Theory and Reality and Ukraine and War

Aftereffects of the last war in Europe

Theory.

Much of the discussion, if you can call it that, surrounding the current situation in Ukraine has involved rehashing NATO expansion in the post-Soviet era.  This is a narrative being pushed assiduously by Russia, and believe it or not, by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, among others on the Right, and it seems to take the side of Vladimir Putin in a twist understandable to MAGA followers of Donald Trump, the biggest Putin fan of them all, but not so much by the rest of us.  This theory more or less parrots the Putin-pushed narrative that Russia has so-called “legitimate interests” in “securing its borders to the west,” as well as rumblings about its so-called “sphere of influence.”

The theory of course assumes that Russia is facing some kind of “threat” to its West, chiefly from Ukraine, the country Russia has decided to encircle presumably to “defend” itself.  The theory ignores that it was Russia in 2014 that seized Ukrainian territory, Crimea, and started a war against Ukraine in the Donbas region by backing pro-Russia “rebels” in the area.  Remember the “little green men,” identified as Russian soldiers in uniforms with no markings?  This would amount to, by any measure other than the Kremlin’s, an invasion of the sovereign territory of Ukraine by a foreign power, namely Russia.

The second element in what we might call the Theory of Russian Interests involves the expansion of NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Essentially, the thinking goes that the West made a grave error when the USSR disbanded by pushing its NATO alliance too fast and too far East into the states that were either allied with or a part of the Soviet Union.  The new NATO would include the unification of East and West Germany into a single member country, as well as other Eastern European countries like the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Albania – all of which could be said to have been in the “sphere of influence” of the Soviet Union, and certainly would be said by Russia to remain within that “sphere” today.

I’m sure you’ve seen now-famous quote from the 1990 meeting between Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”  This was followed by the 1993 meeting between Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Russian President Boris Yeltsin when Christopher assured Yeltsin that the U.S. had no intentions of expanding NATO membership to the east but instead wanted a “partnership” cooperation agreement that would be open to all European nations including Russia. 

That the U.S. intended to go ahead and expand NATO however became clear the following year, enraging Yeltsin who considered that he was still relying on assurances he had been given in 1993.  Indeed, NATO expansion proceeded apace, with Poland, Hungary, and Czechia achieving membership in 1999, and the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia following in 2004, and more Eastern European states still in 2009.

George F. Kennan, author of the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow which first posited the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union in 1946 would call NATO’s eastern expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” 

But eastern expansion of NATO doesn’t completely explain Putin’s moves with Ukraine.  Sure, he resents that the USSR fell apart and the West took advantage.  But we can’t ignore what he sees as his real “security concerns.”  He looks to his west, and he sees the last three “dominoes” to fall:  Ukraine and Belarus and little Moldova.  They are the only real estate between him and the Big Bad Wolf of NATO.  Putin has troops in all three countries now – in the Transnistrian region of Eastern Moldova, conducting military “exercises” in Belarus, and inside Eastern Ukraine, even if he won’t admit it.  He has a friendly dictator in Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, but not so in the other two countries.  His current theory that he faces a “threat” from NATO is as much of an illusion as the theory that led to the expansion of NATO in the first place. 

Reality.

The whole business of thinking that we somehow “won” the Cold War and could do whatever we wanted in the New Europe was like getting the best of a schoolyard bully on the playground and shoving his face in the dirt and telling him, “See what I told you would happen?”  Failure to think that the bully might one day get back on his feet and start taking it out on the little kids again is what I call macho folly, because the thing about bullies is that they don’t “get over it.”  It’s who they are, and they’re bound to do it again.

I know it’s a stretch and I know it seems silly to compare what’s going on right now between the U.S. and Ukraine and Russia to behavior on a playground, but something in me cannot help but see it that way.  I think it’s because I keep remembering that every time I write about war, or the possibility of war, or the aftereffects of war – anything at all about war, in fact – I’m writing about men who are simply grown-up boys. 

Before I went to Iraq in 2003 to “cover” the war we had started there, my son, Lucian V, had recently turned two years old.  I remember one day I took him and my daughter Lilly on a hike to a waterfall in the mountains north of L.A.  We were walking along enjoying the scenery when Lucian spied a stick on the ground.  He picked it up.  It was a good size stick, big enough that his hand barely made it around its circumference.  I’ll never forget the look on his face as long as I live.  His eyes lit up as he lifted it.  I could see him thinking, Wow, look at this cool stick!  I wonder what I can use it for?  

And then I stood there watching as it came to him:  I can hit something with it!

