Putin’s assault on Ukraine has made some things unmistakably clear, or should have
Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece that appears in the April 18, 2022, issue of National Review.
You hear less “the” these days: “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine,” without that definite article. “The Ukraine” implies a region of something broader; “Ukraine” implies nationhood. Also, people are getting the hang of “Kyiv,” rather than “Kiev.” Is this a matter of political correctness? A “woke” term? No. Simply put, “Kiev” is a transliteration of the Russian name for the Ukrainian capital, and “Kyiv” is a transliteration of the Ukrainian. “The” and “Kyiv,” small as they may seem, matter a lot to Ukrainians, and, by extension, to their well-wishers.
Probably, I will never give up “chicken Kiev” or “The Great Gate of Kiev.” (The first is a dish, the second the final section of a work of music: Pictures at an Exhibition, by Mussorgsky.) Otherwise, “Kyiv” has become natural to me, as for so many others.
I vividly remember the first time I heard “Ukraine,” without the “the.” It was from the mouth of Robert Conquest, who had come to campus to discuss his new book: The Harvest of Sorrow (1986). The book is about the Terror-Famine, or Holodomor, inflicted on the Ukrainians by the Soviet government in 1932 and ’33. “Ukraine” sounded so odd, to my 1980s ears, but Conquest explained why the omission of “the” mattered to Ukrainians. In a stroke of luck, he became a friend, later in life. Bob passed away in 2015.
His wife, Elizabeth, became a friend too. I heard from her after National Review published a profile by me of Kateryna Yushchenko, the wife of Viktor Yushchenko, who was president of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010. (This piece was published in the March 7, 2022, issue.) It was Mrs. Yushchenko, she said, who saw to it that Ukrainian schools had copies of The Harvest of Sorrow — and also of The Great Terror, another Conquest classic, which is about Stalin’s show trials, etc. Bob waived all royalties. Translations into Ukrainian were done with the assistance of the U.S. embassy in Kyiv.
For years, Vladimir Putin and his supporters, worldwide, have said that there is no Ukraine. That Ukraine is a fictitious country. Simply a western province of Russia. A vital part of Russia’s “spiritual space.” (Putin’s actions speak of nothing if not spirituality, true?) You will find the Kremlin line echoed in the American media, even now.
On February 24, the day Putin launched his all-out assault on Ukraine, Steve Bannon told his listeners and viewers, “Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept.” He then said — I will quote precisely, however awkward the sentence is — “It’s just a corrupt area where the Clintons have turned into a colony where you can steal money out of.”
On March 15, Candace Owens told her own listeners and viewers, “There is no difference, ethnically, between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously. Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians.”
Speaking to the Russian people on February 21, Putin said that Ukraine was merely a “puppet” of the United States. I have heard just this from my fellow Americans, on left and right. Since the war began, some 400,000 Ukrainians who had been living abroad have returned home to fight, according to reports: to repel the invasion. They are not doing so on American orders. They are doing so because of what they think and feel about their country.
The war in Ukraine is an existential struggle, as Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, grasps, and as all Ukrainians grasp. In a speech to the British parliament, by video hookup, Zelensky said, “The question for us now is, ‘To be, or not to be.’” Only a handful of countries have their very right to exist questioned. Israel is one. Taiwan is another. And, obviously, Ukraine.
In 2016, I spoke with Myroslava Gongadze, who at the time was head of the Ukrainian service of the Voice of America. Today, she is Eastern Europe chief. A native Ukrainian, she has led a turbulent life. Bluntly, I asked her, “Will Ukraine survive as an independent country?” She answered, “I cannot even think about not surviving. I cannot even let myself question that.” It is an understandable sentiment.
I happened to be in Kyiv, reporting, on December 5, 2019 — the 25th anniversary of the Budapest Memorandum. Signed by Russia, the United States, and Great Britain, this accord guarantees, among other things, the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine. There was some dark joking in Kyiv on the anniversary — for Putin had been making war on Ukraine since 2014.
