No Justice, No Peace

I doubt many of my regular readers are familiar with so-called “Tankies.” These are people, often with sincere well-meaning intentions, who at the moment are unwilling to consider the war in Ukraine as anything other than entirely the fault of the United States.

(The origin of the term “Tankies” goes back to the 1950s and 1960s, describing Western observers, almost always on the far reaches of leftwing politics, who refused to condemn the Soviet Union for its tank-led suppressions of democratic movements in Hungary in 1956 and then in Czechoslovakia in 1968).

Now their intellectual descendants are calling for a “negotiated peace” between Ukraine and Russia, without, as far as I can tell, any reasonable or realistic proposals for what “peace” in these circumstances would consist of, or how to bring it about. Usually, they call for the US to stop sending arms and support to Ukraine, calling the struggle a “proxy war” between NATO and Russia, with little or no responsibility accorded to Vladimir Putin for his illegal invasion in Feb. 2022.

(Commonly, they blame the US for Putin’s invasion, insisting he had legitimate grievances against Ukraine for, variously, failing to live up to the Minsk II accords or for repressing native Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine, or for seeking NATO membership despite years-ago promises from US leaders not to permit that. Putin has also called for “denazification” of Ukraine and insisted that Ukraine has no right to think it should exist as an independent country, that pro-Russian rulers in Kyiv were overthrown by a US-backed coup, and that the Ukrainian people want to be part of Russia in one way or another.)

To the extent that any of these is even marginally valid, it’s hard to accept them as any justification considering that, since before starting the war, Putin was volubly insistent that Ukraine had no right to any kind of existence separate from Russian domination. In an infamous article attributed to him in July 2021 (kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181), he called the Russian and Ukrainian people, “one people, a single whole.” He referred to Russia and Ukraine as “one historical and spiritual expanse.” According to him, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus all stem from the same historical origination, the first Russian state established in the ancient city of Kiev a thousand years ago. As far as Putin is willing to concede in public and even in private, this is a development of such historic importance that no one dares alter it in any way, a thousand years later.

In a speech the day before his illegal invasion started (kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828), he said that Ukraine was “not simply a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual expanse” (repeating what he said in July). His argument was, no one can take Ukraine away from Russia, and no one in Ukraine really wants it to happen.

Then, after he began his illegal “special military operation,” Putin has changed his justifications and war goals repeatedly. At first it was, among other things, to “denazify” the Ukrainian government. Or to protect Russian-speakers in Donetsk and Lukhansk. Then it became to overthrow the Zelensky government. Or to keep Ukraine from becoming a NATO pawn against Russia. Or to defend Russian/Christian culture against the decadent and Satanic, godless West.

After the initial attempt to seize Kyiv failed, Putin’s war aims shifted to invading from the east and south to conquer and occupy as much Ukrainian territory as possible. When that stalled, the aim became to hold on to whatever they actually were able to grab before Ukraine began fighting back. Now it appears to be to “Russify” what they can and loot the rest. Their tactical efforts seem downscaled to bleeding Ukraine (and themselves) white by resorting to repeated horrifically futile frontal assaults on Ukrainian defensive positions, gaining meters over the bodies of dead Russian conscripts (and Wagner Group prisoners released to do the dying) and crowing about their magnificent “victories.”

The discourse on Russian media is disgusting. Many of the most popular commentators, such as Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan, have more and more been resorting to undisguised, outright eliminationist rhetoric, welcoming and lauding Ukrainian casualties and the destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure. They laughingly toss around the notion of using nuclear weapons. They mock Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and US President Biden. It is not clear how much they are permitted to range ahead of Vladimir Putin and how much they are urging him on. But they would not be so gleeful were it not part of the official propaganda line.

I hope it is not necessary for me to say that I’m not in favor of this war. As a military historian (albeit without any experience of combat or even anti-civilian violence) I’ve studied the catastrophes that war visits on victor and vanquished alike. I’ve examined how wars start and end, and their aftermaths. The best possible outcome to the war in Ukraine would be a peaceful termination as quickly as possible.

