Russian Maiden, European Bride

10 Years of War in Ukraine

“Since I have entered into these wars. /
Glory is like a circle in the water, /
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself /
Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.”
- Joan la Pucelle [Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, 1.3.111-114]

An image of the ruins of Avdiivka, released by the Russian Defence Ministry. Russia has made a desolation, but will the be able to call it peace?

Introduction: A Journey to the West

February 24th marks the second year of Russia’s “full-scale” invasion of Ukraine, as the Western media likes to call it. “Full-scale” is of course a meaningless term that lost its use for communicating real information once the initial news was known, and anyway Russia used well under its total force capacity. There is some brilliance to the term though, as it manages to be prejudicial against Russia while also providing subtle acknowledgement that it isn’t what started war in Ukraine. It is certainly more accurate than “unprovoked;” perhaps it is a reference to Joe Biden’s “minor incursion” comment at the 2022 State of the Union and they long since forgot why they say it. Regardless, we have just seen what is a more significant anniversary, 10 years since the “Maidan Revolution” which Ukrainians call the “Revolution of Dignity,” despite that it seems their dignity as a people has gone down a great deal since then. Commemorating the event where a dispute over trade policy got out of hand and Regime Change Inc encouraged a mob to chase a legally elected President out of the country despite him having agreed to new elections he would lose. Zelensky previously referred to the protests as when “The first victory in today’s war took place.” Not that I expect Zelensky, Ukrainians generally, or especially Ukraine’s idiot supporters to realize this, but his statement means that it is Zelensky’s view that Ukraine started a war against Russia by overthrowing their government in favor of NATO’s “primrose path.” That isn’t to say Russia’s invasion was a defensive necessity as Russia would argue, it’s just a strange thing to say. One way or another, there has been war in Ukraine for 10 years now, ongoing for 8 years when Russia massively raised the stakes with its “full-scale invasion against its smaller neighbor,” to frame it the way the West prefers.

Though at the moment Russia’s offensive gains have picked up following the capture of the ruins of Avdiivka, there is no end in sight. Ukraine needs to come to the negotiating table, but they are set on national suicide, and could be said to be at least 1/3rd of the way there, if we’re judging by population. Ukraine, or at least Zelensky and Ukraine’s depraved and idiotic supporters, find it better that they should all die than admitting any share of fault in this conflict starting. They will face “genocide” under the Russians, who are completely indistinguishable from them, so it is better they should spread across the world and disappear in diaspora, after all humans have been Ukraine’s top export for 30 years. The only sensible thing is for sponsors to kick their asses to the table, and make them find some conclusion to this atrocity instead of encouraging Ukraine to continue this to their own senseless end.

Maidan’s Bitter Legacy

10 years on it would not seem worth it to continue to argue about Maidan since anyone reading this probably has a set opinion and no one will be convinced of anything, but it’s worth looking back at the late Justin Raimondo’s article from February 23rd, 2014. Titled “Coup in Kiev,” it begins, “Ukraine is exploding, and the force of the eruption may plunge not only the country but also Europe and the US into an abyss out of which there is no easy extrication.” That is certainly what happened. For those of us watching it’s obvious that though Ukraine had internal problems and had long suffered under corruption, it is the nefarious role of the US in this whole affair that led this to play out as it did. Raimondo continues,

“This stage-managing illustrates the essential principle that must inform our understanding of the Ukrainian events: the role of the United States government in this affair is utterly pernicious. While funding and encouraging the Ukrainian people to rise up against a gang of kleptocrats, Washington plots behind the scenes to install their own favored thieves in power. But that is only the beginning of the Obama administration’s crimes.

The larger game being played here is a geopolitical one, with Ukraine in the role of a pawn.”

It is absurd to imagine that the violent overthrow of the regime was the only way to handle what was a disagreement about the country’s alignment, especially as a new election was already agreed upon. A deal was reached on February 21st but that didn’t stop the mobs who chased Yanukovych out of Kiev and then took power. Ukraine had gone back and forth between more pro-Russian and pro-Western Presidents over its independent history, so there was no reason to believe a pro-Western President wouldn’t have won the election and taken power. An article from Responsible Statecraft about the 10th anniversary of Maidan notes that, “policy disagreements over issues of trade and national security can and are routinely adjudicated via democratic procedures” but the United States was happy to get in the way of the deal because they had other plans. RS quotes the American writer Edmund Wilson who wrote, “it is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one’s own” which is perhaps what happened. I don’t think so, though, because the widespread presence of far-right and neo-Nazi groups and their high-level involvement in the new government should have shattered any such illusions. It remains my contention that the driving factor is simply that the US political class has been driven mad by the wages of corruption in Ukraine and thus don’t consider any consequences.

