The Ukraine War shows no signs of winding down, and neither does US involvement. President Biden has just asked Congress for an additional $60 billion in aid for the conflict. In an Oval Office address last Friday, he reiterated his earlier promise not to commit US troops to the war while at the same time suggesting that we will continue to send money and weapons until Russia is driven out of the country.

But what if money and weapons are not enough? According to my guest this week, the political scientist and international relations expert John Mearsheimer, Ukraine is outmanned and outgunned by Russia, and they will remain so even with more US funding. He believes that Russia will eventually whittle down Ukraine’s resources until the country is no longer able to defend itself.

If that happens, it’s easy to imagine Biden’s apparently unshakeable commitment to Ukraine taking us in a disastrous direction. He wouldn’t be the first president to break a promise or to lead the US into an interminable military boondoggle. Money and troops aside, the political cost of backing the losing side in a war and admitting defeat could be devastating to him and the Democrats (though Ukraine has support from both parties). We need an honest accounting of the incentives at work here. If the time comes for the US to cut its losses—that is, if the time hasn’t already come—will Biden have the will to put aside political self-interest and do what’s best for the country? If John’s analysis is correct, Biden may need to have an answer ready sooner rather than later.

This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: Are you worried about escalation?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I am worried about escalation. In my opinion, it can take two forms. The one that scared me the most was one where the Russians were losing. Let's say that the American plan to bring the Russians to their knees was working. Yeah, let's assume it worked out. I believe the Russians would have used nuclear weapons. Or to put it in more qualified terms, it's highly likely that the Russians would have used nuclear weapons.

You want to remember, Glenn, that if the Russians were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine when they were losing, they would not be using nuclear weapons against the West, specifically against the United States. They would be using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have no nuclear weapons of their own, So they would not be able to retaliate with nuclear weapons. And we have made it clear—Macron has been especially outspoken on this—we the West would not use nuclear weapons in response to Russian use inside of Ukraine.

Well, given that calculus, you can see where the Russians would be seriously tempted to use nuclear weapons to try to rescue the situation if they were losing, right? So the fact that the Russians are doing much better on the battlefield today, ironically, minimizes the prospects of of escalation. That's one scenario.

The other scenario, which is becoming the more likely—one more likely escalation scenario—is if Ukraine loses. If the Ukrainian military collapses or the Russians just simply start to overrun them because the Russians have larger numbers of troops and much more artillery and assorted other kinds of equipment, and the Ukrainians are being pushed back, what is the United States going to do? If, in a more extreme case and a possible case, the Ukrainian military collapses and the Russians are overrunning most of Ukraine, what are we going to do? It's very important to remember how deeply invested we are in this war. Can we really afford to lose? Can NATO afford to lose?

Anyway, I raise all of this because I think there will be a serious temptation for us to get directly involved. And given the number of foolish moves that the United States and its allies have made with regard to NATO expansion, I wouldn't be surprised if we got involved. Do I think it's likely? No. But I think it's a serious possibility. So I like to say, I think there's a non-trivial chance that we would get involved if Ukraine is losing in a serious way. And I think at this point in time, that's much more likely than the Russians losing and the Russians turning to nuclear weapons.

Well, I was going to ask you about that. You're scaring the hell out of me, by the way. I was going to ask you—because I read your blitzkrieg essay—about the consequences of this counteroffensive that the Ukrainians were mounting and what the war of attrition betting odds are, given the underlying fundamentals about the differences in the arrayment of forces between the conflicting parties.

Yeah, the counteroffensive which was launched on 4 June of this year was a blitzkrieg. It was a clever strategy. It was designed to deliver a rather quick hammer blow to the Russian military and force them to the negotiating table where we would, in theory, get a very good agreement. “We” meaning the West and the United States.

The counteroffensive has clearly failed. It's actually been a disaster. What that means is that we're now engaged in a war of attrition, which was the case before the counteroffensive was launched. It's important to understand that we launched the counteroffensive, or the Ukrainians launched the counteroffensive, to get out of a war of attrition. Because I think The Ukrainians and the Americans understood that if it was a war of attrition, the Ukrainians could not win.