But what does that mean? As the saying goes, if Russia stopped fighting (meaning if Vladimir Putin stopped) there would be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine. Because, make no mistake, that is Putin’s objective: no Ukraine. Oh, there might be a piece of land he would permit to be marked Україна on the maps. But it won’t be the country internationally recognized as sovereign and independent since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Does it matter? Wouldn’t it be better for the people living there to stop the daily barrage of missiles and drone strikes that have killed so many civilians and destroyed so much of Ukraine’s buildings? Shouldn’t the US and NATO and the rest of the world stop sending Ukraine arms and instead get them and Russia (meaning Putin) to a negotiating table as quickly as possible? Isn’t peace always better than war?

Of course, everyone is tempted to say, yes, absolutely. Peace is certainly better than war.

But…what about JUSTICE? What about holding criminals to account for their crimes? What about punishing the guilty? And not letting gangsters retain what they’ve stolen? The Mafia loves peace, provided it’s on their terms—they walk.

Yes, Putin has some legitimate grievances. But his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is not going to bring him any satisfaction. He has driven Ukraine farther away from Russia’s ambit than ever. He has done the exact opposite of what he envisioned—NATO is about to get larger, not smaller. Ukraine is being destroyed, but it will be rebuilt—and much of the new armaments being promised to them will still be there after the war ends, making them substantially more prepared to defend themselves.

Germany has started to talk about rearming (a necessary if controversial development). It has, more importantly, begun to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas as its primary means of generating electricity. A mild winter has helped them get along with reduced imports, but going to war expecting/hoping for help from the weather is a lesson you’d think Russia had learned from its enemies long histories of fucking around and finding out.

Absent the instant victory Putin was expecting and planning for, his war has been geopolitically destructive indeed—of his own country. Turns out (as I have been saying for years) Russia is basically a Third World country—with nukes. The old Soviet Union spent its seventy years of existence investing in almost nothing worth a damn. They build up basic industries and productive capacities, then failed to modernize them sufficiently to keep up with the Western capitalist economies they kept bragging about outcompeting.

The post-Soviet Russian economy has been just as laggard. Instead of building up, they’ve been looting out. American capitalism has degenerated into a financial casino and crony-fouled rentiers’ delight, but before that, it built up an enormous structure of investment, production, distribution, innovation, laws and regulations, and shared networks of interests and competitions designed to keep it going.

We built up so much that not even the 1% has so far been able to steal all of it.

Russia never even started that kind of deep economic maturation and instead went straight to the thieving. Russia produces almost nothing the rest of the world wants other than oil, gas, precious metals, and vile politically connected billionaires with their looted wealth. Russia imports luxury goods—there are no Russian companies making them. Nobody outside of Russia buys a Russian-made car. Their high-tech industries depend on Western-made components and Western designs.

And then came the sanctions. President Biden has led much of the world in an unprecedented crackdown on the Russian economy and Putin’s crony oligarchs, leading to growing stresses on the country’s ability to keep up with the staggering squandering of its military strength in the futile fields of Ukraine. The war first demonstrated how hollow the Russian military was; now it is bleeding the country ever whiter.

And yet, nothing has yet deterred Putin from his announced and constantly repeated goals of eliminating Ukraine as an independent nation, or eliminating Ukrainians, whichever he can achieve first. Nobody talks to Putin except a tiny claque of loyalists, so nobody knows what he’s really thinking. A few highly educated observers (who all know Russian) have been able to speculate with some degree at least of not simply making it all up, but even they don’t dare predict what he will do next.

One thing it seems certain Putin won’t do is call it off. He could, you know. Obviously, he could. Saying he can’t simply means he won’t. Sure, it would be a humiliation for him to slink away. But this war has been an utter disaster for his country, one that it will take years if not decades to recover from. He is about to turn 70, may not be in great health, and has never named or even hinted at a possible successor. His entire aim since becoming President of the Russian Federation at the beginning of 2000 has been to restore what he sees as Russia’s natural, deserved greatness as a world power, an equal to the United States.

Yeah, not so much, huh?

Of course Putin doesn’t want to go down in history as the man how turned the country into a shambles, of course he’s doubling down—desperate gamblers are known to keep plunging rather than cut their losses. And maybe he really thinks there’s no way back. As Macbeth says, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

But does he deserve a way back? Does he deserve simply saying “I’m done, bygones”? (Not that he would or will.) Should we negotiate with him? Should WE negotiate at all? I mean, he didn’t invade the US. He didn’t even invade a NATO member (yet). What would WE negotiate with him over?

