The War That’s Here and the War That’s Coming — Back From Ukraine 4
Have We Really Understood What’s Coming?
Funeral of a soldier in front of the monastery of Saint Michael the Golden Dome, Kyiv, Ukraine, March 24, 2024. Photo: Nicolas Tenzer
Each of my four trips to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s all-out war against the Ukrainian people has been a moment both necessary for the affection and unconditional support—alas, such a weak and symbolic gesture—that it was imperative for me to show the Ukrainian people, and for the awareness of a possible future that it brought to light. Each of these trips is an opportunity for numerous exchanges with officials from Ukraine and the many other countries present there, as well as with members of civil society. It’s also a time to take the time to try and understand the situation by simply observing the city, bearing in mind that Kyiv, where I was, doesn’t represent the whole of Ukraine. It's also worth listening to some of the “little stories” that are told to you in the course of a conversation, sometimes mostly theoretical and serious, but sometimes they tell you more.
Walking around the city, for example, means keeping your wits about you in the face of possible alerts announcing criminal Russian strikes—even if Kyiv is better protected by a missile shield than other Ukrainian cities—and noting, despite the posters calling for involvement, a necessary and salutary appearance of normalcy. It’s strolling through Podil, seeing the big wheel and children playing in their electric cars, watching young Ukrainians chatting in front of cafés and enjoying a good meal, even if the restaurants close early because of the curfew. It’s hearing this reported response from a high-ranking officer to a journalist: “We have no jealousy because we are also fighting so that this happy life can continue.” But he also added: “Tomorrow, we will be vigilant to ensure that another Ukraine emerges, not the one we once knew. We are fighting to ensure that exemplarity becomes the law.” Neither life nor the often bitter political debates about the future have disappeared—as they should in a democracy.
We also need to follow in the traces of the past—what I called here the reconstitution of the thread of history—just as much as it is important to grasp the conflicts and contradictions that it carries as much as the present. I’ll discuss this at greater length in my next essay here.
You can’t understand the reality of Ukraine without realizing that it lives in the shadow of mass crime. But this shadow is not just the crudest truth of past history, nor even an imprint in collective memory, but the reality of the present. It is not, so to speak, a continuity of memory, but a historical permanence that is more than a century old, and which historians such as Tymothy Snyder and Serhii Plokhy have studied.
To travel to Ukraine is certainly to travel to Europe. Ukraine has brought its values and aspirations to the highest possible level. It's also a journey to its darkest past; it's a rediscovery of the origins of its founding, and a state of consciousness that can only be found in those who cultivate the project. To take a detour via Ukraine to rediscover Europe’s past is, in a way, to explore its possible future. The devastation of the Ukraine by the forces of Putin’s Russia is not the vision of a remote province inhabited by distant cousins; it is both the symbol and the sign of our own inner havoc, that of our intelligence as well as our morality; it is the harbinger of our possible physical annihilation.
Thinking about the strategy we need to develop—for it is here that we are summoned to convene the figure of duty—is impossible without this forward-looking historical perspective. But we need to agree on what it means: behind the possible annihilation of the Ukraine—for that remains a possibility—and the preservation of a Russia doomed to pure destruction, something other than the distant statement of facts is at stake. The obliteration of Ukraine, which is first and foremost the elimination of Ukrainians, would be a long-term license for a power with the authority of life and death. To authorize a criminal power to destroy life—which is what the Western powers have been doing, in fact, for over two years—is to destroy history as a category. It is to accustom the consciences of so-called democratic peoples to murder and evil. We can’t help feeling this way when some, in Western chancelleries or among strategists, speak of battlefields and weapons as if they were a distant abstraction. Let’s bring them back to the awareness of murder, thus permitted, and its ultimate meaning.
On Maidan Square, Kyiv, Ukraine, March 24, 2024. Picture: Nicolas Tenzer
We haven’t won the war yet, and we can lose it!
