The Murdered Writer and the Stain of Our Unconsciousness

Reflections on Our Strategic Childishness

Victoria Amelina (1986-2023), September 1, 2015. Picture: Osabadash, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Tribute after tribute has been paid, emotion has been expressed around the world, and dread has grown in the face of the immensity of Russian barbarity and the extermination project that is guiding Russia in Ukraine. The writer, the poet, the activist for the investigation and punishment of Russia’s endless crimes, Victoria Amelina, was murdered in the cowardly strike, like all Russian strikes, on a well-known restaurant in Kramatorsk. This latest war crime has so far claimed thirteen victims, including three children. It is neither the first, nor—we suspect—the last. Nor is it an “accidental” act, but this restaurant, frequented by humanitarian organizations, activists, intellectuals and many foreigners passing through the area, was knowingly and deliberately targeted by the Russians.

Victoria was 37 and left an orphaned 12-year-old son. She was supposed to come to Paris with him on a scholarship. She will never come. I was so hoping to see her, because we didn’t know each other, even though we followed each other on Twitter, which gave us the opportunity to read about each other. I’ll never get to know her. For me, this is also unacceptable and unthinkable. Not only is it not right, as they say, it’s not normal.

Her death is not normal—or rather, her assassination is not normal. Let us never think that this war is “normal”, that these crimes are “normal” and that the Russians are “normal”. Absolute crime is never normal. There are only deliberate, willful crimes, perpetrated in cold blood, like tens of thousands of others—and I’m thinking here, in particular, of Yuriy Kerpatenko, the murdered conductor to whom I paid tribute. It’s because these crimes are not normal that, politically, there can be no normalization. Normalization, after all, is merely the harbinger of future crimes. If the poet Victoria was investigating these crimes, it’s because the only certainty that civilized people can have is that justice is the beginning of everything and the ultimate end of our actions.

The guilt of those who don't know how to cry

I say here: “not Putin’s regime, as I was still inclined to say at the start of the total war. And I say: “Russia”. Some crimes are too great not to be borne by an entire people. Some crimes go beyond the mere culpability established by justice, which must be established by name, individually, and in this respect, totally.

Who, after all, committed this crime, and certainly more than a hundred thousand others? Certainly, it was Putin who unleashed this new war of aggression, an extension of the one he started in 2014, and he and all his accomplices will have to be prosecuted for this crime of aggression too. On July 3, the International Center for the Crime of Aggression was set up in The Hague under the authority of Eurojust, the EU’s agency for cooperation in criminal justice matters. And it was designated Russians who gave the order to fire the missile, and others who carried it out by aiming and triggering the shot.

Still others, as Nataliya Gumanyuk reports, congratulated themselves on the murder, including children, such as the head of the Duma’s military committee, Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov, on a propaganda program on Russian television. And those who invited this colonel are guilty. And those who listened to this program without saying anything or feeling anything. And those who look away and say nothing. And those who vacation in Europe. And those who voted for Putin and who—80%, it seems, even if polls are always questionable—support his war (the number has increased since February 24, as has the expressed rate of support for Putin). And those, too, who supported Priogozhin, as if there were no equivalence between Wagner’s crimes and those of the regime. And those who fled conscription, but said nothing against massive crimes. And all those, even dissidents, who continue to complain about their fate, but say nothing about that of the Ukrainians, as if there were no possible comparison. But also, yes, those among them who, while calling for an end to the war and punishment for the crimes committed, refuse to pay reparations. Those who do not kneel. Those who do not ask forgiveness. Those who, because they didn’t vote for Putin, think they can exonerate themselves from the burden of the crime. And, of course, those who will never speak of Victoria because, in strength, intelligence, generosity and courage, she towered over them all.

Then I certainly have some rare Russian friends who carry each of these crimes on their conscience, for whom it is a real personal suffering each time, and you still have some—women members of feminist organizations especially, it seems—who have enough courage to light a little light in front of the makeshift votive monuments in tribute to those who were murdered in Bucha, Mariupol, Izyum or Dnipro. Dissidents such as Evgenia Kara-Murza, like her husband Vladimir, the most dignified and steadfast of Russian opponents, imprisoned for 25 years, continue to speak out about these crimes. Recently, too, the writer Mikhail Shishkin, while calling for national repentance, declared that his language had become the language of murderers. But how many people are capable of thinking like that? If you Russians do not mourn Victoria and all the others, not out of obligation, but deep down inside, you are guilty.