But we're back into a war of attrition. So the $64,000 question is, who wins a war of attrition? And the answer is the Russians. And you say to yourself, “Why is that the case?” Well, what matters the most in a war of attrition is the relative population size of the combatant, because how big your population is determines how many soldiers you could produce. And second, the balance of artillery, how much artillery each side has. Because in a war of attrition, as we used to say when I was a cadet at West Point, what really matters is artillery. It is the king of battle.

Well, if you look at the population figures, the Russians have five people for every one Ukrainian. The Russians have a five-to-one advantage in population. That means they can produce five soldiers for every one soldier Ukraine can produce. That is terrible news for the Ukrainians in a war of attrition. In terms of artillery, the conventional wisdom is—almost everybody agrees on this, including people in the West and in Ukraine—that the Russians have somewhere between a five-to-one and a ten-to one advantage in artillery.

And moreover, that advantage is likely to grow in the future, because the Ukrainians cannot produce much artillery. We don't have much artillery to give them and can't spin up the industrial capacity to produce large amounts of artillery tubes and artillery shells quickly. Well, on the other hand, the Russians are pumping out artillery tubes and artillery projectiles like crazy. So this advantage, which is somewhere between five-to-one and ten-to-one in artillery, is going to grow with the passage of time.

The point is, when you look at the balance of artillery and you look at the manpower balance, it's hard to see how the Russians don't win. So my argument, Glenn, moving forward, is that as this war of attrition goes on, what will happen is the Russians will grind down the Ukrainians.

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— Glenn

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Operation: The Pool

Again the waiting. This time in a bunker. This time in a trench. This time in a minefield. This time in a forest.

The moments before a battle are a vacuum in which each man's mind dwells on the possibilities of an action not yet taken place, a thinking subject to all the fancies of a feverish mind and the manipulations of high emotion. But when the action begins in earnest, and one is occupied with the dynamism of the moment, with navigating its ever-changing paths, the phantasmagoria of rapid scenes flitting before one, all that apprehension comes to nothing. One is too preoccupied with living out an action to bother contemplating it. Need arises, one meets it. Simple. An obstacle, one hurdles it; a danger, one avoids it; an opportunity, one takes it. The battle is a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball. You can’t control its speed or trajectory. You can only swing and hope. 

It is quite difficult to do one's intellectual duty and examine one's feelings and thoughts during such a time. One desires only to quell the apprehension, not to sharpen it by focusing on its unsightly aspects. People speak in cliched descriptions of a “knot” of fear in the “pit of the stomach.” But a similar knot lodges itself in the chest as well. The parched throat constricts, the limbs tingle and grow numb, the breath shallows, sharpens, and stutters.

“The thing about an artillery bomb is, if it’s successful, you won’t know it.” At least there’s that! But this gallows humor did not soothe me. Out in the field, with the artillery falling on both of us, this line, which I had heard many times, did not once come to mind.

Well, there’s nothing for it, I tell myself. That was my line, my laic mantra, for meeting an intractable situation, an irreversible difficulty, an unavoidable condition. There is no way out but through.

Well before my arrival, there had been talk of a “big operation.” We only knew it involved a push to the south, into Kherson. It had been rumored and canceled many times, once only a day before it was to commence. Now it’s spoken of with more assurance. The operation will occur this week. My flight departing from Warsaw is a week hence, and the team leader asks if I intended to join the mission. I resolve to participate in the first phase of the operation and then to find my way back independently. He suggests that I ride back with the first medevac, who would ferry the wounded away from the front line. When I ask what to do if there are no injuries in the first hours of the operation, he smirks and says something about the workings of a miracle.

At 4.00 am, the operation is to open with a fusillade from our artillery, beginning five hours of “death from above,” as our translator put it. The enemy's base is hidden within a concrete hollow that we call “the pool.” Following the artillery barrage, our team is to advance to this spot, and from there we will storm what remains of their headquarters.