At the end of March 2024, the climate was gloomy. It could hardly have been less so! And I can’t claim that it wasn’t during my previous trips in 2023. But many are still struggling to grasp the weight of time and the impact on Ukrainian society of the continuous strikes and deliberate massacres of civilians by the Russians. For the justified feeling, which has only deepened, is that of abandonment by some of Ukraine’s allies, in particular the United States. When I was in Kyiv, it had just come to light—at the time in the form of rumors, confirmed in the days and weeks that followed by official statements—of American opposition to Ukrainian attacks, legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter, on Russian refineries and other logistical facilities used by Moscow in its war effort. It became increasingly clear that Washington, beyond the blocking of military aid by House Speaker Mike Johnson, was not giving Ukraine all the weapons it was legally capable of providing. In short, the stark reality facing Ukraine, reflected in the statements of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several other officials, was that not only had Kyiv not won the war—lacking the necessary weapons, it could not launch new offensives—it could actually lose it. If this were to happen, it would be the Allies’ fault alone, a sin before history. Raising this risk publicly presents a double complication. On the one hand, sowing the seeds of defeatism has always been a tried-and-tested technique of Russian propaganda: the mention of this risk can easily turn into a prophecy; when the prophecy gains ground, it gives credence to the Russian narrative that the Ukrainians should give up the fight and rush to demand negotiation. Allowing such a belief to take root would be particularly dangerous. On the other hand, publicizing this risk would also have a demoralizing effect on Ukrainian fighters and the Ukrainian population, but is nevertheless an essential element in mobilizing the Allies, since we know only too well that Russia’s mad drive for destruction would not stop, and that the Russian leaders have a plan for perpetual war. Yet the most contagious despair lies in the impression that even the most urgent warning of the consequences of a Ukrainian defeat remains insufficient for certain Allies, here again mainly Washington and Berlin, to radically change their attitude.
We therefore need to weigh up what such a Ukrainian defeat—which, whatever its form, would mean a victory for Moscow—would mean in concrete terms. It’s far from certain that Russia would succeed in recapturing the whole of Ukraine, but it would render it incapable of functioning in any real way, due to its hold on part of the territories and the major destruction inflicted on the energy and water infrastructures—and of course the permanent threat it would represent. The endless crimes would continue in the occupied territories, and reparations would never be paid, nor the crimes committed. Ukraine would be in perpetual mourning, for the past and for the future. The unfulfilled promises of the democracies regarding Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty would seem like a long betrayal. Clearly, Russia would be in a state of perpetual war against the democracies, mainly European, and many would be next on Moscow’s list of planned crimes. What would the entry of an amputated Ukraine into the European Union and even NATO mean? Europe would become even more populated with enemies from the inside, both within the EU and on its margins, notably Serbia.
In short, the democracies would have decided to lose the war in the same way as they would have allowed Russia to perpetuate new crimes. It would be 1945 in reverse.
Abstraction of death, unreality of strategy
The propensity of political leaders to look the other way in the face of endless crime and destruction is neither new nor unique to any one country. It’s as if they don’t seek to see the images that abound on TV channels and social networks, as if they think they can ignore the reality of death deliberately inflicted by a criminal power in their decisions, as if their very strategy were not dictated by the permanence of mass crime. In reality, it is only among idiots that insensitivity is considered the pinnacle of strategic thinking. The reality is that if we don't see what crime is announcing, we don’t see it coming our way.
So, of course, there may be the occasional outraged communiqué, and for the rest, the usual self-congratulation about Western efforts and new-found unity, support “for as long as it takes” and the new-found solidity of the Alliance—a kind of window-dressing at a time when Ukrainians are dying en masse and Russia is growing stronger militarily and, for this very reason, receiving increased support from revisionist countries, first and foremost the People’s Republic of China, seeking to capitalize on Western pusillanimity. But there is no discernible strategy.
The US administration is stubborn in its absurd and sometimes contradictory strategic assertions about the risk of a war between Russia and NATO—as if supplying more advanced weapons capable of reaching Russian territory in Kyiv would necessarily lead to it, the danger of a nuclear strike by Putin if the US were to supply too many weapons to the Ukraine (Jake Sullivan’s unconfirmed and undeniable comments reported by Senator Michael McCaul) and the danger of Russia imploding after its defeat—in fact, this too is a story fabricated by Moscow—with the uncertainty of what will happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons. A few months ago, Jonathan Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor, absurdly mentioned possible negotiations with Russia once Ukraine was strong enough: “We want to position Ukraine in such a way by the end of next year that Russia will have to decide whether to come to the negotiating table with conditions acceptable to Ukraine..., or confront a stronger Ukraine,” he stated. This position is inconsistent for many reasons. Let’s look at three of them.
