Why We Are in Ukraine
Recently, an article appeared in Harper’s Magazine entitled “Why Are We in Ukraine?” The article, written by Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, is not especially noteworthy in and of itself: it belongs to what is by now a bulging genre of think pieces that purport to question the “conventional story,” derided as “simplistic and self-serving,” surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the American and European response to it.
In the article, Vladimir Putin’s well-documented imperialist fantasizing, Russian ethno-national chauvinism, and the gutting, undeniable face of genocide are largely waved away with an eye-roll in favor of the rote recitation of tired cliches about “NATO expansion,” “cavalier” American policy, an increasingly “concerned” and “unsettled” Russia, and cheap geopolitical whataboutism that encompasses the former Yugoslavia, Cuba, Libya, Turkey, and imaginary Russian bases in Acapulco.
Not unexpectedly, the authors content themselves with deploying what are, circa 2023, embarrassingly naive tropes about the “linguistically and culturally Russian” population of Crimea who “have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia” (author’s note: they have, in fact, not), and in general treat Ukraine and Ukrainians as little more than frustrating troublemakers who do not know their place and are simply too unsophisticated to reject the predatory temptations of the West (that is, when they aren’t being reduced to inert pawns whose lives and destinies are things to be traded between Great Powers lording over their respective “spheres of influence”).
In this scheme, even Ukraine’s planned association agreement with the European Union, the betrayal of which was the spark for the Euromaidan Revolution (also known as the Revolution of Dignity) is caricatured as little more than “an opportunity to incorporate Ukraine into the West’s orbit, an outcome that Moscow had long defined as intolerable.” Russia’s “response” was to “amass forces on Ukraine’s border” and to invade in order to “arrest[] Ukraine’s NATO integration.”
It goes without saying that Ukraine and Ukrainians are almost completely effaced in this narrative, except as objects that have little choice but to bend to Moscow’s definitions of “intolerable.”
Schwarz and Layne duly recapitulate by now familiar allegations that Washington, fully transfixed by its “egocentric” proxy war against Russia, simply refuses to accept the only obvious, sensible solution: a negotiated settlement, the details of which, as always, remains seductively elusive beyond that it will somehow involve ceding Crimea, giving some sort of “autonomy” to “Russian-speaking areas of Donbas,” and apparently unembarrassed endorsements of “Great Power spheres of influence”:
[S]uch a system would in fundamental aspects resemble a modern Concert of Europe, in which the dominant states of the E.U., on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, acknowledge each other’s security interests, including their respective spheres of influence. In practice, this would mean… that the Baltic states and Poland would enjoy the same large, but ultimately circumscribed, degree of sovereignty as, say, Canada does. It would also mean that, while Paris and Berlin won’t find Moscow’s internal arrangements to their taste, they will resume economic and trade relations with Russia and build on myriad other areas of common interest.” [emphasis mine]
If all of that sounds wearyingly familiar, it’s because it is essentially just laundry list of Russian war aims disguised in a trenchcoat and trying to convince readers that no, really this time, seriously gang, it’s actually about NATO and American hubris and stuff trust me bro. Mercifully, Schwarz and Layne do at least manage to spare readers the agony of once again encountering the words “fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian” penned in earnest.
Small graces.
At its best, though, little of their paint-by-numbers analysis, if it can be dignified as such, can be counted as fresh or particularly insightful. At worst, it drunkenly lurches into bleary-eyed slurs that even the most lazy attempts at fact-checking would have disproved. I mean, do the authors really believe themselves when they rather bravely assert that
[f]ar from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine (an impossible goal for the 190,000 troops that Russia eventually deployed in its initial attack on the country), all of Moscow’s demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that ‘the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward’”?
Is this a tenable position circa 2023? If they do believe it, then we can only conclude that they’re not especially invested in understanding anything about this war, since Russia has been pretty clear about what its intentions for Ukraine have been for a rather long time.
