![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Russia-AFghanistan-Wiht.jpg\")
\nA convoy crosses a bridge in Termez, now part of Uzbekistan, during the withdrawal of the Soviet Red Army from Afghanistan, on May 21, 1988.<\/em><\/p>\n
Had my father not left Europe in 1939 to escape the Nazis (he was Jewish) and the Russians (he was a capitalist), I would be Ukrainian today and living in one of those towns now being shelled by\u00a0 Putin’s thugs. Instead I’m in upstate New York where today’s concern is tomorrow’s big snow storm.<\/p>\n
I suspect that our sanctions on Russia will hurt (in order) the Russian people, ourselves (Boeing and others get scarce minerals from that part of the world) and finally Putin and his oligarch cronies, who’ve been stashing money away since Putin grabbed Crimea 8 years ago — and won’t feel one tiny little thing.<\/p>\n
Two days ago, I wrote a blog, “Nobody is escaping this. But there are logical things we can all do.<\/em>” If you missed the piece, click here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Here are the best two pieces I’ve read recently on Ukraine by writers much smarter than me:<\/p>\n ====================<\/p>\n The Rape of Ukraine<\/span> And so, Putin has crossed the line.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n During an\u00a0Ubu-esque\u00a0meeting in which he chastised his minions as though in a bad Ernst Lubitsch film, he recognized the independence of the separatist territories of Donbass.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And so here we have the West ridiculed; Ukraine defeated; and thousands of men and women who have fought for eight years to maintain the freedom of Luhansk and Donetsk, handed over to thugs.<\/p>\n In the fog of provocations and lies still to come, we must satisfy ourselves, for now, with recalling the following:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No. 1: Russia has no right to Ukraine. None. No right to amputate, and no right to dictate its alliances. Of course, geopolitics is an affair of power relations. But right remains right. This dictates that peoples are not pawns for the powerful in the Great Game of\u00a0empires. That the United States and Russia, when Ukraine renounced in 1994 its nuclear arsenal, formally took over guaranteeing Ukraine\u2019s security. In violating borders, Putin has betrayed his word. He has revealed his true face. He has banished himself from the concert of nations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No. 2: Ukraine, he said, has a common history with Russia.\u00a0But,\u00a0remember this: It was a colonization. And then, under the Bolsheviks, the strategy of the \u201ciron sweep\u201d to rid Odessa of its anarchists. Then, with Stalin, the Holodomor, the extermination by hunger, that made at least 4 million\u00a0victims. The rest\u2014the bad literature about the so-called \u201cfraternity\u201d of the Slavic peoples, the fable of the \u201cKievan\u00a0Rus\u2019\u201d that would be, in the late ninth century, the cradle of a Russia yet to exist\u2014\u00a0just\u00a0smacks of propaganda. Either Putin knows this and is playing the fool, or he is ignorant of it, and we\u00a0should recommend he\u00a0read\u00a0Vasily\u00a0Grossman, Isaac Babel\u2019s\u00a0Red Cavalry<\/em>, or more recently, Anne Applebaum\u2019s\u00a0Red Famine<\/em>. As for us in the\u00a0West, we had one and only one task: As in Afghanistan,\u00a0Kurdistan,\u00a0and\u00a0everywhere\u00a0peoples strive to embrace democracy, help Ukraine unfetter these bonds of subjection, misfortune, and death.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No. 3: Putin, beyond the hour-and-a-half of verbal diarrhea he unleashed on us, has a goal. Only one. To weaken Ukraine. To bring it to its political knees. To break the democratic \u00e9lan launched eight years ago by the citizenry assembled in Kyiv\u2019s Maidan. His method was calumny, offense, the transformation into fascists of the hundreds of youths who died clutching the starred flag of Europe. And he had another method: sending the little green men of the FSB to\u00a0Donbass with batches of Russian passports; the open mustering of his army to stop an alleged\u00a0genocide; then, in the days that followed, an occupation in the style of Prague or Budapest. He did both. It\u2019s a historic crime against Ukraine and a frontal attack on Europe\u00a0and the West.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No. 4: We hear\u00a0this one\u00a0a lot: The diplomats will have to be back on the scene to help Putin calm down, to stop him, to help him save face. Maybe. I don\u2019t know. But one thing is sure. We should not\u00a0reverse\u00a0the\u00a0roles\u00a0and lose sight of the fact that it was Putin, and he alone, who broke the taboo over war in Europe. We\u00a0must remember that it\u2019s Ukraine, and Ukraine alone, that honor commands us to save from an atrocious and announced offensive. And, even if things end there and we can breathe a sigh of shameful relief, it behooves us to never forget how, well before today\u2019s troubles, from last\u00a0December\u00a0and January, the Kremlin described Europe as a wide-ranging \u201ctheater of military conflict\u201d (Alexander\u00a0Grushko, deputy minister of foreign affairs); brandished the threat of a \u201cpreventive\u201d nuclear strike of the kind Israel wields against Iran (Andrey\u00a0Kartapolov, chair of the Duma\u2019s Defense Committee); and let partisan and friendly media (Svobodnaya\u00a0Pressa<\/em>) announce that, in the case of an enlarged NATO, Russia would vitrify \u201call of Europe and two-thirds of the United States in thirty minutes.\u201d No peace agreement could erase these staggering declarations, without precedent, which I\u00a0assembled in a piece<\/a>\u00a0from Jan. 18. Or else,\u00a0it\u00a0would be\u00a0a Munich-style peace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No. 5: Does all this mean that we should not take into account Russia\u2019s feeling of being surrounded, mistreated, humiliated? I think that this humiliation is\u00a0a myth. I remember how NATO, since 1994, proposed to Russia a \u201cpartnership for peace.\u201d How Russia was invited to join the Council of Europe and the G7. I remember the 2002 NATO-Russia summit in Rome. And Barack Obama\u2019s July 2009 visit to Moscow, offering a reset of all nonconventional weaponry. And\u00a0the self-imposed limits, up to and including\u00a0Donald Trump and Joe Biden, on the number and reach of American weapons deployed in Europe (even while Russia violated its agreements). I can see no other example of a fallen empire that benefited from such sweet consideration from its adversaries. And I believe that the legend of Russian humiliation is the last trap that must be avoided.