In 2004, there was a brazen act of violence. Campaigning for president, Yushchenko was almost murdered, in a poison attack — the kind of attack for which Putin’s agents are now infamous. Also surviving a poison attack was Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, and now a political prisoner. The attack on Yushchenko appears to have been the first act of violence in Ukraine by the Russian state, following Ukraine’s independence in 1991. There would be many, many more acts of violence to come.
That year, 2004, Yushchenko went on to be elected in the Orange Revolution, a democratic uprising. Putin and his allies called this uprising a CIA operation, plain and simple — that is a standard charge.
In 2008, the American president, George W. Bush, went to Ukraine, where he supported the country’s bid for NATO membership. He said that the Kremlin would not enjoy veto power over the alliance or its membership. The year 2019 happened to be the 70th anniversary of NATO. I saw banners in Kyiv, marking the anniversary. They were forlorn — wistful — however, because Ukraine’s chances had been smashed for the foreseeable future.
Ten years after the Orange Revolution, there was another one — another democratic uprising: “Euromaidan” or the “Revolution of Dignity.” Naturally, Putin claimed it was a CIA operation. Naturally, his echoers in the West — very much including the United States — echoed him. Ukrainians have no agency. They have no will or spirit of their own. They are just pawns in American hands, or Russian hands, for that matter.
Can this illusion now die, in light of what we have seen in Ukraine? The fight they have put up? Can it die along with the illusion that Ukraine is not a real country, etc.?
In 2014, Putin annexed Crimea and launched a war in the Donbas region. This had a profound effect on the Ukrainian population. There are many ethnicities in Ukraine: Ukrainian (of course), Russian, Belarusian, Moldovan, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Tatar . . . Before 2014, few people sang the national anthem, apart from ethnic Ukrainians. After 2014, everyone sang the national anthem. This is something that Vitaly Portnikov, a prominent Ukrainian journalist, pointed out to me. When he said, “Now everyone sings the national anthem,” I first thought he was speaking metaphorically, or poetically. But he meant it literally.
While in Kyiv, I saw the wall of remembrance, commemorating those killed in action in the Donbas war. The heading on that wall is “Servicemen of the Military and Law Enforcement Who Died for Ukraine’s Unity.” A few months earlier, John Bolton and William Taylor were laying wreaths at the wall. The former was President Trump’s national security adviser, the latter was the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. While they were doing this, Trump was in France, attending a G7 meeting. He was calling for Russia’s readmission to the group, making it the G8 again. (The group suspended Russia’s membership in 2014.) This was a stark illustration of the difference between Trump and some of the people around him. Trump fired Bolton about two weeks later.
I took note of one of the casualties in the war: Vasyl Slipak, an opera singer. A baritone. He had worked in France, mainly. He returned home, to volunteer to fight in the Donbas. He was killed in June 2016.
In December 2019, I spoke with a variety of Ukrainians who were irked — in some cases furious — at American perceptions of their country: the perception of Ukraine as a corrupt joke, the perception of Ukraine as not really separable from Russia. You know the spiel. One woman said — spat, actually — “It’s all a pack of lies, coming straight from the Kremlin, and you guys believe it. Disgusting.” People were also bewildered that Vladimir Putin could be regarded, by anybody, as a champion and guardian of Christian civilization.
Volodymyr Zelensky had recently been elected president, at the age of 41. He had had a career as a television entertainer — best known for playing an ordinary Joe who found himself elected president. And here he was, president of Ukraine, in real life. I spoke with people who were for him and people who were against him — but even the ones who were against had sympathy for him, because he was caught in an American impeachment drama. (Trump’s first impeachment had to do with Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and with Zelensky in particular.) Zelensky needed the goodwill of all Americans — Republican and Democratic — and so did Ukraine. The new president was in a tricky position.
As we speak, Zelensky is widely admired as a wartime leader. But not everyone is a fan. Some illusions, some strange understandings, persist. “Zelensky is a thug,” said Madison Cawthorn, the Republican congressman from North Carolina. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.” “Woke”? As in desiring freedom and independence? Life itself? And here is Candace Owens, communicating to her 3 million Twitter followers: “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people.” “Globalists”? Meaning, those allying with Ukraine, or thinking that things are connected in this dangerous world?
