made the mistake of aspiring to become a European democratic society while located next to an oligarchic tyranny whose ruler cannot abide their example. So they must die. If there is such a thing as a just war, Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion qualifies.

I present here excerpts from Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum's address on being awarded the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize in Frankfurt, Germany. The citation named her “indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy.” As well as being a journalist, she's an historian and a part time resident of Poland where her husband is Foreign Minister in the current, pro-democracy government. 

The Case Against Pessimism: The West has to believe that democracy will prevail.

... When, in the 1990s, I was researching the history of the Gulag in the Soviet archives, I assumed that the story belonged to the distant past. When, a few years later, I wrote about the Soviet assault on Eastern Europe, I also thought that I was describing an era that had ended. And when I studied the history of the Ukrainian famine, the tragedy at the center of Stalin’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine as a nation, I did not imagine that this same kind of story could repeat itself in my lifetime. ...

... After 2014, and then again after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, cruelly familiar patterns repeated themselves. Russian soldiers treated ordinary Ukrainians as enemies and spies. They used random violence to terrorize people. They imprisoned civilians for minor offenses—the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle, for example—or sometimes for no reason at all. They built torture chambers as well as filtration camps, which we could also call concentration camps. They transformed cultural institutions, schools, and universities to suit the nationalist, imperialist ideology of the new regime. They kidnapped children, took them to Russia, and changed their identities. They stripped Ukrainians of everything that made them human, that made them vital, that made them unique.

... In 2014, Russia was already on the way to becoming a totalitarian society, having launched two brutal wars in Chechnya, having murdered journalists and arrested critics. But after 2014, that process accelerated. The Russian experience of occupation in Ukraine paved the way for harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further; independent institutions were completely banned.

... In the early, emotional days of the war in Ukraine, many did join the chorus of support. In 2022, as in 2014, Europeans again turned on their televisions to see scenes of a kind they knew only from history books: women and children huddled at train stations, tanks rolling across fields, bombed-out cities. In that moment, many things suddenly felt clear. Words quickly became actions. More than 50 countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed. In Kyiv, Odesa, and Kherson, I witnessed the effect of food aid, military aid, and other European support. It felt miraculous.

... Since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically, in both Europe and America. ... Now, faced with the greatest challenge to our values and our interests in our time, the democratic world is starting to wobble. Many wish the fighting in Ukraine would somehow, magically, stop. Others want to change the subject to the Middle East—another horrific, tragic conflict, but one where Europeans have almost no ability to shape events. A Hobbesian world makes many claims upon our resources of solidarity. A deeper engagement with one tragedy does not denote indifference to other tragedies. We must do what we can where our actions will make a difference.

... Slowly, another group is gaining traction, too, especially in Germany. These are the people who do not support or condemn Vladimir Putin’s aggression but rather pretend to stand above the argument and declare “I want peace.” ...

... In 1938, the German writer Thomas Mann, then already in exile, horrified by the situation in his country and by the complacency of the liberal democracies, denounced the “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.”

During World War II, George Orwell condemned his compatriots who called upon Britain to stop fighting. “Pacifism,” he wrote, “is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

In 1983, Manés Sperber, the recipient of that year’s German Peace Prize, also argued against the false morality of his era’s pacifists, who at that time wanted to disarm Germany and Europe in the face of the Soviet threat: “Anyone,” he declared, “who believes and wants to make others believe that a Europe without weapons, neutral and capitulating, can ensure peace for the foreseeable future is mistaken and is misleading others.”

... But let me repeat again: Mann loathed the war, as well as the regime that promoted it. Orwell hated militarism. Sperber and his family were themselves refugees from war. Yet it was because they hated war with such passion, and because they understood the link between war and dictatorship, that they argued in favor of defending the liberal societies they treasured.

We have been here before, which is why the words of our liberal democratic predecessors speak to us. European liberal societies have been confronted by aggressive dictatorships before. We have fought against them before. We can do so again. ... To prevent the Russians from spreading their autocratic political system further, we must help the Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine. If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it....

The challenge is not only military. This is also a battle against hopelessness, against pessimism, and even against the creeping appeal of autocratic rule, which is also sometimes disguised beneath the false language of “peace.” The idea that autocracy is safe and stable, that democracies cause war; that autocracies protect some form of traditional values while democracies are degenerate—this language is also coming from Russia and the broader autocratic world, as well as from those inside our own societies who are prepared to accept as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state.

Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders.

... All of us in the democratic world, not just Germans, have been trained to be critical and skeptical of our own leaders and of our own societies, so it can feel awkward when we are asked to defend our most fundamental principles. But we can’t let skepticism decline into nihilism.

In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship in Europe, we in the democratic world are natural comrades. Our principles and ideals, and the alliances we have built around them, are our most powerful weapons. We must act upon our shared beliefs—that the future can be better; the war can be won; that authoritarianism can be defeated once again; that freedom is possible; and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world.

It seems essential to post this on the weekend when Donald Trump returns to Madison Square Garden to re-enact the Nazi rally of 1938 during which people who called themselves "America Firsters" celebrated Hitler's regime. They thought to bring it across the ocean. Have we come full circle? 

Will we turn the US government over to an admirer of Putin and Hitler? Yes, this does seem to be the choice before us.