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is\u00a0what the next red lines should be, after the disaster in Donbass.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Beyond that would reign a diplomacy that, true to the etymology of the word, would consist of bowing obsequiously before force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The same causes producing the same effects, it\u00a0would be the\u00a0return of the terrible 20th century.<\/p>\n ==============<\/p>\n The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Putin has declared that history is destiny, and that Ukraine will never get away from Russia.<\/em> “Are you listening to Putin?\u201d is not the kind of text message I expect to receive from a friend in Moscow. But that\u2019s the question my closest friend asked me on Monday, when the\u00a0Russian President<\/a>\u00a0was about twenty minutes into a public address in which he would announce that he was recognizing two eastern regions of Ukraine as independent countries and effectively lay out\u00a0his rationale<\/a>\u00a0for launching a new military offensive against Ukraine. I was listening\u2014Putin had just said that Ukraine had no history of legitimate statehood. When the speech was over, my friend posted on Facebook, \u201cI can\u2019t breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n Fifty-four years ago, the Soviet dissident Larisa Bogoraz wrote, \u201cIt becomes impossible to live and to breathe.\u201d When she wrote the note, in 1968, she was about to take part in a desperate protest: eight people went to Red Square with banners that denounced the Soviet Union\u2019s invasion of Czechoslovakia. I have always understood Bogoraz\u2019s note to be an expression of shame\u2014the helpless, silent shame of a citizen who can do nothing to stop her country\u2019s aggression. But on Monday I understood those words as expressing something more, something that my friends in Russia were feeling in addition to shame: the tragedy that is the death of hope.<\/p>\n For some Soviet intellectuals, Czechoslovakia in 1968 represented the possibility of a different future. That spring, events appeared to prove that Czechoslovakia was part of the larger world, despite being in the Soviet bloc. The leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was instituting reforms. It seemed that, after the great terrors of both Hitler and Stalin, there could be freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a free exchange of ideas in the media, and possibly even actual elections in Eastern and Central Europe, and that all of these changes could be achieved peacefully. The Czechoslovaks called it \u201csocialism with a human face.\u201d<\/p>\n In August, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing the\u00a0Prague Spring<\/a>\u00a0in Czechoslovakia and hope everywhere in the Soviet bloc. Nothing different was going to happen here. It became impossible to live and to breathe. This was when eight Moscow acquaintances, with minimal discussion and co\u00f6rdination, went to Red Square and unfurled posters that read \u201cFor Your Liberty and Ours\u201d and \u201cHands Off Czechoslovakia,\u201d among others. All were arrested, and seven were given jail time, held in psychiatric detention, or sent into internal exile.<\/p>\n Ukraine has long represented hope for a small minority of Russians. Ukraine shares Russia\u2019s history of tyranny and terror. It lost more than four million people to a man-made famine in 1931-34 and still uncounted others to other kinds of Stalinist terror. Between five and seven million Ukrainians died during the Second World War and the Nazi occupation in 1941-44; this included one and a half million Jews killed in what is often known as the Holocaust by Bullets. Just as in Russia, no family survived untouched by the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism.<\/p>\n After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, both Russian and Ukrainian societies struggled to forge new identities. Both contended with poverty, corruption, and growing inequality. Both had leaders who tried to stay in office by falsifying the vote. But in 2004 Ukrainians revolted against a rigged election, camping out in Kyiv\u2019s Independence Square for weeks. The country\u2019s highest court ordered a revote. Nine years later, when the President sold the country out to Russia\u2014agreeing to scrap an association agreement with the European Union in exchange for fifteen billion in Russian loans\u2014Ukrainians of vastly different political persuasions came to Independence Square\u00a0again<\/a>. They stayed there, day and night, through the dead of winter. They stayed when the government opened fire on them. More than a hundred people died before the corrupt President fled to Russia. A willingness to die for freedom is now a part of not only Ukrainians\u2019 mythology but their lived history.<\/p>\n On Monday, Putin took aim at this sense of hope in his rambling, near-hour-long speech. Playing amateur historian, as he has done several times in recent years, Putin said that the Russian state is indivisible, and that the principles on the basis of which former Soviet republics won independence in 1991 were illegitimate. He effectively declared that the\u00a0post-Cold War world order<\/a>\u00a0is over, that history is destiny and Ukraine will never get away from Russia.<\/p>\n Hannah Arendt observed that totalitarian regimes function by declaring imagined laws of history and then acting to enforce them. On Tuesday, Putin asked his puppet parliament for authorization to use force abroad. His aim is clear: in his speech, he branded the Ukrainian government as a group of \u201cradicals\u201d who carry out the will of their American puppet masters. As the self-appointed enforcer of the laws of history, Putin was laying down the groundwork for removing the Ukrainian government and installing one that he imagines will do the Kremlin\u2019s bidding.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Taking Putin\u2019s grievances seriously would be nothing more than a death wish for a return to the terrible 20th century
\n<\/em>by Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy, Tablet<\/p>\n
\nby Marsha Gessen, New Yorker<\/p>\n