Curiously, moreover, the article doesn’t do much to answer the question that the authors pose in the title: why are we in Ukraine?
In fact, the limitations imposed by the authors’ own analytical framework preclude any meaningful answer to such a question because, as is customary for articles like these, Ukrainians themselves are largely written out of the story. Euromaidan is mentioned one time, in passing, and only then to weave a conspiracy theory that largely deprives Ukrainians of agency, pointing to “circumstantial evidence” of the United States “semi-covertly promoting regime change by destabilizing Yanukovych.” Although the authors gravely note that “much about these events remains unclear,” the fact is that there is a wealth of published material about Maidan, much of which relies on first-hand knowledge and personal accounts from people who were actually there. Such accounts flatly refute the allegations that the whole affair was the result of American geopolitical machinations.
Disappearing Ukrainian Syndrome is not uncommon in articles like this. Faced with the stark reality that they don’t actually know an awful lot about Ukraine or Ukrainians, various commentators make the convenient choice to simply make them go away, to the extent possible.
And yet Ukrainians; Ukrainian voices; and Ukrainian aspirations are, in the end, the indispensable elements of this whole story. To simply omit them out of plain unfamiliarity or, worse, to portray them as little more than pawns in an American conspiracy against Russia, is to say that one neither understands the story one is telling nor particularly cares to. It is to say that Ukrainians themselves are irrelevant and undeserving of their own voice.
However, it is precisely when we begin to attend to these voices and to seek to understand what it is that Ukrainians want, why they want them, and what they have sacrificed, in many cases with their lives, to achieve those things, that the question posed by Schwarz & Layne’s article — “why are we in Ukraine?” — slowly begins to metamorphize, emerging like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon as an answer: why we are in Ukraine.
When we understand Ukrainians in human terms, we begin to understand that “we are in Ukraine” not in the “American grand strategic,” “geopolitical spheres of influence” sense that Schwarz & Layne’s narrative concocts, but simply because as empathetic humans, we must be.
Perhaps that sounds wooly and sentimental; and perhaps it is. But I find myself caring less about such allegations these days. One can only see so many photographs of dead and maimed and tortured civilians; one can only look at the ruins of yet another city and its memories buried in ash; one can only watch as Ukraine’s best and brightest — poets, philosophers, musicians, dancers, and conductors, as well as countless ordinary people, each of whom is beautiful in their own secret ways — put their bodies between their friends and family and genocide — and how many of them will never know how that story turns out? — before deciding that we must be there in whatever ways we can because empathy and humanity demand it.
I recently finished reading Olesya Khromeychuk’s “A Loss”, which describes the aftermath of the death of her brother in eastern Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2014. I won’t summarize the book here — you should read it yourself. But reading it I was almost overwhelmed with the significance of what was being described: yes, this is one sister’s loss; one mother’s loss; one family’s loss. But their loss was more than that: it was the loss of a person. A whole; complex; mysterious; beautiful; frustrating person who had a future, until he did not.
And then I began to think about the true enormity of what was really being described: even before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 that loss was being repeated almost daily across Ukraine. But today, after Bucha and Mariupol and Izium and Kramatorsk; after the Kherson torture chambers; after Nova Kakhovka; after the deported children; after the rapes — who can even speak of loss? What could there be left to say for which words would even suffice, rather than a terrifying, screaming, lacerating chorus? How many whole; complex; mysterious; beautiful; frustrating people have become mingled with the ash of their homes?
But the loss is only partly borne by the dead, isn’t it? After all, it is the living who must carry it with them. And how many Ukrainians will now bear this war with them forever? How will Ukraine itself carry forward in the absence of all the unwritten poems; the missing coworkers; the flowers untended; the lovers who never will be? What could this possibly mean? And who will explain it to us?
I cannot. Schwarz and Layne cannot, and have no interest in doing so.
