A dangerous path

Human beings are not chess pieces

The past two months I’ve given considerable thought to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and my sense of the situation is quite different from my friend Professor Art Hobson’s, who has recently published pieces in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on the matter.

At the outset I should note that I, too, am vitally concerned that Vladimir Putin may resort to nuclear weapons should he decide it’s the only way to force Ukraine into submission. Be that as it may, I am not inclined to think or believe it is wise to capitulate to the criminal actions of maniacal aggressors.

To date, the international community seems fairly positive that Russia has already committed war crimes. Other actors, including Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, assert that Russia is engaged in genocide. My position is that Putin may well have the intent to commit genocide. Time will tell.

Snyder recently tweeted the following: “When Putin says that there is no Ukrainian nation and no Ukrainian state, he means that he intends to destroy the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian state. Everyone gets that, right?” Tellingly, the four specific groups protected under the UN Convention of Genocide, are “racial, ethnic, religious and national.”

I agree with Hobson that (1) NATO’s presence on Russia’s doorstep is likely perceived by Putin as an existential threat, (2) the prospect of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO profoundly exacerbates the aforementioned threat, and (3) the West’s propensity to be extremely aggressive every now and again (i.e., the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq under a bogus claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction) may well have ratcheted up Putin’s concern.

But those are far from the only reasons Putin has attacked Ukraine. As the Atlantic Council has noted, Putin perceives “the Soviet collapse as ‘ the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.’” The aforementioned assertion essentially constitutes “a lament for lost Russian greatness.”

More specifically, the Atlantic Council asserts that “[i]n fact, [Putin] is a Russian imperialist who dreams of a revived Czarist Empire and blames the early Soviet authorities for handing over ancestral Russian lands to Ukraine and other Soviet republics.” For Putin, subjugating Ukraine is part and parcel of bringing his dream to fruition.

Hobson suggests that if Zelenskyy would agree to (1) “cede Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia” and (2) “pledge not to join NATO,” it would likely bring the war to an end, thus avoiding the possibility of a major nuclear war. Perhaps.

My major concern is this: Capitulating to such a murderous dictator, who has already cavalierly and criminally made a land grab against Ukraine, and killed thousands of innocent Ukrainians — and apparently has no qualms about continuing to kill at will until he gets his way — is not only plain wrong, but dangerous.

First and foremost, precious human lives are not chess pieces to be traded for this or that hoped-for outcome. Second, when dealing with brutes, there is absolutely no guarantee that capitulation to them isn’t simply the first step of the so-called domino effect. Once Putin has obtained one chunk of Ukraine, who can guarantee that he won’t go after another chunk? And once he has violently subsumed Ukraine into Russia, where is the guarantee he won’t go after other former Soviet republics?

Should he do so, war down the line is all but a certainty. That is, once it’s obvious that Putin won’t stop with Ukraine, neither individual nations nor the international community are likely to stand by and do nothing. And then we’re right back to where we are today should Putin threaten the use of nuclear weapons (and why wouldn’t he?).

We need not reach that far back into history to see what a dictator obsessed with power and expansion will do to bring his maniacal obsession to realization, and we can express that in a single word: Hitler.

As one who has not only studied genocide for the past 30 years but also spent a significant amount of time in an active war zone (the Government of Sudan’s war against the Nuba Mountains people of Sudan), I can readily attest to the multitude of horrors that accompany a dictator’s attempt to cow a people into towing his line, the horrific injuries and causes of death to innocents as a result of such insidious weapons as aerial bombings, RPGs, machine guns, cluster bombs, and unexploded ordnance.

That, of course, doesn’t even begin to take into consideration any of the following that has reportedly occurred during the current war in Ukraine: children witnessing their mothers and sisters being raped in front of them by Russian soldiers, the nightmares rape victims will likely suffer for the rest of their lives, or the abject lives of those children who are orphaned. And what about the fate of all those Ukrainians who have been forcibly “transferred” to Russia?