Protestors in Maidan Square in 2014 wave a European Union flag.

One way or another, Maidan did happen, and mid-February of 2014 was a major turning point in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history. In a characteristically shitty article New York Times article titled, “For Many Ukrainians, It’s Been a 10-Year War, Not a 2-Year One” they echo Zelensky’s line that “For Ukrainians, the protesters who faced off with riot police on Kyiv’s main square a decade ago were the first soldiers in a war still raging today.” They speak to one man identified as Capt. Oleh Voitsekhovsky who says, “We have always been fighting Russia. It is just sometimes cold and sometimes hot.” It characterizes his view of Ukrainian history as “a continual struggle against Moscow.” This, of course, puts him squarely in the camp of the Nazi collaborators, because the great majority of Ukrainians in World War II were in fact fighting with Moscow to save their country. You also can’t expect reason out of anyone who thinks that way. I am reminded of a quote from Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, “He went on shouting. Ismail was only twenty-six; he had no personal knowledge of the events he described. Rats infest his house, he told me. The Serbs were to blame” [Prologue.] It’s monstrous to cultivate these sentiments in another people for geopolitical reasons that have nothing to do with them, but it is also a kind of specialty of us Anglos that we learned from our British cousins.

The New York Times article also says it was a “transparent ruse” that Russia disguised men as biker gangs or angry locals in Crimea, despite the fact that the majority of Crimea was ethnic Russia and Russian-speaking, so it is in no way a “transparent ruse” and one imagines they are all in the same biker gangs. No evidence is presented that such men were Russian nationals, much less state-sponsored; in the United States the Hells Angels show up at various events they consider important all the damn time. There was much talk about “little green men,” because Ukrainians and the Western media can never be serious but instead have to speak of everything in childish terms. The idea is that some great mass of unmarked Russian soldiers were instrumental in the taking of Crimea, and further that the Donbass separatists was wholly a result of Russian machinations. The fact is that regardless of Russia’s level of involvement [and Russia had a long-standing military presence in Crimea] no one claims they used any serious amount of violence and there has been no meaningful internal resistance to Russian or Russian-aligned rule in either area. No one earnestly claims Crimea wants to be part of Ukraine, they just don’t even pretend to care about the will of the people.

A Russian “Little Green Man” tricking the residents of Crimea into revolting in 2014 [colorized]

To many Ukrainians, such as Capt. Oleh Voitsekhovsky, hating Russia has become a key part of their identity, dating to well before the invasion. If my country had never recovered from post-Soviet hell, I suppose I would want someone to blame as well. However there is a massive flaw in this logic, being as Belarus is landlocked, hardly moved past communism, is basically a Russian satrap, and still has a much higher GDP per capita than Ukraine which seemingly has every advantage over it. Russians are perplexed by Ukrainians’ hatred of them, and Russians not understanding why they should be hated has long further enraged the Ukrainians. Most of all they blame ethnic Russians for Stalin, despite that as I’ve explained, this makes absolutely no sense and Ukrainians were every bit as involved in running the Soviet Union as Russians. In the Tucker Carlson interview, which take what you will from it, but seems to express Putin’s actual views, he said even with this war he thinks that as brotherly peoples the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians will repair over time. Alternately, Ukraine and it’s supporters claim that Putin saying they are “one people” shows genocidal intent, which once again, makes no sense. I’ve often commented that Ukraine is like an entire nation of Democrats [as in the American political party,] and may have gotten an explanation for how this came to be. The Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko wrote a book titled “Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War” which is about to be published, and the portion of the preface which was shared on Unherd is quite illuminating. He writes,

“For over 30 years, the Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia advanced a very specific project of Ukrainian modernity. Its two main components were a rejection of Soviet modernisation and an anti-Russian articulation of Ukrainian national identity. These intellectuals sought to draw an equivalence between everything Ukrainian (in their specific articulation) and everything modern, while on the other hand they hoped to associate everything backward with everything Soviet and Russian.”

