2022-02-24-ukr.md

The invasion¹ of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia² has solidified two simple things in my mind.³

1. Everyone has the right to stay where they live, and to leave.⁴
2. No one should be in harm’s way just because they were born in one place rather than another.

1. I’m posting this on the data of the beginning of Putin’s overt attempt to take Kiev, but Ukraine has been the subject of an illegal and inhumane occupation by military forces under Putin’s control, and other acts of war for a decade. ↩

2. We could have a long and productive talk about why naming a state bent on the erasure of Ukraine is among the grossest of appropriations, but instead I’ll point to Timothy Snyder’s excellent course on the making of modern Ukraine, and commentary on Putin’s conversation with the craven credulous Tucker Carlson. I’ll also note that I like the approach of referring to what I’m calling “Putin’s Russia” as “Muscovy” taken by Brad DeLong and others. I like it because it demonstrates that the writer using it understand the history of the repeated experiments at empire and appropriation by the polity based in Moscow. However, I’m sticking with “Putin’s Russia” for three reasons. First, it places emphasis on the person who alone started the conflict, and who alone can end it. There is a glib version of this where I note that, Putin started this war and he can end this war, but there is a deeper more fundamental version of this where I note that “Armies generally do not win by exterminating the enemy, but by making the enemy stop fighting, give up and run away.” (the linked ACOUP post is highly recommended). Russian troops can go home as soon as Putin lets them, the Ukrainians that have to give up and run away for the war to end are all of them. I’m not being hyperbolic: Putin’s goal is the elimination of the Ukrainian state and people. But I also want to emphasize that this is Putin’s war and that we should be careful to not to conflate Putin with the Russian people. Second, I think that it is more clear to more readers. Third, as an homage to the excellent book Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya, a book for which she arguably gave her life. ↩

3. I wrote this down as I watched the invasion unfold. It has taken me some time to actually publish the post. The footnotes were written much later and reference things that were written in response to the invasion. The ensuing time has been a struggle with myself about what I could say and do to help. At the end of the day the answer has been not much, I’ve volunteered small amounts (in the grand scheme of things) of time and money to various parts of the effort to defend Ukraine, but my skills and resources don’t match the type and magnitude of the problem. I’m publishing this as I near the 20th anniversary of my return to the US from Ukraine, where I lived from 2002 to

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4. I’m obviously thinking of this in the context of the war in Ukraine, and not thinking about evictions, foreclosures, the US housing crisis, eminent domain, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a host of other thorny issues. Though, this does influence my thinking on those topics as well. ↩