Talking with me in 2019, Vitaly Portnikov used a memorable phrase: “pregnant with war.” The “post-Soviet space,” he said, was “pregnant with war.” Bismarck and others had spoken of the Balkans as “the powder keg of Europe.” Here was another one, potentially. And if Putin took Ukraine, he would not stop there, Portnikov said. Putin would have to be checked — halted — by democratic nations, working together.
I have been thinking of another conversation, too — one with Vladimir Bukovsky, the great Soviet-era dissident, at his home in Cambridge, England, in April 2019. Bukovsky died later in the year, in October, at 76. “Putin will provoke the West again and again,” he told me, that spring day on his patio. “What he is doing now, you remember, used to be called ‘brinkmanship.’ He will push things to the limit — to test the strength and resolve of the West.” Putin annexed Crimea. He altered international boundaries by force — and got away with it. He proved that a taboo was not, in fact, a taboo. What else could he do?
Putin is a classic Soviet man, said Bukovsky, “a product of the system.” He did not spend all those years in the KGB for nothing. “Everything that comes from him has a birthmark on it”: a Soviet birthmark. Putin and those like him regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy, and the loss of Ukraine as a particular tragedy. Unjust. Unnatural. Insulting.
On the eve of the current war, Myroslava Luzina, a political analyst in Kyiv, told me that the Kremlin was like “an abusive ex”: a man who stalks the woman he once had and would rather kill her than see her live as she chooses. “We all have a right to our lives,” said Luzina, “and Ukraine has a right to its life, and not to be controlled by an abusive ex, you know?”
Bukovsky made another point to me, three years ago: Putin, like Kremlin chiefs before him, cries “Encirclement!” He pretends that Western powers are encircling Russia, preparing to do Russians harm (rather than to stop the Russian military from invading other countries). This is a way of distracting the population from the problems that bedevil it. According to Kremlin propaganda, the West is always plotting against the Russian people. “The truth is, the West doesn’t give a damn about Russia,” said Bukovsky. “I should know this, having lived in the West for more than 40 years.”
It is Putin’s purpose, or one of them, to restore the Russian empire — which became the Soviet empire — or as much of it as feasible. On February 22, just before Putin began his all-out assault, George Weigel wrote in First Things,
This artificially created crisis, aimed at Ukraine’s destabilization and subjugation, is one expression of Putin’s determination to reverse history’s verdict in the Cold War. Putin has been quite clear about this for twenty years, and only fools or those peering through the ideologically befogged lenses of the new “national conservatism” fail to grasp what is afoot here.
Putin is a patriot, or a nationalist, who loves Russia – or so many claim. On February 22, Trump said, “He loves his country, you know? He loves his country.” Putin has looted his country. Robbed it blind. He has denied his country a free press, genuine elections, an independent judiciary. He has created another “fear society,” to borrow Natan Sharansky’s phrase. He has driven millions into exile — especially young people hoping for a better life. He has made Russia a pariah on the world stage. If this is love of country, what is antagonism?
Vladimir Bukovsky, among others, thought that Russia’s great tragedy, great error, is that it did not hold people to account for seven-plus decades of terror: Soviet terror. There was no accounting, no Nuremberg trials, no denazification. At the time — in the early ’90s — many said, “We must not have witch hunts. The situation is too sticky. Too many people are entangled. No witch hunts! Just move on.” Bukovsky, Andrei Sakharov, and others rejoined, “If we don’t hold them to account now, the ‘witches’ will come back and hunt us” — which is exactly what happened.
A great many Russians love their country, obviously. Many of them are in prison cells or graves. Russians are among the bravest people on earth, long have been. Think of those who have protested the current war, at tremendous risk to themselves. “Putin is committing monstrous crimes in the name of my people, my country, and me,” said Mikhail Shishkin, a novelist. “Putin is not Russia.” This is in marked contrast with a notorious statement made by Vyacheslav Volodin, a high-ranking Putin lackey, in October 2014: “There is no Russia today if there is no Putin.”