I have suffered no loss, though I live in daily fear of what Kromeychuk calls “those things I was supposed to expect but had tried not to think about.” Mine are safe, for now. Too many others are not. Too many others are just gone. Whole; complex; mysterious; beautiful; frustrating: and gone.
But they are why we are in Ukraine. You and I, that is. Because we share, I hope, something more than just solidarity: empathy.
Unfortunately, a fundamental lack of empathy for Ukrainians has become endemic throughout large swaths of both the right and the left. Recently, the Union of Colleges and Universities (UCU) in the UK adopted a controversial resolution that, while it “did contain a passing and ritualistic reference to ‘solidarity with ordinary Ukrainians,’” and generically called upon Russia to withdraw troops, also took pains to explicitly condemn NATO and to demand that the UK government cease supplying weapons to Ukraine while calling, in typically vague fashion, for a “peaceful settlement” to the war.
Left unsaid, of course, was an acknowledgement what those weapons are achieving: air defense to protect innocent civilians and offensive weapons to liberate occupied territory where, for the past year, the most appalling abuses of human life have been carried out with mundane regularity.
Left unsaid was an acknowledgement of the cost of inaction.
Left unsaid was an acknowledgement of the staggering reality of loss, collective and individual.
In response to the resolution, numerous UCU members publicly resigned. Others, including faculty at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College of London (UCL) released their own statement condemning the UCU’s motion as “disgraceful and based on a profound and willful misrepresentation of Russia’s war against Ukraine.” In particular, they noted, the UCU “turns the focus away from the sole perpetrator — Russia — and onto NATO, pushing the discredited notion of a ‘proxy war.’”
Jo Grady, the General Secretary of the UCU, hastily published a statement of solidarity with Ukraine and appealed to members not to quit the union. Defenders of the resolution, meanwhile doubled down on their insistence that NATO “maneuvering” since 1991 has resulted in
the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination [having] been wholly subsumed by the conflict between Russian and US imperialism…Ukrainians are used by the West as cannon fodder who fight and die in order to in horrific numbers in order to extend the power and reach of the West, and the US in particular.
Ultimately, according to their argument, “It looks like a war just between Russia and Ukraine. In reality, it’s a much broader conflict…”
One thing that I think emerges very clearly from this defensive and tone deaf reaction to the principled condemnation of the UCU resolution is that there are many people on the ostensibly “anti-war” left who simply do not view Ukrainians empathetically. Many seem content enough to run through a prefab dialogue tree about Ukrainian Nazis, corruption, NATO, “the Maidan coup,” a “proxy war,” “shelling the people of the Donbas,” and so forth by means of justification and, once they’ve exhausted those talking points, inevitably revert to their default position: they are essentially indifferent to the reality of Ukrainian suffering.
Most won’t admit it quite so openly, preferring to camouflage indifference with words like “diplomatic negotiations,” “peace,” or “solidarity with the Ukrainian working class.” Quite notably, however, they seem neither willing nor able to offer a meaningful response to those who point out that any “peace” involving territorial concessions to Russia will also consign Ukrainians to genocide.
The worst offenders — empty husks like Danny Haiphong — will openly praise the razing of Bakhmut and its capture by mercenary war criminals like Wagner. They revel in the killing, since every dead Ukrainian is for them a point scored toward the realization of a fantasy “multipolar world” and the defeat of NATO. At times, this sort of cynicism is undergirded by an infatuation with an imagined Soviet past that consistently drifts into the uncritical acceptance of naked propaganda. How else, in 2023, to explain bizarre sentiments like “The Soviet Union raised Eastern nations to sapience,” genocide denial, or the justification of Stalinist mass murder and deportations on the grounds that the victims were definitionally “kulaks”?
It is easy enough to dismiss the mottled assortment of hammer-and-sickle fetishists as little more than grifters and cranks, or perhaps just comfortable poseurs who will say just about anything, no matter how extreme and ghoulish, to generate traffic. But what of less cartoonishly malevolent figures like Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic or the authors of “Why We Are In Ukraine”, who churn out article after indistinguishable article that continually rehash the same tropes and arguments about “negotiations” and the need to starve Ukraine of armaments without acknowledging any of the criticism that greets them?