We awake the morning of the mission to silence. Some hitch has occurred with logistics (not unusual), but the mission is nevertheless a go. We wrap yellow tape around our shirtsleeves to distinguish friend from foe in the field. We pack ourselves into three separate trucks and drive along hilly, unpaved roads to the Kherson front.

I reproduce a dispatch sent into The Glenn Show the hour after I left the site of battle. The lines still vibrate with the intensity of the former moments:

That I am writing this letter at all is a very simple fact that I cherish. You’ll have read in the news of a southeastward push by Ukraine towards Kherson. In the first phase of that operation I took modest (truly modest) part—brief though breathy. 

A more extensive account of this episode I defer to a hotel room in Warsaw, sometime next week, with the quiet and space and idle time (and stationary) necessary for written reflection.

Briefly, perfunctorily: The assault eventually rebuffed the Russian defenses but that initial thrust was sketchy. As soon as we (recon team) reached our position the enemy seemed to know of it. Artillery and machine gun fire kept us head-down knees-up behind a berm. They seemed to have anticipated us and made the appropriate greeting. Friend was wounded by a shell and I medevaced him out. This was early in the fight. Some time elapsed before infantry and tanks arrived to relieve the team. They did so and our forces eventually nudged ahead. This concerns our assigned patch of dirt, near the small town of Pravdino. How the grand offensive turns out is for the news to report in time. 

This is only a hurried live broadcast; promptness justifies it, present events dictate it. From here (separate email to follow) I resume the narrative where it left off.

The Boom

The thing about an artillery bomb is, if it’s successful, you won’t know it. You hear the incoming whistle of death on the approach, and you curse. Everyone curses, and everyone has their particular personalized expletive: the omnipresent “shit,” the upgraded “fuck,” the denominational “Jesus Christ” (even I, heretical Jew, have caught myself uttering the name).

The acoustics of falling metal. One learns to recognize the type and nearness of artillery by sound. Some have the wah-wah envelope swish of a boomerang. Some wail down with a strange and hollow keening, as if in premature mourning, whereas with others the whistle is brighter, cheerier, like a construction worker's catcall. Gunshots whizzing near your head sound just like they do in the movies, a whistle and zip.

The howl and thunder of artillery. I grue at the thought of it. Such scenes as these make themes for opera. But one does not rehearse life before stepping onto its stage.

If you hear the explosion, you're good. Meaning as good and whole as you were a hideous instant before. You hear the telltale, haunting whistle, you mutter your heaven-directed plea, you lower your head into the grass. In this tense crouch, you wait, all contraction, your eyes glaring down at an unremarkable patch of ground. You wait for a sound, an orgasmic boom, nearer or farther. Hopefully not too near. Too near and you will feel rather than hear it. Nearer still and you will neither feel nor hear it at all. You wait in a pitch of dreadful anticipation for the lovely, ameliorating explosion, the welcome reverberatory crash of the boom. The satisfaction is only temporary, and Thanatos's whistle is again soon heard.

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Britain and I are one pair, Mexico and Korea another. We are lying behind a hillock, foreheads to the grass. Bullets from a heavy machine gun play a trill at the top of the small mound a foot above. Artillery falls on every side. You cannot guess where it will land. There is nothing to do but stay put. There is no rolling out of the way of falling metal. One is never so bare, so totally vulnerable, so removed from his own meager devices and controls of the world as here.

I heard screaming from the right bank of the hillside, followed by: “Korea's hit!”

“I can’t move! I can’t fucking move!”

I saw the others fall back some meters to treat his wound, and I lost sight of them within a copse. Suddenly, a bomb landed directly where they had taken cover. I saw a great retch of earth, then a gray ominous plume bellow up from those trees. But some moments later, I saw them scurrying a safe distance away.

I handed Britain the radio and proceeded to crawl until I caught up with them.

“Somebody carry K.”

“I got it," I said, approaching.

“You sure?”

“I’ll take him.”