Are Russian dissidents and risk-takers relatively few? Well, aren’t they always, in any fear society? Looking at these stunning Russian protesters, arrested and beaten up, I have thought of a line from José Martí, the 19th-century hero of Cuban independence: “When there are many men who lack honor, there are always others who have within themselves the honor of many men.”
We have long heard the following, from people around the world — certainly in the United States: “People in western Ukraine think of themselves as European and want to join the European Union and NATO. They are cosmopolitan elites, essentially. Uppity. Real and earthy people in the east — they are Russian and Russian-speaking, and yearn to return to their rightful fold.” In December 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on independence. Ninety-two percent of people voted for it — independence, that is. And today, people in the east are saying to the invaders, “Go home!”
One of Putin’s pretexts for war, you remember, is that he is saving Russians and Russian-speakers from their Ukrainian oppressors. He has a funny way of showing it. His forces have flattened Kharkiv and Mariupol — Russian-speaking cities — the way they did Grozny and Aleppo. “There are no coffins left in the city,” said a morgue director in Kharkiv. Here is a report from Mariupol, filed by the Associated Press on March 8, before the city was completely pulverized: “Corpses lie in the street as people break into stores in search of food and melt snow for water. Thousands huddle in basements, trembling at the sound of Russian shells pounding this strategic port city.”
Can this be another lie that dies? That Putin is motivated by his love for Russia — Russian culture and “spirituality” and language? Soviet depredations in Budapest and Prague, in 1956 and 1968, have nothing on Putin’s depredations in the Russophone cities of Ukraine.
On March 22, New Lines magazine published a report headed “In Kharkiv’s Rubble, Hatred for Russia Is Strong.” The report, by Tom Mutch, begins,
“Russian terrorists did this. . . . And my father is Russian, from Belgorod!” Galina, a 63-year-old cashier, says as she pulls her belongings from the wreckage of what used to be her apartment.
Further on, Mutch writes,
Animosity toward Russia has sharpened among people in the east for two main reasons. First, eastern Ukraine has borne the brunt of the indiscriminate destruction that Putin has unleashed. Kharkiv and Mariupol have suffered brutal and cruel bombardments. The second factor is proximity to Russia — and not just in geographical and cultural terms. For many, this feels like a deep family betrayal, as if it is their siblings and cousins firing the shots. In some cases, it is.
One more paragraph:
The locals say that the Russians will often wait until shortly after the morning curfew ends at 6, when everyone goes to line up at supermarkets for supplies. Then, they will unleash their artillery in an attempt to scare the civilian population into submission.
As for Mariupol, Pyotr Andryuschenko, an adviser to the mayor, said, “Humanity has not yet invented a word for what Russia is doing to us.” Charles McPhedran, an Australian journalist who covers Eastern Europe, tweeted, “Just driving with refugees from Mariupol. They are in such deep trauma they can barely speak.” Manolis Androulakis, a Greek diplomat — the last EU diplomat to be evacuated from Mariupol — said, “What I saw, I hope no one will ever see.”
Above, I mentioned Vasyl Slipak, the opera singer, who was killed in June 2016. Maybe I could mention just one casualty of the recent assault on Kharkiv — one death, that of a civilian: Yulia Zdanovskaya, a 21-year-old mathematician. In 2017, she represented Ukraine at the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, winning a silver medal.
The air is heavy with the N-word: “Nazi.” “Nazi! Nazi! Nazi!” cry Putin and his men. Their mission is to “denazify” Ukraine, they say. Opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia, said, “You have to ask, is this money and is this United States military equipment falling into the hands of Nazis in Ukraine?” Ukraine has a far-Right element, certainly. So do Russia, Poland, Serbia, and many another country we could name. Ukraine also has a Jewish president. And a Jewish defense minister. From 2016 to 2019, it had a Jewish prime minister. Writing in the Times of Israel, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, noted that Ukraine has “the third-largest Jewish population in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.”