He banged it on the ground a couple of times, but that didn’t satisfy him.  He wanted a target.  So he walked over to some rocks and started hitting one of the rocks until he knocked it off the pile it was sitting on, and as that rock flew away, his eyes lit up even more.  Suddenly, I realized I was watching him, at age two, turn his stick into a weapon.

One day over in Iraq, I was on a brigade base camp outside the outlaw town of Tal Afar near the Syrian border.  I was eating breakfast one morning in the D-fac, or dining facility.  I had been with a company right on the Syrian border for several days and hadn’t had a hot meal in about a week, so I had hungrily loaded up my tray with bacon and eggs and toast and hot coffee and found a seat over near one of the walls of the huge tent-like structure of the D-fac where a flatscreen TV was mounted on the wall.  Several soldiers who looked like they had just returned from a patrol somewhere – they were covered with dust and dirt and clearly hadn’t bathed in days – sat down at the table next to me and began eating.  I asked where they’d come from, and they said they’d been on a ten day patrol in Sinjar, another outlaw town full of insurgents to the west of Tal Afar.

The TV’s in the D-facs over there were usually tuned to an ESPN “classic” channel showing re-runs of old football and basketball and baseball games.  But for some reason, this TV was tuned to C-Span and was showing a speech by some Defense Department official in Washington D.C. at a dinner held by one of the conservative think tanks.  The guy on the screen was running his mouth, throwing around military acronyms and mil-speak like “expansion of our security footprint” and “making best use of our forward-deployed assets” and “maintaining our current defense posture.”

I was sitting there listening to this tsunami of verbal garbage when one of the soldiers turned to me and asked, “Sir, do you know who that motherfucker is?”  Suddenly, it came to me:  That guy got his job in the Pentagon, and he looked around and he said, gee, look at this great big stick I’ve got!  I wonder what I can do with it?   And he started a war. 

I replied, “Yes, I do.  That is Douglas Feith, he is a Deputy Secretary of Defense and along with Mr. Wolfowitz, he is one of the architects of this war.”

“He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about,” the solider said. “Shut up, you dumb asshole,” he yelled.  He picked up a piece of toast slathered with jelly and threw it.  The toast hit the screen and slid slowly down, leaving a trail of jelly.  Suddenly, the rest of the soldiers were picking up food and little jelly containers and peppering the screen, yelling at Feith.  Mercifully, he reached the end of his speech and the screen switched to one of the C-span anchors and the barrage stopped.

Between that dining facility in Iraq and a hotel ballroom in Washington D.C. lay the folly of Feith and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and their “footprints” and “assets.”  What I had just witnessed was the yawning gap between the theories of the “thinkers” in Washington D.C. and the reality of the exhausted, dirty, hungry soldiers who were at war.

And here we are again.  This time it’s Putin and his “thinkers” in Moscow indulging in the same delusions that our “thinkers” indulged in about Iraq and Afghanistan.  We’re big and we’re powerful and we can flex our military might and we can tell little guys what they can do and what they can’t do.

Folly upon folly upon folly. 

I spoke to Bill Taylor today.  He is the former ambassador to Ukraine after a long career spent in the State Department and USAID.  He is a classmate of mine from West Point, we were seniors in high school together in Virginia, and our fathers were classmates at West Point, so we’ve known each other for a long time.  I wanted to talk to him because I’ve seen him interviewed repeatedly over the last few weeks on MSNBC, and he is one of the very few people who has consistently said that basically, “I don’t think Putin’s going to do it,” by which he meant pull the trigger and invade Ukraine.  I wanted to know why he thought so differently from other “experts” about the prospect for war.

What it boiled down to was his sense that Putin rattled his sabers and moved all of his forces to surround Ukraine to intimidate President Zelensky and President Biden, “and they weren’t intimidated,” in Bill’s blunt language.  “I was in Zelensky’s office two weeks ago, and he told me, ‘I’m not afraid of a hundred thousand troops on our borders, but I would be afraid if he put a half million or a million there.’”  Bill went on to say that another of Putin’s big problems is the attitude of the Russian people.  “They don’t hate Ukraine.  There is not a great feeling against Ukraine in Russia despite the best efforts of Russian state media to spread disinformation.  He has real opposition within Russia to invading Ukraine.  Last week a former Russian general, Leonid Ivoshov, wrote an open letter to Putin telling him not to invade.  That’s extraordinary.  So far as I know, it’s still up, it’s still there.”  (By which he meant, still available to be read in Russia by its citizens.)