“Take his rifle for him,” Mexico said to the others. I removed my weighty, constricting vest. Korea never wore a vest, but even without his gear, he was heavy. I laid down perpendicular to him and attempted to roll him over onto my back as we learned in the army. He had little energy to center himself, and I couldn’t lift him.

“We don’t have time for this shit, come on!” said Mexico.

I got up and tried the second way to lift a wounded man. From a standing position, I laid one of my feet over the foot attached to Korea’s good leg, grabbed an arm, and hauled him up and sidelong over my back.

We began running toward our trenches. It is not an easy thing to carry a limp human being at a run. Trudging through that field, I recalled having done this in training, and as the bombs fell to either side of us, I thought to myself, As I trudged through that menacing field I recall thinking, not without an appreciation of its irony, “So—this is what's it's like to be doing this for real.”

An unbroken noisy background of machine gun fire and the syncopation of exploding shells. Hearing the prelude to a bomb’s death song, we stop in place, drop, and huddle until the gonging crash rings out. We rise again and continue our scamper.

I pride myself on my fitness, but sprinting with a heavy man’s weight unevenly distributed across my shoulders while trying to stop him from sliding down my back quickly taxed my cardiovascular limits. Every minute or two, when either he or I wearied, I put him down and we continued at a crawl.

“Just keep moving. Don't think. The more you move, the sooner you can lie down. Come on, you Asian bastard! After this you'll get all the fucking kimchi you want.”

Having recovered my lungs, I took him over the shoulders again at a run (really about the pace of a brisk walk). In this manner—shoulder and drop, carry and crawl—running with him laid horizontal over my back or dragging him behind, all while shouting at him deprecating encouragements, we gained the trenchline. When we made it across, I was dragging him behind me, his two arms draped over my neck from behind like a human cape.1

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-Glenn

TGS Regiment:

I titled the initial batch of letters I sent to you “A Few Rows Back from the Front.” In this dispatch, those few rows are placed behind us. Here is the turning-over of the album on the record player. These notes contain a marked increase in tempo, a “Giant Steps” key change—this is the peripeteia, the coup de théâtre, the Dark Lady sonnet, of this story.

My last account described life in the barracks; this one emerges from underground into the open field. Let’s hope for better music than the symphony of crashes and booms currently echoing in the occupied theater of Ukraine. 

Slava Ukraini

Among the few articles I took with me for the mission described below was a blue leather Moleskine pocket notebook the size of a balled-up fist, convenient for taking reconnaissance notes and jotting quick, personal impressions. These took the form of one-word descriptions, paratactic sentences, semi-masticated phrases, even symbols meant as mnemonic devices. Looking over the pages now, some of it is illegible even to me. My notebook serves more as in-the-field artwork than reportage. Besides reassembling what I could from my rubble of notes and mortaring in the rest with memories all too clear and indelible, I reprint the record below without bothering with too much polish.

I detail the missions in which I took part and which almost took a part of me. Transcribed from the flesh to the page, war naturally loses some of its rigor. 

Operation: Catwalk

It will be best to call the members of the recon team by their country of origin or heritage: Mexico, Australia, Korea, and England. (It is illegal, in many of those countries, to serve a foreign power.) Our motto, as emblazoned on our team patch, was “Brave, but Retarded” (inexpertly translated), which, while facetious, was perhaps less of a joke than intended. The work of a recon team, that of crossing our front line toward the boundary of the enemy’s, was viewed by Ukrainian conscripts with a mix of admiration and pity. To enter no man's land is to risk encirclement, to risk encirclement is to risk capture. One does not wish to be last seen trussed up in the back of a lorry headed to Russia and an inevitable war crimes trial. The job held a singular attraction to “crazy foreigners,” or volunteers in pursuit of a war experience (or restive, self-willed, traveling American-Israeli journalists). 

What appeared to be an enemy observation post appeared on the drone footage. Team A—consisting of me, Korea, and our Ukrainian head scout—was to advance as near the enemy line as concealment would allow. Team B, positioned over a hundred meters behind, would provide emergency cover-fire if needed. 