As Ishchenko explains, this was meant to reverse the idea that Ukrainians were the “backwards” ones, but the problem is that it was the USSR which modernized Ukraine and communism was never a “backwards” idea- incorrect, but highly “modern” in perhaps the worst way. These “intellectuals” rejected forming a strong, new, independent identity based on their real shared history and experience, and instead wanted a Ukraine that was, “young, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, stylish, mobile, liberal, well-educated, successful.” The problem is none of this is true, for example they already had atrocious birth rates before the war and thus an aging population and Ukraine is a vast agricultural country where the more urbanized and industrialized region is the ethnic Russian part. They had to portray everything about Russia as evil, and the USSR as a continuation of the Russian Empire, not a multinational federation that they were a major part of. This put them in harmony with the West’s miserable rootless overeducated urbanites who take all of the anxiety medications and do none of the work, except in the West those people can afford to be downwardly mobile and in impoverished Ukraine people lack that luxury. The failure on all accounts led to ever more blaming of Russia, and anyone else who wouldn’t go along with this ridiculous program. It all explains the love affair between this class of Ukrainians and the Western urban liberal class: they’re losers with no connection to their culture or past, no understanding of the world that doesn’t come from Marvel or Star Wars, and a vague utopian ideology they have no ability to implement, so a Russian conspiracy must explain a world they cannot understand.

Taken together, we can see that even knowing the sequence of events would lead to losing Crimea and much of the east, massive death and displacement, and their country being destroyed, they wouldn’t do anything different because all of that is Russia’s fault and in their view it’s not their government’s job to stop their country from being victimized but it is Russia’s job to not victimize them. There’s a decent moral argument there, but you have to be retarded to think that applies to international relations, which is why the NAFO idiots call their ideology “neo-idealism,” which basically just means doing whatever you want and blaming the world’s lack of justice for the consequences. Since the Maidan Revolution the Ukrainians have got to feel like they are a second-class part of Europe, but they’ve lost huge amounts of land, population, and now much of their country is destroyed. For all of this, few Ukrainians would tell you it was a mistake: they blame Russia for it happening, blame then-President Yanukovych for fleeing instead of letting them kill him, and refuse to accept the responsibility of managing a relationship with a stronger neighbor despite that dealing with such threats is a key function of government. In fact, a survey which I found shocking, showed that 45% more Ukrainians trusted Zelensky after Russia invaded than they did in February when he was insisting Russia wouldn’t invade while horribly mismanaging reaching a peace settlement.

The Raging Bear

Tensions had continued to a lesser or greater degree for 8 years when Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. I recently dealt with an idiot on Twitter who claimed that with both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war on Gaza the main difference is that “the media is covering it now.” That is, of course, complete nonsense. In both instances by any way that the intensity of a conflict might be measured, for example participants, deaths, or ammunition used, there was an increase by orders of magnitude. However, it’s true that the media often did a bad job, sometimes intentionally, of showing that the invasions were part of long-running conflicts. More importantly, in both instances, it was those with the most responsibility for continuing the circumstances which led to violence who the most want you to believe the attacks were “unprovoked.”

While Donald Trump ended up being an enormous supporter of Ukraine and greatly escalating weapons deliveries he seemed to come into power with a different instinct. The Democrats, and really entire Western political establishment, have nothing but to blame Russia for their failures, most of all Trump’s election. Donald Trump responded terribly to “Russiagate,” which could fairly be called a “vast international conspiracy” against him, and was unwilling to make any meaningful effort to settle affairs between Russia and Ukraine because of this pressure. How different things could have been if his story was that he campaigned on better relations with Russia so of course his staff met with their Russian counterparts! Then, all of the people who spent 6 years constructing an entire worldview based on nefarious Russian involvement in everything they don’t like acted shocked at how evil Russia was when it finally responded. Of course, their propaganda went entirely off the chain because they couldn’t have the public realize that this is what their policies had wrought. In the first days of the invasion I wrote about how the media had obfuscated with nonsense, in a campaign of the sort I had never before seen. However, it takes a mashup video by the incomparable Matt Orfalea to truly appreciate the din of propaganda:

