History of the Present (fortnight ending 18 December 2022)
In Ukraine
I spent the first of these two weeks in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. A long way from the frontline, but definitely a city at war. Military funerals almost every day in the church across from my hotel. Frequent multi-hour powercuts and meetings in freezing cold rooms. Fascinating, moving and harrowing conversations with wounded veterans and refugees from Mariupol, Kramatorsk and Nova Kakhovska.
I will write about this in the chronologically last chapter of my new book, Homelands, and in a forthcoming essay in the New York Review of Books. I draw upon it in this column in the Guardian, which argues that Vladimir Putin is actually the destroyer of the Russian world: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/17/ukraine-greatest-threat-russian-world-vladimir-putin. I have posted the full text separately at the end of this note.
Rather than reprising or anticipating these texts here, I thought it would be more interesting to post a few photographs from my trip. First, the one above from the military graveyard in Lviv, known as the Field of Mars (so much for Robert Kagan and Europeans being from Venus), with all the fresh graves of dead soldiers behind. Second, below, the volunteers I saw in Lviv making trench candles for the troops on Ukrainian Armed Forces Day (6 December, St Nicholas Day in luckier, more peaceful parts of Europe). I found the process fascinating, and an example of the way in which this really is a people’s war.
If you want to get a sense of the fighting at the frontline, read this superb report by one of the best correspondents in Ukraine at the moment, the Financial Times' Christopher Miller: https://www.ft.com/content/dcdd09bf-440a-4648-9664-6084b11dddd4?shareType=nongift. (Paywall, I'm afraid.) Trench warfare and the Russian way of war, sending in wave after wave of cannon fodder. A small sample:
"Then came the Russian infantry, charging in a first world war-style attack across a no man’s land of shredded trees and artillery craters. The Ukrainians popped up and mowed down many of them with machine guns and grenade launchers. Moments later, the scenes were repeated — although this time the Russian fighters had to navigate their comrades’ bodies. Again many were cut down by Ukrainian bullets."
Of course all of us are asking…
When and how might this war end?
Short answer: tragically, there is no end in sight. The Ukrainians are not going to give up, and so long as the West goes on supplying them with weapons they will continue to fight. Putin is not going to give up, and he has the 'mass' of Russia behind him. (He's bringing some 200,000 recruits on stream in the next few months; his economy is still surviving sanctions quite well, thanks to sky high energy prices; he’s threatening a second front from Belarus.)
Both sides are reportedly preparing fresh offensives early next year. Every single person I met in Ukraine said that what Ukraine needs most, and most urgently, is: weapons, weapons, weapons.
Longer answer: If this analysis of the situation on the battlefield is correct, there are only two ways in which lasting, substantial change, leading eventually to something resembling peace, might come: if the West changes, or if Russia changes. The biggest danger of the former would be a Trump victory in 2024. Otherwise, for all the wobbles and doubts in the US and Europe, it seems to me that a sufficient number of Western states (led by the US, but notably including the UK – Ukraine is one of the few places where one is proud of British government policy these days –, Poland and the Baltic states) will continue to supply sufficient weapons from the technologically superior Western military-industrial complex to – at the very least – prevent a decisive Russian breakthrough.
What remains? Change in Russia. Speculation on how that might come about is interesting, but not very productive. It may take a long time, but one never knows. When it happens, it will probably be in a way that none of us anticipated. But change in Russia is the least worst long-term possibility for a durable end to this war.
Comments welcome.
Tip: Read Lawrence Freedman on his father-son Substack Comment is Freed for wise, in-depth strategic analysis.
And here’s how to make trench candles…
Vladimir Putin - destroyer of the Russian world
The text of my Guardian column, published on Saturday 17 December - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/17/ukraine-greatest-threat-russian-world-vladimir-putin. If sharing on social media, please use the Guardian link.
The time has come to ask whether, objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin is an agent of American imperialism. For no American has ever done half as much damage to what Putin calls the “Russian world” as the Russian leader himself has.
This thought came to me recently when I was in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrainians made refugees in their own country by Putin’s war. “I was a Russian speaker until 24 February,” said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find “the spirit of freedom” in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.
Tetiana, a refugee from the ruthlessly bombed and destroyed city of Mariupol, had suffered without heat, light or water in a cellar under constant bombardment, seen her best friend killed by a Russian missile, and then had a traumatic odyssey of escape. Tetiana not merely speaks much better Russian than Ukrainian; her mother is actually from Russia, as are her parents-in-law. The Russian president would consider her a Russian. So I asked her for her message to Putin. She replied that she would like to kill him.
Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write “russia” with a small initial letter. “I don’t correct them.”