Russian patrols may comprise as many as ten men. If a soldier or two broke off from the group to defecate or take a private call, my team would attempt to capture them. To that end, I memorized three terms: 

Стоп [Stop]

Руки верх! [Hands up!]

Иди сюда [Come here]

At the speaker’s discretion, "...сука" [bitch] could be appended to any of these greetings. 

If the opportunity to bring in a hostage didn't arise, we reserved the option to effect a guerrilla-style assault on their patrol. Otherwise, we had the usual work of intel-gathering: noting the source of enemy missile fire and the accuracy of our own, minuting enemy patrol times, attempting to derive a sense of his mental disposition, his attitude, level of readiness, etc. 

We named the mission “Catwalk” for the concrete canal bed that cut across the dead field between our front line and the enemy’s. What possessed until now the texture of a dream—benign, intangible, harmless—began to take on realistic contours as the hour approached for its realization.

Two thoughts troubled my conscience. First, family: Should anything befall me, an unspeakable suffering would mark the life of she who gave me my own. One is accustomed to think of personal freedom as the ability to live one's life as one chooses. A truer personal sovereignty inheres in the ability to dispose of one's life as one chooses. And yet I felt that I owed my safety to another. I felt free to do as I pleased with my life, but I did not feel quite free to give it up. It is queer to be vicariously fearful for one’s own safety through another. 

The second source of anxiety had a visual form: piled-up manuscripts, open books with a mark indicating where the reader last left off, a notebook bursting with unorganized ideas, an uncapped pen—the writer’s unfinished work. I thought of the heaping scores of music composed, left unrecorded; the essays written, yet unpublished—all the fine lyrics unsung. 

These two doubts together formed, in their way, the age-old obligations to work and family, obligations to God and one's fellow man, both of whom I consider myself serving here. Still, I had long wished to get out of that damned bunker and run at least one mission before my time in Ukraine expired. I would have my Persephonian spring break from the underworld. 

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We sat around the circular table of the rec room, cleaning our rifles. Like playing an instrument, cleaning a gun produces a symphony of brush strokes, taps, tings, snaps, scratches, clicks, and bangs. Two grenades were distributed to a man, and we each carried a vacuum-sealed parcel of food. I had a treasured piece of Belgian chocolate given me by D, the technically talented multilingual liaison between us and the monoglots at HQ. I also took a satchel of nuts and a few of those ubiquitous sardine cans as quick and convenient snacks. Each of us carried a tourniquet, and a medical kit. Helmet and bulletproof vest were optional. 

That week I had signed a paper listing such vitals as blood type, emergency contact, and family address, lest anything should happen. “Lest anything should happen”: a phrase that avoids explicit mention of capture, injury, or death. Of these three, perhaps the second is the worst. The team member I was paired with remarked to me before the Kherson mission that if he were to lose his legs from a bomb, I may as well leave him in the field to die. Some feel, considering the particular character of the enemy, that any contingency, even the last, is better than the first, since the first would entail a protracted and increasingly ghastly version of the second, likely followed by an inglorious and anonymous version of the third. 

Before debouching into the midland from the trench, we delivered a gift, donated by an organization associated with one of our crew, to the men at the front line: a crate of cigarettes. It was, I believe, what the Ukrainian soldiers had been hoping for. The appointment fell to me to present the parcel with an impromptu speech.

No, the man prone on the ground is not dead, though you would be forgiven for believing so, given the passivity of his position against the uproar of his surroundings. We are at the Kherson front, in a wooded glen, waiting. We keep low, as our base behind us is playing artillery ping pong with the Russians in front of us.

Reconnaissance work consists chiefly of this: lying in a patch of briar or thorn and straining your neck to watch a horizon across the moor. The "waiting game," it seems, is played out here as it was in the bunker. Listless hours elapse. The  artillery continues its arc above us, a black rainbow.