They seem to honestly believe if they repeat something enough it becomes true. They also believe that Ukraine will win because it “has to” and that we will win because we are “good.” Neither of those things are true, nor are they how history works. It’s the geopolitical equivalent to one of those “vision boards” white women like. This has in fact never been an existential war for Ukraine as Russia has never wanted to control the main mass of Ukrainians West of the Dnieper. Kiev just wants to be able to oppress Russian speakers in the east more than they want to survive. On top of this most of the economic capacity is in the east because, contra the Ukrainians, everything of any economic value in the country was constructed by the Soviets and a lot of Russians were sent to that area to work in those industries; it’s been said that even Ukraine doesn’t want western Ukraine if it’s by itself. At least some of them really are set on the clearly untrue notion that Russia is obsessively expansionistic, the proof being that Russia once stopped Georgia from invading South Ossetia and later seized the majority-ethnic Russian Crimea after an anti-Russia coup. You know it’s a gas station with [space!] nukes but also will conquer Brussels if not stopped in Ukraine. Either way, anyone should know that existential wars can be lost by the fact that many of them have and those people or countries don’t exist anymore:

Ukraine and its supporters have been working on what the internet would call a “vibes-based” understanding of conflict. This is why these idiots think it harms Ukraine to be at all honest about the nature of the war and see some great value in being annoying on the internet. Alternately, quite a lot of Russia supporters have insisted Ukraine was going to collapse in weeks for well over a year and don’t seem to have ever changed their forecast. I have to admit it took Michael Tracey showing examples for me to realize how wrong I had been to take Douglas MacGregor seriously, though the man does have some interesting insights about how militaries function generally. Even if Ukraine does collapse MacGregor and others won’t have “predicted” it, they’ll just have said the same thing endlessly until it ultimately happened.

Overall, if you look at what I wrote for the 1 year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, it is horribly depressing how little has changed. It has just been another whole year of senseless carnage.

Ukraine has held on, despite having been so long on the brink of collapse. It needs to be noted that “brink” does not mean imminent and is not some sort of measurement of time, it’s like following a narrow trail along a cliff-face , which is to say, you could fall off at any time or you could carefully guide yourself to a more safe position. Alternately, though Russia is paying a high price, it is stable, and as I have said many times, is able to do this indefinitely, having essentially unlimited steel, fuel, grain, and men at the current use rate. It does, in many ways, seem as if Ukraine’s lines are actively breaking as I write this, so perhaps it’s finally happening this time. Russia’s progress has still been small, but getting through the lines is the big part of the work. It’s not clear what Ukraine can do if Russia is through their lines, but it is also an enormous country to advance across.

Incredibly, it has been 20 months since I first wrote that the narrative on Ukraine was collapsing, and while we have seen many distressing reports and there has been an enormous amount of deaths, the Ukrainians have persisted. This is the way living through history works though, it takes a long time and then the big events happen all at once. The truth tends to be let to slip out slowly between the propaganda, as a sort of media insurance policy. When I wrote that article, in June of 2022, I said that it seemed that on a bigger strategic level Russia had calculated very well- not necessarily the initial invasion but the impact it would have on the world. I wonder, now, if it is the case that though Russia can easily outlast Ukraine, on a higher level this is worse for Russia the longer this goes on. Michael Tracey wrote a recent piece arguing this was a strategic disaster for Russia, and though I don’t agree with all of it, I think it is well worth reading:

The war in Ukraine is a giant disaster and Putin should not be valorized for it

The biggest point he makes is that Ukraine hasn’t collapsed and neither has Western solidarity, the argument about US funding notwithstanding. More importantly, it has woken the Western countries up from their slumber, Ukraine is more integrated into NATO, and of course NATO has expanded, into Finland. Italy and Canada have just signed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine, which in Italy’s case is a full security guarantee. Of course, Italy faces no threats, so the idea that Ukraine would ever come to its defense is fictitious, they’re just taking it on as a liability. The UK, France, Germany, and Denmark have signed similar agreements. You would think the UK had learned its lesson about giving security guarantees to countries in Eastern Europe, but of course it did not. The real mistake it seems Putin made was underestimating the depravity of the British, which is inexcusable with Russia having dealt with them for so long. If the deal reached in Istanbul had been implemented the decision to invade would look much different, but Boris Johnson saw that it wasn’t.