Here is Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, eulogizing one of Putin’s victims in the current war:
Borys Romanchenko, 96, survived four Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen. He lived his quiet life in Kharkiv until recently. Last Friday a Russian bomb hit his house and killed him. Unspeakable crime. Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin.
In a podcast with me, Radek Sikorski, the Polish writer and politician, made a point about this Nazi business. Think of the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” — “One people, one realm, one leader.” Whose vision and behavior does that fit? Putin’s or Zelensky’s?
About ten years ago — on November 28, 2011, precisely — Sikorski gave a speech in Berlin that made headlines around the world. He said, “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.” In response to Putin’s assault on Ukraine, Germany has decided on a massive increase in defense spending and other changes of course. NATO has reawakened, it seems — been jolted wide awake.
On March 19, the vice foreign minister of China, Le Yucheng, delivered himself of an opinion: “NATO should have been consigned to history alongside the Warsaw Pact.” As it happens, NATO was born the same year the Communists took power in China. Some of us are hoping that NATO outlives the Communists’ rule.
At the beginning of this year, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said that Eastern and Central European countries had been “orphaned” by the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Sikorski had a blunt response: “We were not orphaned by you because you were not our daddy. More of a serial rapist. Which is why you are not missed.”
Putin’s longstanding fans and allies in Europe are having to do some fast dancing. In France, Marine Le Pen shredded 1.2 million campaign pamphlets. They had boasted a photo of her with Putin. Then there is Matteo Salvini, in Italy. Even more than Le Pen, he is a favorite of nationalists and populists across the West. He and his party established a “Friends of Putin” group in the Italian parliament. They signed a “friendship and cooperation” agreement with Putin’s party. (“A historic deal,” Salvini called it.) Salvini wore a Putin T-shirt — Che-style — in Red Square. Also at the EU Parliament in Strasbourg.
Today? The poor guy is reduced to having himself videoed bringing flowers to the Ukrainian embassy in Rome.
On February 24, as Putin was unleashing hell, CPAC held a meeting in Orlando, Fla. Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA, said, “I’m more worried about how the cartels are deliberately trying to infiltrate our country than a dispute 5,000 miles away in cities we can’t pronounce, in places most Americans can’t find on a map.” If you will allow that history sometimes rhymes — maybe you can forgive some of us for thinking of another speaker, elsewhere, in September 1938: “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Volodymyr Zelensky thinks the struggle in Ukraine is more than a local concern. He had a message for pro-Ukraine demonstrators in Prague: “If we win — and I’m sure we will win — this will be a victory of the whole democratic world.” The Balts are watching with special concern, as you can imagine. One foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said, “We in Lithuania know very well that Ukraine is fighting not just for Ukraine” but also “for us in the region” and for “everyone in the democratic world.” In Taiwan, they are also looking on with special concern. The vice president, Lai Ching-te, said, “The people and government of Taiwan stand with Ukraine. The principle of self-determination cannot be erased by brute force.” The president, Tsai Ing-wen, tweeted out photos of Taiwanese cities, lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “Our country & people #StandWithUkraine against Russian aggression,” she wrote.
You know who else understands the stakes in Ukraine to be very high? Here is Putin’s foreign minister, Lavrov: “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.”
Let us have an end to illusions: that Ukraine is not a real country; that Ukrainians are essentially Russians with a funny accent; that one half of Ukraine wants to be free and independent while the other half wants to be ruled by Russia; that Putin is looking out for the Russian-speakers; that he is a guardian and champion of Christian civilization; that NATO is obsolete and unnecessary; that the United States must “pivot to China” because Russia and Europe are insignificant; that the fates of nations, in either hemisphere, are unrelated; that Ukraine is a Nazi enterprise; and so on and so forth.
An end to illusions is impossible. They are never killed off entirely. But maybe we could have fewer of them? A reprieve from them? Churchill wrote a six-volume history of World War II. To each of the volumes, he gave a theme. The first volume is titled “The Gathering Storm” and its theme is: “How the English-speaking peoples, through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature, allowed the wicked to rearm.” The last volume is “Triumph and Tragedy.” Its theme: “How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.”