Firstly, to suggest that Ukraine must first be strong seems like a joke in poor taste, given that the United States, regardless of the blockage in the House of Representatives, has not given Kyiv all the means to regain the territories occupied by Moscow and to strike directly at Russian territory, and, in the immediate future, to impose a no-fly zone. Secondly, the question of “conditions acceptable to Ukraine” remains imprecise, to say the least, in Finer’s words. The only ones that could be were formulated by President Zelenskyy’s ten-point peace plan, and obviously presuppose a total defeat of Russia in Ukraine. They include the return of Ukraine to its 1991 borders, the payment of reparations, the repatriation of deported children and the punishment of criminals. It is also the only position the Allies would be able to accept. It therefore seems somewhat ill-advised to talk of negotiations on this subject. Finally, this statement reveals a total absence of strategic thinking about Russia itself. In the minds of American leaders, everything is going on as if the Russian question would be settled even after a Ukrainian victory—not to mention the hypothesis, apparently cherished by Finer, of a partial victory. Above all, it’s as if the United States, in a hurry to move on, could live with Moscow’s persistent threat to Europe, as long as it didn’t lead to Moscow’s complete takeover of Ukraine and European countries. They seem to imagine a situation of chiaroscuro, uncertainty and so-called equilibrium, as if they were inclined to analyze the Russian war against Ukraine in the light of the Cold War, and to accept a fixed situation in which two blocs would stare at each other. This would be to completely misunderstand the reality of Putin’s Russia.
Ultimately, people like him will have contributed, if they succeed in satisfying one of Putin’s major objectives, as rightly defined by Françoise Thom: “to discredit NATO in Europe, and to discredit the United States by showing that it was incapable of protecting those who looked to it for security.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess what’s coming next.
Funeral of a soldier in front of the monastery of Saint Michael the Golden Dome, Kyiv, Ukraine, March 24, 2024. Video: Nicolas Tenzer
The scenario of catastrophe
In a way, talking about a disaster scenario may seem almost misplaced in that it would lead to minimizing the scope of what’s happening now. The simple reality is, in fact, that the catastrophe has already taken place: the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian dead should still be alive, as should the million Syrians mainly murdered by Assad and his Russian and Iranian accomplices. We could also add all the other catastrophes caused by Russia in Belarus, in Chechnya where it all began, in Georgia, in several African countries... and certainly on its own territory. Another catastrophe lies in the way Moscow has managed to corrupt so many minds in the West for so long, in political, intellectual and economic circles. This corruption, which induces a very particular way of “thinking”, has exerted profound effects on the soul that will certainly not cease even after Russia has been defeated.
But today’s catastrophe is first and foremost in Ukraine, in terms of the number of victims murdered daily by the Russians and the destruction wrought. And yet, it’s as if it’s necessary to imagine an even greater catastrophe. First of all, Ukrainians are being led—and democratic leaders need to really understand, in their flesh, not just intellectually, what this represents—to understand that the present catastrophe will continue to occur in the days, months and undoubtedly the coming year. They have already been told that tens of thousands, perhaps more, will die in the near future. Shamefully, even disgustingly, this is being presented to them as a foregone conclusion, whereas tomorrow, if the democratic leaders so decide, these deaths will not take place. And the Ukrainians know that these leaders will not decide this—and that there is no valid, rational, tactical, strategic, military, political or any other reason not to.
So we’re announcing the sacrifice of lives that we in the West could have saved, and that tomorrow, no more than today or yesterday, we will not have wanted to save. We must understand this and face up to it—and one day think that history will judge.
But tomorrow, there will be another catastrophe—that of the much wider and deeper war we have allowed to exist. Let’s also be totally straightforward: those who, today, take the decision—since non-decision is always a decision—not to stop Russia by any means possible (except nuclear) must know that they are accepting—actually, deciding, here too—the continuation, extension and aggravation of the war.
So those who today proclaim that those who have been saying, sometimes for more than ten years, that Putin must be stopped by force are war-mongers are designating themselves. Warmongers are, in reality, whether they are Kremlin agents or just stupid, supporters—voluntary in the first case, involuntary in the other—of an even more devastating war.
Those who consider that the risk of a confrontation with Russia is now too high to be taken must in reality face the risk, far more certain, of a more intensive, wider and deadly confrontation. Those who consider that this potential confrontation—and I have demonstrated elsewhere that in reality it would have every chance of remaining limited and circumscribed, and that Moscow would back down—could directly threaten the security of European countries are taking the risk of facing a far more dangerous situation in which Russia would be stronger and Western democracies weaker. In short, the longer we delay, the greater the uncertainty of the outcome, which is less and less likely to be in our favor.
History is full of disasters caused by leaders focusing on the almost imaginary risks of the present, rather than the proven risks of the future, which have not only allowed contemporary disasters to continue, but have paved the way for those of the future.