Bill has also made a point to note that if Russia were to invade, “Ukraine will fight and fight hard.”  Casualties will be larger than people think.  Opposition in Ukraine to Russian aggression on its eastern border and its seizure of Crimea is very strong, he told me.  “Every village in Ukraine has a memorial to the dead from the Donbas region,” he said.  (More than 14,000 Ukrainians have been killed since the fighting began in 2014.)  “They have photographs of the dead displayed, and I’ve heard they’re having to make extra room in Kyiv on their memorial wall.”  He went on to tell me of a friend he has in Ukraine who served in the Ukrainian army in Donbas in the early days of the war.  “He was a squad leader.  He’s out of the army now, and last week he sent me a video of all the equipment he has ready if Russia invades.  It was all laid out, including a military assault rifle.  He told me when he went to buy the rifle, he had to stand in line, there were so many people doing the same thing.”

Who is rattling all those sabers and ordering around all those tanks and displaying all those videos of rocket launchers moving into position in Belarus and the Ukrainian border?  Men.  When we talk about war, or the possibility of war, or the results of war, we’re talking about men.  Who has to pick up the pieces when the wars ordered by men are over?  Women. 

When I lived in Germany in the mid-1950’s, driving through the bombed out sections of Mainz or Nuremberg or Heidelberg, what you saw was women, most of them old and stooped and wearing rags around their heads and old boots on their feet, picking up the bricks from bombed buildings, putting them in wheelbarrows, and moving them to places where they piled them in neat stacks for when the city would someday be rebuilt.

I was reminded of this image by a reader who was good enough to send me an email about one of my stories on the subject.  Her name is Irene Jarosewich, and she is a representative to the U.N. for the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations.  She lives in this country, but she wrote of the Ukrainian Diaspora, which she describes as one of the largest in the world.  “At present, approximately 10 million self-identified Ukrainians live beyond the borders of Ukraine, almost 25% of Ukraine’s in-country population of 45 million,” she wrote.  And then she talked about what it’s like when she runs into someone of Ukrainian heritage. 

“Every woman has her personal war-story legacy – as a survivor, as the mother of a soldier, as the daughter or granddaughter of a war refugee, as a woman whose great grandmother lived through two world wars.  We don't ask – ‘oh, wow, love your dress, where did you get it?’ - we circle - and pretty much gently get to the question ‘where were you in 1945?’  Now, it does not mean where YOU were specifically - because probably you were not even born - but where were your people - parents, grandparents, family, were they deported to Kazakhstan or Siberia? Were they German slave laborers? Were they escaping and got stuck in Poland?  Ended up in European DP (displaced person) camps? Were they sponsored by the Catholic Church and ended up as laborers in South America?  It's a shorthand that immediately gives you a sense of this person's worldview and reality. But the jumping off point is the end of WW2.  My mother had a shitty life until she was about 22, and then it was merely hard until she was about 40. Why shitty and hard?  Because she had her youth - years of education - poor nutrition - taken from her by war, an early death of her mother since there were not enough meds/treatment in DP camps. In turn, the woman with whom my mother shared a room was a war widow with two daughters, so she did not feel very sorry for herself.  When I went to work in Ukraine in the 1990s - I worked and interacted with women of all ages and from all regions - sooner or later - if the relationship went past conversation one - some war entered into the conversation - a description of how their father served in the red army, how their grandmother survived the Russian civil war - how (this from an older wife of a poet) she grew up in the same village of Nestor Makhno - she just assumed I knew who he was - and, well, I did - and so on.  My intergenerational war legacy - I hoard non-perishable food.  No amount of logic - we're in America - no war here - can help me break the habit I got from my mom - must always have food in the house - never assume you can just get it. It's a small issue, but fortunately, my husband is also a child of war survivors, so, did not even have to ask, he built me a pantry.”

As Irene wrote me, “no amount of logic” can explain any of it.  Folly upon folly upon folly, and it’s the folly of men, the folly of Putin to think that he, or Russia, but mostly himself, is threatened by Ukraine, or by NATO, or by anyone.  The folly that his answer is moving more than 100,000 soldiers and God only knows how many tanks and bombers and helicopters and cannons and rocket launchers and order them to drive around and show themselves so Zelensky and the Ukrainian people and everyone else will be impressed or intimidated or something anyway.  The folly of our response and the response of European countries, that nobody, no bully, is going to push us around and tell us who can or who cannot be in our club, or where we can move our tanks and our missiles and our bombers and our cannons and our soldiers.

You want to know what isn’t folly?  The dead bodies in wars, and who will bury them, and who will pick up the bricks and pile them in neat stacks for the detritus of war to be rebuilt and the whole thing starts over again.