There was a key episode in the Roman unification of Italy where the Samnites attacked the Campanians, and the defeated Campanians sought the protection of Rome, which Rome gave them despite the obvious implications. Then it became shameful to not protect the Campanians, who already needed it. In a chapter called “Causes that Commonly Provoke Wars Among the Powerful” Machiavelli writes of this event, “Valuing empire and glory over tranquillity, as its goal, Rome could not refuse this undertaking” [Discourses, II.9.] Being that the Ukrainians were already somewhat under the protection of the broader American Empire, which cares far more about its fake “rules-based world order” than anything else, and knowing the Ukrainians were desperate to fully be the subjects of Washington and Brussels, it is questionable to have given them all the pretext. There is no possible reading of giving a security guarantee to a country already under an active invasion but that you intend for war.

In many ways, Ukraine is piecemeal getting its own NATO alliance without joining, and those countries which were unprepared are working on becoming prepared, even if they have wasted equipment sending it to Ukraine. Even if Ukraine does collapse and the immediate objectives are achieved, at what cost did Russia purchase them? It certainly seems with things having played out like they did it was a mistake to not take the separatist parts of Donbass all at once in 2014, and even in February of 2022 Russia could have done something more like the “limited” invasion of Joe Biden’s 2022 State of the Union Address and come up to the long-stable lines between Kiev and the rebels, threatening Ukraine against attacking Russian troops and demanding an implementation of the Minsk Agreements. But it seems just as likely that would have escalated to where we are now and Putin would again look like a fool for trying to solve the eastern Ukraine problem through half measures. We can only know what did actually happen, which is massive death and destruction in Ukraine as the world aligns into ever more hostile blocs.

The Faint Hope of Peace

It was estimated in 2023 that Kiev ruled over around 28 million people. In 2014, that number was around 45 million, in 1991, around 52 million. Ukraine has lost nearly half of its population in just over 30 years, if you count deaths, emigrants, refugees, and lost territory. This is unprecedented in the modern era in any situation besides a federation breaking up. Ukraine has been destroyed, and it wasn’t a nice place to begin with. If Ukraine has 28 million people, Russia has around 5 times its population from which to draw troops and income, and far greater and more diverse territory from which to get supplies. But to Ukraine, it seems, it is all worth it for the chance of being part of Europe. They will fight to the last Ukrainian for the “European perspective.” They seem to have chosen national suicide, a fever which has gripped many before them, and they are well on their way there. There is no reason to believe large numbers will return to rebuild Ukraine if this ever ends, instead, survivors will join loved ones abroad.

I still can’t believe she said this. Who would possibly want to join these people if they had any other option.

Despite, or perhaps because of, all of this, it is about peace negotiations that the Ukraine’s supporters are dumber than anything. You hear, “you can’t make peace with someone who wants to destroy you!” ; “who would negotiate with someone who invaded them?” ; “There can be peace at any time if Russia just leaves!” It’s as if they are intentionally trying to give the realists among us a stroke with their idiocy, and perhaps they are. These are of course exactly the situations in which one negotiates peace, as the old saying goes, “you don’t make peace with your friends.” However, Ukraine has even banned negotiating. Zelensky holds fake “peace summits” where he just begs for more money and the only thing he will negotiate for is how large of reparations Russia will pay when Ukraine reaches Moscow and overthrows the Putin regime. It is not serious, instead it is madness. Meanwhile, Putin continues to tout the peace deal he says they made in Istanbul and it seems as if it was entirely reasonable. In these situations you should keep negotiating where possible, because it’s obvious that Russia’s goal is not the extermination of Ukrainians, and there is always some way to move closer to an understanding or at least reduce the human cost of war.

Just one military cemetery in Kharkiv, showing a tiny fraction of Ukraine’s deaths. I don’t trust numbers on either side, but if the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 43, you can imagine what happened to the others. Zelensky just claimed Ukraine only 31k Ukraine soldiers have died, but who believes that?

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft recently released a policy brief by George Beebe and Anatol Lieven titled, “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine.” I don’t agree with everything in it, but it is well-sourced and paints a grim picture. In the long run, everything is against Ukraine. Still, as they point out, Russia has plenty to negotiate over, especially being secure in their territories when this ends. It is still my view that currently Russia will not end this without Odessa and the associated coastline, leaving Ukraine a land-locked rump state, but negotiation could greatly lower the human cost on both sides, while potentially allowing Ukraine civilian use of the port. But this all requires an agreement. The most valuable part of the brief, in my opinion, is responding to those who refuse to negotiate,

“Many reject this possibility out of hand. Among the claims made are that Russia is not motivated or willing to negotiate, that Putin would never accept an independent Ukraine, that any Russian success in the war would encourage aggression elsewhere, and that Moscow would not abide by the terms of any acceptable settlement.