Flies, you cannot swat them (note: flies here bite); sneezes, you must stifle them; gasses, you cannot expel them; words are passed between like shared test answers in a highschool classroom. You eat lying down or with your back against a tree trunk. Lunch consists of the omnipresent sardines, stale nuts, a small rock of the Belgian chocolate, what would normally amount to an insipid repast was now seasoned by the circumstances. One doesn’t often have the experience of dining al fresco in quite this manner. Each bite, each chew of each bite, the languorous moments after swallowing, is succulently slow. I chew lingeringly, grinding the nut pieces into a butter. A nibble of the rich chocolate sends me into euphoric transports. I resolve to save the last piece of it for the last day, as an incentive.  

A dry canal bed runs perpendicular to the two front lines. In this we make our base. From here we advance to their line, to here we return to sleep. I break off the longest bough I can find and hand it to our Ukrainian scout, M. With this makeshift tool he prods the ground before him. Finding a mine or boobytrap, he indicates the spot with a small flag; finding none, he crosses over the cleared space. This is the slow, tedious work of making one's way across a minefield. 

In the patch. We are about 70 meters from the Russian line. Ahead of us is another patch of bushes, and M decides to advance ahead of us to determine its usefulness as a vantage point, telling Korea and me that he’ll be back in 15 minutes. Half an hour passes. M has the only radio, so we can’t communicate with HQ. Korea asks what I think. I tell him we'll wait another quarter hour. If M isn’t back by then, we'll advance to his last known position. Nothing else for it. There is no roundabout angle of approach, the ground consisting mostly of open land with a few copses and thickets for cover and tufts through which to crawl from one place of concealment to the next.

A few minutes before the 15 minute mark, we spot M returning at a fast crawl, casting look behind him every so often. Korea and I get up on a knee behind a tree trunk and aim the rifle in the direction of M’s anxious glances. We beckon him on. In bated pidgin English, he explains: A roaming patrol had stopped just beyond M’s hiding place and struck up a conversation above his head. He had no choice but to hunker down and wait. We tell him how we nearly followed him there. We have a shaky laugh, and slap each other’s backs in our relief.

A volley of machine gun fire. Everyone gets flat and still. And fast. 

We make it back to the canal. I’m happy to retire from that incommodious thorn bush. 

An artillery shell explodes in the field a few meters from where we lay. M listens to the radio report and begins laughing. 

“That us?” I ask.

“It's us,” confirms Korea, with a smirk. “Everything normal.” Ukrainian artillery is becoming quite dependable—you can always trust it will be off-target. 

“Нормально,” [normalna] repeated M.

We all laugh some more, stifling the sound.

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We get a message from HQ telling us not to engage the enemy unless he comes up on us. So we’re back to the waiting game. And in the welcome lull I play the If (quickly striking this word, and substituting When) I Get Out of This game. The game helps one press through the dull or trying moments; to dwell on the happy future relieves the mood of the hapless present. 

When I finish this mission, I think: New York, family, hot showers. Food that isn’t canned. I think of that girl back in Poland with the red hair, all the more striking against the sheer paleness of the rest of her, who works at that wonderful artisan pizzeria in Warsaw. I’ll ask her out when I get outta this. I even come up with my line. I’ll sit down and nonchalantly wait for the menu. “I'm actually not hungry,” I'll say. I'll tell her how I'm on my way to see family in New York, how I just got back from Ukraine, and how I am in Poland for the week. “Show me a cool spot where locals have a drink, and I'll tell you all about the front.” 

I think about New York and my wonted spots while growing up: McSorley's, that Napolitano restaurant on (what street was it?), the Lower East Side, the Strand, Alabaster Bookshop. I smell the aromatic steam and fumes of Chinatown, hear the jazz in that club in the West Village. That underground mezcal bar in Chinatown that Shadya once took me to. I still owe her a proper date after all these years, too long. We’ll have mezcal shots chased with cinnamon-laced orange slices and go pizza scavenging the day after. I think, naturally, of home. What a contrasting image one's bedroom of youth presents against this dried-out canal bed! Under its twinkling canopy of rockets! 

Perhaps all this thinking is a mistake. I can’t sleep. I yearn to be good and done with the mission. All the more reason to do the job well and get back safely. 