It’s never fate

So Victoria was a writer and a poet. She described the fate of her kind, who are always a prime target for Russian criminals. In fact, she had paid such an extraordinary tribute precisely to another poet and children’s author murdered in Izyum, Volodymyr Vakulenko, whose buried diary had been unearthed and then published thanks to her. Above all, she had—and with what words!—as if to announce on June 2 what was to be her fate, and these verses resonate today with a mournful sound.

“Birds try to sing louder in Kyiv

Birds want to be louder than explosions

Birds win.”

This time, as all too often, the bombs triumphed.

Ukraine’s future victory will never erase the dead. They will be heroes. And yes, of course, Героям слава ! But they should have lived. We would have preferred less heroes, but alive. The cult of heroes is always the cult of the dead. It’s not a political purpose.

Except that... except that there is no destiny; there is no fatality; there is no predestination—we used to say that praying at Auschwitz made no sense, because Auschwitz is a silence from God that translates his absence. Ukraine, forgive me for saying so, is also the absence of God, for there is no mystery that can explain such crimes. And to speak of redemption would be sinister in every respect. The only thing that “explains” them is an absolute criminal will. I had already suggested that we shouldn’t talk about tragedy: the tragic is the figure of the inevitable, of an external force that cannot be stopped or defeated. The fatum is that against which it is futile to fight. Without going back over the texts of classical tragedy, Greek and then French—Shakespeare’s seems to me singular—we also have more popular versions, in Verdi’s operas, where the heroes are often driven to perform acts that hasten their downfall. They are unaware of this, and driven by the Forza del Destino. In this version of things, there may still be good people and scoundrels, but there’s no such thing as agent freedom anymore. All this is as stupid as it is unacceptable, especially when applied to Ukraine.

The unbearable lightness of strategy

So why did I have to make this detour? Because that’s how some of our allies and Western analysts think. Sometimes I find myself doubting whether they know it themselves. How often have we heard them talk about the “horrors of war”, not only as a way of reducing this war to all the others and merging them all in a form of undifferentiated magma, but also as a way of saying: “Yes, it’s horrible, but there’s nothing we can do about it”? Elsewhere, some senior official and analysts refuse to intervene on the grounds that things are extremely complex and risky, and that while in theory we could have prevented the crimes, in practice it would be complicated—and point to the risks of escalation, perverse effects, an even greater (nuclear) threat. All this is all too familiar—and so predictable.

In the end, the most certain inclination of certain geostrategists is the art of circumvention. They refuse to look the crime in the face. It’s so much easier than not looking at the victims’ faces, especially when they are young children or young women. By dint of pretending that absolute crime is the hallmark of war, we end up dealing with a theoretical war without crime—and in this case, without mass crime.

It seems to me that this is a form of strategic levity, futility and childishness. Certainly, on a political and moral level, we must by all means—and this should also apply to Western leaders—fight dehumanization by talking again and again about each of the victims, getting to know their stories, seeing their faces and recounting their hopes forever buried. It is this bit of humanity that alone can tie us to these dead, while many are still trying to unburden themselves of them. But in this lightness there is also a form of strategic disembodiment. If security alliances were created, notably the Atlantic Alliance, it was not to establish abstract security, a kind of security for states considered as desert entities.

In fact, the question here is not that of a kind of border that we would set, for example, between NATO member countries and the others. Quite apart from the fact that Russia’s war against Ukraine poses a direct threat to the security of the Alliance’s 31 member states, the principles we defend, as set out in its Charter, go much further. In particular, they allow us to come to the aid of an aggressed state by attacking the aggressor, including on its territory (Article 51 of the UN Charter), and oblige us to protect civilian populations (R2P), including by military means in response, as we know perfectly well that they are deliberately and systematically targeted by the Russians.

I won’t go back over what I've written too often: we are also guilty of not having saved the lives of so many Ukrainians; we could have prevented the death of Victoria and so many others; we in the West didn’t want to, and we have to face up to that fact.

But we are also unconscious, because we know very well what these crimes mean and announce; we know that they are the mark of an aggression by our enemy on our countries, our values, our dignity and, ultimately, our conscience. Our inaction weakens us strategically and, despite all we have certainly done to defend Ukraine, we have not, as it were, dealt seriously with the issue of crimes.

We are beginning—and Victoria had so courageously contributed to this—to build mechanisms, still too frail, but doubtless one day decisive, which will enable us, perhaps only in part if we do not decide to defeat Russia, to deal with Russian criminals. But we are allowing the very crimes we are about to judge to be perpetrated day after day.

So one day we will try to judge what we have finally authorized and permitted. We are destroying ourselves.