Some of these claims are dubious, some are exaggerated, and others are testable — and can only be tested through negotiations.  It is certainly true that any negotiations with the Russians would be quite difficult. But those who reject diplomacy as a viable option underestimate the gap between what Russia can achieve through its own military efforts in Ukraine and what it needs to ensure its broader security and economic prosperity over the longer term.  They also underestimate the ways in which verifiable agreements could be constructed even in areas where trust has been undermined by Russian aggression and years of bitter warfare.”

The first two are nonsense, and of course by “independent Ukraine” they mean “Ukraine that has ceded its sovereignty to Brussels and is a Western military dependency.” “Independence” has always been a red herring, as Ukraine wants to be Europe’s bride and Belarus has a great deal more sovereignty over domestic matters as Russia’s satrap than Ukraine would under the schoolmarm rule of Brussels. The last two objections truly do have to be tested through negotiations. We don’t even know what might make Russia stop, but it is surely some goal far more modest than “annexing all of Ukraine.” It is Ukraine refusing to negotiate while Russia says it wants to and has always wanted to. Agreements can be verified and enforced a lot of ways. That they feel Russia violated an agreement from 30 years ago, that had already been widely violated, when it invaded Ukraine is not a real objection to making peace, its a pretense to forever remain at war until all are dead. Historically most peace agreements had a “sunset” clause, it’s in fact crazy that they often don’t now. That it might be violated decades later when entirely different men rule each country is no objection to making peace.

Ukraine needs to come up with something it would give up in peace negotiations instead of its current lunacy of only being willing to “negotiate” after a total military victory that is never coming. There are several issues where both sides could work towards an understanding in hopes of one day reaching peace. For one thing, it’s not a big ask to ban the promotion of Nazism in Ukraine, they could easily pass laws in line with those of other countries in Europe and have the implementation overseen by other countries which were victimized by Nazis. I also believe there is still some degree of dispute about the pensions people in separatist areas were previously receiving from Ukraine, which they could ask Russia to take over and consider the matter settled. Everyone but Zelensky and the NAFO idiots knows Ukraine is never getting back Crimea and that Crimea doesn’t want to be Ukraine, they could agree to negotiate about holding an internationally observed referendum on Crimea’s status that includes everyone who lived in Crimea in 2014 and work together on agreeing on the voter list so that those who fled the Russian takeover are represented. Of course, Crimea would vote to be part of Russia, but then the matter would be fairly adjudicated. For that matter, it’s also extremely clear that Russia doesn’t want most of western Ukraine, they could agree that some segment is completely off the table for annexation, but of course to Ukraine that is an acknowledgement that some is on the table. These are just some early things a reasonable country in a hopeless war would begin to negotiate about. I suppose it’s better that Russia should take what it wants by force and they remain in a frozen conflict for eternity, occasionally murdering each other with missiles. It probably wouldn’t be an eternity though, it would just be a number of years before a larger war breaks out and Ukraine is again a killing field.

Photographic proof that it is possible for Putin and Zelensky to have a meeting moderated by another world leader. Also proof that Zelensky could wear a suit but chooses to be a “little green man” [from 2019]

The biggest object in the way is the obvious lie that Ukraine is a sovereign country and only they can negotiate. The United States pays their government salaries. Russia really should be talking to Zelensky’s [literal] bosses, but absent that it’s easy to make aid contingent on holding negotiations. The problem is that Ukraine is being used as a sacrificial pawn and are letting themselves be used as such, because their nation has no identity but hating Russia. There is no end to this road but mass death, in one form or another. What is the most scary about this situation is that a new world war seems not inevitable, but already decided on. This is especially insane given as I couldn’t even tell you what intractable problems there are between the US and Russia or what necessity there is to fighting them out. In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West says that everyone had decided what we now call World War I was inevitable, and the great powers made no effort to stop it from happening. She writes,

“It was known to all of Europe…that the Central Powers were preparing for an aggressive war, but it was not generally expected that they meant to act in 1914…it is said that both France and Russia were for some reason convinced that Germany and Austria would not make war until 1916, and certainly that alone would explain the freedom with which Russia announced to various parties in the early months of 1914 that she herself was not ready to fight. So Serbia was in a trance of amazement when Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek were killed at Sarajevo, and it became certain that the enemy was going to use the murder as a pretext for instant attack.” [Belgrade VII]

This is not a perfect parallel, and is probably also an imperfect explanation of the start of WWI, but it’s remarkable the extent to which countries have admitted their lack of preparation for a war and all of them are just hoping they have time to properly arm before one starts instead of looking for a long-term diplomatic solution. They spent years telling us what a danger Russia posed to Europe, but didn’t care enough to make real plans to protect themselves. In some ways its not even clear if peace in Ukraine matters for anyone but the Ukrainians, because these maniacs clearly intend to build up militaries until they find a pretense to use them.