This may be unsurprising in Ukraine, a country suffering from a Russian war that is now primarily directed against the civilian population. But the same thing is happening across much of the territory of the former Russian (and subsequently Soviet) empire – which, since the early 2000s, Moscow has tried to reimagine as the russkiy mir, or Russian world.
In Georgia, a strong resentment of neoimperial Russia is more than understandable, since Russia has occupied roughly – a fifth of the country’s sovereign territory (in Abkhazia and South Ossetia) since 2008. But following the invasion of Ukraine, that hostility has enveloped almost all Russians. Ironically enough, this impacts the many tens of thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia precisely to avoid being conscripted into fighting in Putin’s war against Ukraine. Georgians ask: why don’t you protest back home? Or as one banner put it, “Putin is killing people in Ukraine while Russians eat khachapuri in Georgia.” (Khachapuri is the distinctive Georgian cheese bread.)The revulsion is also found in central Asian states that still have very close ties to Moscow. On YouTube, you can watch a magnificent excoriation of the bullying Russian ambassador to Kazakhstan, Alexey Borodavkin, delivered in fluent Russian by the Kazakh journalist Arman Shuraev. “Russophobia is all that you have achieved with your stupid actions,” he says. If Russia invades Kazakhstan as it has Ukraine, “the entire Kazakh steppe will be strewn with the corpses of your conscripts … You are idiots. You are cannibals who eat themselves.”
“Borodavkin,” he concludes, directly addressing the ambassador, “if you want to see Nazis and fascists in Kazakhstan, look in the mirror and you will see the main Nazi and fascist. Glory to Ukraine! Forward Kazakhstan!”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, the Ukrainian journalist Olha Vorozhbyt tried to explain to an Indian public what was going on. “Could you imagine a Britain that claims India is in its empire?” she wrote in the Indian Express. “That is what Russia is doing now.” One can extend the analogy. Imagine that a revanchist, militarist British dictatorship instrumentalised the cultural notion of an “English-speaking world” to justify its reinvasion of India. That’s exactly what Putin has done.
The notion of russkiy mir was revived and repackaged in the late 1990s as a kind of Russian soft-power initiative (mir means peace as well as world). In 2007, a Russkiy Mir Foundation was created by presidential decree. This was presented as a Russian counterpart to the British Council or Germany’s Goethe-Institut, but the concept was then weaponised by Putin to justify his war of recolonisation in Ukraine. He explicitly mentioned the term in a speech justifying the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The entirely predictable result: revulsion against his recolonisation wars has extended to the whole broader notion of a Russian-speaking world. Obviously, a comparison with the English-speaking world points up big differences as well. Britain’s empire was overseas, Russia’s a contiguous land empire. The ideology of a Russian world was always closely associated with the Russian imperial project, the Russian Orthodox Church (now headed by the ecclesiastical warmonger Patriarch Kirill) and autocracy. But if Britain had reinvaded India, the British Council wouldn’t be very popular either. Those who justify their wars in terms of culture will find their culture treated as an enemy.
Russian culture is thus a collateral victim of Putin’s self-devouring cannibalism. There was an alternative future in which Russian-speaking culture, like today’s English-speaking culture, may have become multiculturally enriched by authors and artists from all its former colonies. What would contemporary English-language literature be without authors from India, Africa and Oceania? And, after all, fine contemporary Ukrainian writers such as Andrey Kurkov write – or should I say wrote? – in Russian.
But we must keep our eyes on the main tragedy. Putin is trying to recover parts of the Russian empire by brute force and terror. He recently boasted that the Azov Sea has become an internal Russian sea, adding that even Peter the Great “had still to fight to gain access to [it]”. About 14 million Ukrainians, a staggering one-third of the country’s population, have been made homeless. Europe has seen nothing like this since 1945.
Even in Lviv, in the far west of Ukraine, I encountered frequent multi-hour power cuts, because Russia has destroyed about 50% of the country’s energy infrastructure. What does Ukraine need most? Every single person I spoke to gave the same answer: weapons, weapons, weapons. Give us the tools, they say, and we will finish the job. And so we should.
In the end, Vladimir Putin will go down in history not merely as the man who failed to restore the Russian empire, but as the destroyer of the Russian world.
Reminder: please credit https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/17/ukraine-greatest-threat-russian-world-vladimir-putin.
And season’s greetings to one and all…
Good places to donate to help Ukrainians resist and survive are (from UK): https://www.dec.org.uk/appeal/ukraine-humanitarian-appeal or (from US): https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/ and to give to the Ukrainian army directly: https://bank.gov.ua/en/about/support-the-armed-forces
Those candles are brilliant! Thank you for posting the photos here