I recently asked a loved one from China what they thought about the war in Ukraine. They replied not with criticism of Russia but by asking a series of seemingly innocent, non-random questions about the United States. What is the U.S. doing in all this? Does it have any regional interests? Is it just an altruistic global police officer?
A few days later, I was speaking to a young man from India who said Russia’s war on Ukraine is entirely reasonable. After all, he said, what would the U.S. do if Putin set up a military base in Mexico? We don’t even have to ask, he quickly added, because we already know the answer—just look at the Cuban missile crisis (take a guess what he thought about Taiwan).
Whataboutery directed at the U.S. is nothing new. It’s the favorite opening move of every tankie chess player who ever lived. And on its face, it does seem fair to compare Ukraine entering NATO with Russia paving an air strip on the other side of the Rio Grande. Both involve a major rival setting up shop right outside your doorstep. But we can’t simply look over the shoulder of the fact that Russia and the U.S. expanding their spheres of influence is apples and oranges. To be fair, the U.S. has waged immoral wars and replaced democratic leaders with dictators who terrorized their own people. And the U.S. did it because those leaders aligned with our interests. Or, as Roosevelt famously said about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
But let’s not pretend like the U.S. and Russia are therefore somehow on the same moral playing field. They’re not. Not in terms of freedom of the press, not in terms of minority rights, not in terms of corruption and certainly not in terms of military policy. In Russia, journalists who say the wrong thing are defenestrated. In Russia, LGBT activists are not celebrated but incarcerated. In Russia, oligarch mafiosos run the land and the military doesn’t kill civilians because a few psychopathic soldiers got trigger happy, they do it because of the Gerasimov doctrine, named after Army General Valery Gerasimov (not to be confused with Vitaly Gerasimov, who was reportedly recently killed in Ukraine).
The Gerasimov doctrine is a scorched earth policy. You not only go after military assets but the economy, infrastructure, people and culture. Civilians die in every U.S. war but it’s not as if Obama was telling his generals in Afghanistan to blow up all the daycare centers they could find, whereas Russia is blowing up kindergartens in Ukraine. And hospitals. And parks. And cemeteries. And gunning down people as they flee clutching not weapons but their own children in their arms. Putin is targeting civilians to instill fear. He wants to break Ukraine’s spine because the bravery of the Ukrainian people is a dangerous thing. And as everyone knows, you have to break the enemy’s morale. Putin is doing that with violence against innocents in order to achieve his political ends. The very definition of terrorism.
My point is, while the war in Ukraine is a proxy battle between the U.S. and Russia, or more specifically, between NATO expansion and Putin’s revanchist goal of rebuilding Soviet glory out of Ukrainian gravestones, we cannot ignore the most important piece on the board: Ukraine itself. In fact, Ukraine isn’t really the most important piece on the board. It IS the board. Whatever you think of the U.S. or Russia, you have to also ask, “what do Ukrainians want for themselves?” Tankies will tell you Ukrainians in the east speak Russian, as if this is an argument for annexation. Well, all Ukrainians speak Russian. Some to the point that even Russians can’t tell the difference and others, only in broken grammar. But they almost all speak it. They’re proud of their Russian heritage because it’s an important part of their Ukrainian heritage. But they’re still firmly Ukrainian.
Forget the fact that much of their Russian culture is the product of conquest. Forget the fact that much of the rest of it is the product of manufactured consent, by physically moving enough Russians into places like Crimea that you can then turn around and say look how many Russians are in Crimea. Forget that this is Putin’s favorite play, that he fed separatism in Georgia’s South Ossetia then invaded to end the “genocide,” or that he fed neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine then invaded to “denazify.” Forget that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent it from sliding further West, and forget that Ukraine sliding further West is the one thing that would actually help eliminate its neo-Nazi elements (you’re not gonna get hate crime legislation, widely supported by Ukrainians, or broader civil liberties as a vassal state of Moscow).
Forget also that Putin wants to “denazify” the country by sending in the neo-Nazi Wagner Group to kill the nation’s Jewish president Zelensky. And finally, forget that the U.S. military has done terrible things. Because if you oppose those terrible things then you either oppose them anywhere you find them or what you actually oppose is simply the U.S. In Ukraine, an imperialist power will benefit either way the war goes. But what benefits Ukraine? If Ukrainians wanted to join Russia and Putin’s opinion was, let them do what they want, but the U.S. wanted to force them otherwise, then the U.S. would be the villain of the play. And somewhere in the metaverse, that’s the case. But in this world, it’s the other way around.
Ukrainians want their freedom. Their voices are blindingly clear. So whatever you think of the U.S., make sure you don’t forget to think about Ukraine.