The actual causes of the coming World War are perhaps best described with the immortal words of Capt. Edmund Blackadder, who said of World War I, “the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war.” It’s not clear how much effort it would take to prevent the coming war, because no one is trying.

Conclusion: There is No Glory

When the history of our time is written, if it is at all, I can hardly imagine the hagiography pretending this was some sort of epic struggle between good and evil. Of course, to the skeptic, reading history is an exercise in trying to understand how men could be so foolish. It is even harder to understand when you are living through it. I’m of the belief that fewer people have read War and Peace than claim to have read it, and of those, even less understood the text. War and Peace is not actually the story of a handful of noble families living through the Napoleonic Wars, instead they are used to show how little control man has over the world he lives in. He perhaps isn’t predestined, but his free will is limited as well, and his power even moreso. Tolstoy would argue that Putin didn’t send men to Ukraine to slaughter their brethren, he simply signed some documents and gave a speech, and many other forces were at work. With Zelensky, it is easier to see he is being controlled by forces more powerful than himself, but the forces we can see and understand are human.

Tolstoy’s view was that men who think they know their own role in history are usually useless and almost always use their perceived knowledge to make the wrong decision. He writes,

“In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understand its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness.” [War and Peace, IV.I.IV]

Putin and Zelensky both seem to think they know their place in history. Putin is certainly a key figure of our epoch, and as we learned, he sees himself as a continuation of 1200 years of Russian history, bringing part of Russia’s cradle province back into the fold. That is not at all a reasonable perspective from which to make decisions. Zelensky, on the other hand, is part of the new history of Ukraine, one where it is free of Russia. Zelensky’s self-deception is that he will be the great hero: in reality the former leading man is a bit player in a grand tragicomedy. He does not see that he is driving his people towards hell and in the long run they are at most a side-story in the narrative of humanity’s destruction. By this line of reasoning, it is perhaps only Joe Biden, safe in his dementia dream, who doesn’t think he knows his role in history, and it is scary to imagine this means he is the only one doing what he is supposed to do. One way or another, there is no glory in any of this. To again quote Shakespeare, this time of ours, “Is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing” [Macbeth, 5.5.25-27.]

Zelensky shows some foreign luminaries the people they have lost, so they can go home and tell their public how glorious it is to fund this slaughter.

In later part of 2022 I heard the hosts of Radio War Nerd, Mark Ames and John Dolan, mention that a war which lasts more than a month is likely to last more than 10 years. I don’t remember if they made it clear if that was a “rule of thumb” or the result of some sort of study on wars, but I remembered thinking there was no chance the Russia-Ukraine War could go on that long. I was wrong in two ways: It didn’t occur to me that the war was over 8 years old at that point, and I wouldn’t have believed then that at 2 years since Russia’s invasion there would still be no end in sight. I was also worried about something “triggering” a wider war, but had not yet realized it was not just negligence, but that all the powers think we are due for civilization to break down entirely and they are not trying to stop it. 10 years into the war in Ukraine and I do think the phase of Russia’s invasion may be drawing to a close, but that is unlikely to be the end of the saga. It seems we’ll be extremely lucky if we’re alive and the world is at relative peace by February of 2032, when a Ukrainian born at the time of Maidan will be old enough to die for his country, his life defined by nothing but opposition to Russia.

Still, for all of that, its strangely comforting that the insistence of Ukraine’s nationalist intelligentsia on being wholly European is such an incredibly stupid root cause of a major world conflict that historians will likely find something better, if less accurate, to say about what set off this dreadful chain of events. That said, the Peloponnesian War started over remarkably similar causes, and we know about that 2,500 years later. Things never change. Heaven forbid Ukraine just develop a new national identity as a people straddling East and West, accepting their Russian past but choosing their own future.

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