I think, ultimately, that the answer is that these people simply do not care, either about Ukrainians or about criticism of their ideas. The reason they refuse to engage with Ukrainian history or with Ukrainian voices is that the fundamental act of knowing would reveal them to be intellectually threadbare frauds. Their politics are completely bound up with the aesthetics of “resistance” — against American hegemony; against NATO expansion; against neoliberalism; etc. —and so, when faced with the plain truth that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nothing less than a genocidal crime against humanity, they cannot concede the point. Doing so would be to admit that their politics are, at least on this question, monstrously wrong. The ostensible moral authority upon which their entire project rests would be undermined.
And so many of them simply end up walling themselves off, intellectually and emotionally, from the horror that is unfolding before them. Because knowing that horror and loss and tracing its genesis would break down the discursive structure that supports and authorizes their indifference and, ultimately, their cruelty. Ukrainians have to be turned into demonic paper dolls with swastikas on their foreheads, or at least into pathetic dupes who’ve been tricked into fighting a proxy war at the behest of their NATO puppet-masters, because otherwise the indifference and cruelty would be unmasked for being precisely what it is: just indifference and cruelty in the service of narcissistic self-congratulation.
It is in this way, I think, that cruelty and indifference have become absolutely foundational to the contrarian position on the war. Accounting for Ukrainian lives and Ukrainian suffering would require a genuine owning up to what vague calls for “peace” and “negotiations” would actually entail: facilitating genocide and territorial dismemberment. This is a position that, in the final analysis, has nothing to do with a just peace; nothing to do with human life or dignity; and, ultimately, nothing to do with the real world at all.
It is a position that stands in fundamental opposition to empathy. Its only concern is a vague, self-congratulatory geopolitics of “resistance.”
At the beginning of each semester, I tell my students that there is very little that truly separates them from the rest of a world that many of them barely know; that everywhere there are other people just like them: people who have a favorite color; people who have a crush; people who take a shit in the morning; people who don’t like cilantro; people whose hearts become glad when they hear their favorite song on the radio.
People.
Some of those people once lived in Mariupol and their songs are over, unless we help pick up the chorus.
Because even if we’re a half a world away, the war in Ukraine is our war, because it’s a war that involves other people, whole, complex, mysterious, beautiful, and frustrating people just like us.
If we write those people out of the story; if we close our ears to their songs; if we blind our eyes to their beauty; if we refuse to admit that what’s being lost is humanity itself and everything that makes humanity mean something; that is, if we reduce the whole story to a tidy little narrative about NATO and American hubris…then how can we even say we’re in Ukraine at all? In that case, we standing safely at a distance satisfying ourselves with how well Ukrainians play their assigned roles as actors in the stories we want to write for them.
But those people are the only thing that matters in this war. They are the answer: why we are in Ukraine. And so, while most of us cannot be there physically, we must be there with them in whatever ways we are able. It is our responsibility to make sure we stay there with them in solidarity and empathy and not to treat them as paper dolls or pawns in some geopolitical board game between NATO and the “multipolar” future.
We have a responsibility to remember that this is an existential war being fought by and for ordinary people, and we have the responsibility to act as if our lives depended upon it.
Because theirs absolutely do.
Note: I wrote the bulk of this essay before Russia destroyed the Nova Kakhovka Dam, unleashing a flood of water that has drowned entire cities and their residents, humans and animals alike, and unleashed an environmental catastrophe that rivals that of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
I don’t have much to add about that event right now that others haven’t said more eloquently and forcefully. But I was struck by this tweet from Margo Gontar, which gets directly at what I was trying to say in my writing: “Kherson region right now is where humans are.”
Let’s never forget that.