There’s a frequent chant of the civil rights movement: “No justice, no peace.” Does that not also apply in cases of international turmoil and bloodshed? Putin illegally and with vile, malicious intent invaded a sovereign neighboring country. His motivations are irrelevant, as well as notoriously unfounded and ever-changing (other than his consistent fixation on ending Ukrainian nationhood).

The extent to which had some concerns are long and completely overshadowed by his horrific actions in their direction. His war has caused incalculable death and destruction (including of his own country). He has so far shown not the slightest inkling of remorse or reconsideration. He has made no statement of war aims other than his maximalist, invidious fever dreams of total conquest.

In fact, he keeps upping the ante by issuing ever more unhinged accusations against Ukraine and especially its international supporters. For his propagandists, the war is more and more an existential crusade for Russia against satanic demonic anti-Christian Nazis. More and more the war is not against Ukraine at all but against their American puppet-masters who care nothing for Ukraine but are only using them as proxies to destroy Russia.

The accusation basically is that America kept Ukraine from settling peacefully with Russia before the invasion even began. The inconvenient fact that almost every American intelligence agency was predicting before the war started that Russia would win almost immediately is ignored. Some strategy, using as pawns people we expected would lose. Not only are we Machiavellian, we’re stupid.

Calls for peace are, I’m sure, mostly sincere. This war, like all wars, is shocking and disgusting. But what is the alternative? A ceasefire right now will let Putin hold on to the territories he seized and where his minions are carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity. A ceasefire right now will enable Putin to restock his dwindling ordnance and try to reinforce his shredded formations.

And can he even be trusted? His vaunted “Christmas ceasefire” lasted only as long as until he himself violated it. The lies and distortions he uses to justify his actions show a man who believes only in power and his right to use it as he sees fit. (I plan to write an article soon on the failures of autocracy and authoritarianism; Putin is an object lesson in both.)

I don’t know how to end this war—and neither does anyone else. Can Ukraine defeat the Russian army, even with modern NATO battle tanks and, eventually, one assumes, advanced fighter jets? Will Putin ever be forced to withdraw, by some nebulous plot or cabal in the Kremlin? At some point will the Russian people have had enough? That seems unlikely, but so did the revolution in Petrograd of late February 1917. And we all know how that turned out.

I want peace. You want peace. Everyone wants peace. But I also want JUSTICE. If you let Putin off the hook (let alone, let him succeed), what does that do to international rule of law, even as tattered and frequently violated as it is? Yes, the US is not the shining pure exponent of democracy and freedom, we have committed nearly all the crimes Putin is wallowing in right now.

BUT THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE VLADIMIR PUTIN! “Tu quoque” is NOT A DEFENSE FOR ANYTHING! In fact, it recognizes that what is being discussed is wrong! To say US iniquities mean we can’t criticize Putin for his implicitly concedes that Putin is guilty!

There are people who sincerely just want the war to end. Many of them want ALL wars to end and see the Ukraine horror as benefitting only the military-industrial complex. They see an unjust peace (to the extent that they are willing to recognize Putin’s injustices) as preferable to continuing a fight. Others see people supporting Ukraine as dupes or shills, too blind to see the US’s manipulations behind the crisis.

Of course, that attitude totally negates Ukraine’s agency in any of this—they are nothing but our hoodwinked pawns in our endless Russophobic Cold War nostalgia.

Obviously, I don’t agree with any of that. I think the record makes pretty clear Putin’s vicious hostility toward a recalcitrant Ukraine that refuses to accept its allocated place in the World According To Volodya. He wants to punish their leaders and squash their national aspirations. He wants to make them bow down and request that he let them back into the Russkyi Mir, the Russian World.

Like all bullies, he is affronted when his designated victims disagree with him and fight back; that’s just not the way things are supposed to go when you’re a Major World Power! So naturally it can’t be that they are doing this on their own—it has to be that it’s someone bigger and stronger than they are. How dare we take the side of the victim? No wonder his stooges more and more blame us—it’s a pathetic but obvious way to claim that he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling Americans.

Some people agree with him. It’s all our fault. It’s always all our fault.

Sorry. A lot IS our fault. But that just lets Putin off the hook for the crimes that are his alone. No justice, no peace. Slava Ukraini!