Listening through the sounds of the elements for the sounds of man produces a horrible tension. To strain your hearing for a twig crushed underfoot, the rustle of a bush … is that a winged insect or an approaching drone? Listening so keenly, one hesitates to swallow, so quiet is the night. The sound of swallowing in my throat engulfs the sound of the world like a crashing wave. To strain your sight for the slightest movement or a recognizable silhouette in the dark. Korea lies across from me. At every sound, he peers over the berm looking out for enemy patrol. 

As in one direction, so the other; every move a meticulous calculation to muffle the sight and sounds of yourself.  

The small sounds of the evening, usually unnoticed, ring out: the small cracklings of the treetops, the rustlings of the ground, the breathing of the wind, bird-chirpings, and insect-buzzings. Every such small sound puts you on guard, makes your ears perk up, and sends you intensively listening, darting, with a ferocious imagination as to the possibilities of fitting human form to sound.

Presently we hear the Russian night patrol, speaking the desultory talk which occupies the time of any two bored night guards. We hear their animated chatter, their laughs, and the sudden cessation of their sounds as their dog sniffs and lets out a soft woof. I feel like a fugitive hiding out in the swamps surrounding the county jail, a search party of police and bloodhounds sniffing him out. I suspected a shout of view halloo! and a furious barking to erupt any moment. 

Eventually they go away, and then comes a few hours of stasis. Sleep, in any bedding, is a powerful authority and eventually dominates any of the forces which look to keep one awake. 

The sun spills over the clouds onto the ground like slow-running honey. We crawl back to the rose bed. We watch distant silhouettes pass every half-hour over the horizon of a hillock.

I hear a drone above. I had forgotten about that buzzing bastard. Knowing the drone to be “one of yours” is a comfort from above, like a floating guardian. An enemy drone can be the prelude to a climactic scene. The drone hovering some meters above sounds like a fly buzzing not far from your ear. Every so often I hear a spurt from a machine gun or the high whistling whoosh followed by the cracking burst and bassy reverberation of artillery. There are missiles that give off a low whistle and flutter, whose impact sounds like a cracking roll on a Chinese tom-tom. Others, farther out, sound like the crash of an aluminum dish as wide as a field. 

From rose bed to canal bed, I've become impatient with the cycle. I remove my helmet, place it behind me as a prop for my neck. A nearby whoosh, then a nearer sound: a heavy, dull, ominous thud in the grass just behind my head above the edge of the canal. We all jump down into the deepest center of the canal, parts of each atop the other, covering our heads as best we can. I wait for the sound...

“It's okay,” pronounces Korea, rising. “Artillery shell. Ours. Dud.”

M reports the abortive missile. “Too close! Artillery fire landing near our position.” He speaks in Ukrainian, but his tone says it all. Ukrainian firepower was coming up short of the enemy, or to say it another way, it was coming down on us. 

The report comes back; M nods and confirms. He makes the universal finger twirl that means “wrap it up.” 

“That's it, we're out,” says Korea. 

We gather our gear posthaste, and head back to the trench at a jog.

At our nearest, we were 40 meters from the enemy. We were lucky to get back with all ten digits;  some of the more brutish Russians were known to sever the fingers of captured Ukrainians, after killing them extrajudicially. Another thought I put quickly out of mind. Arriving at HQ, I have that curious sensation that marathoners feel at crossing the ribbon. We unload the truck, stow our gear. I need a smoke.

To be continued …

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Godliness 

Much free time in army life is spent trying to stay clean. Or rather, because you are never really clean, trying to stay hygienic. Alcohol wipes and shampoo and foot powder are among the militiaman's bag of toiletries. The surfaces of his world are muddy, dusty, or stained, and the soldier is forever trying to keep himself dry and clean and fresh. 

In certain conditions that opportunity seldom comes. Weeks or months can pass without sight of a shower or change of clothes. It is curious that, once you accept the squalidness, you feel somehow less repulsed by it. 

The food I ate with unwashed hands (unwashed of what exactly, I don’t want to say), the stained mattress I slept in (stained by what, I don’t want to think about), the begrimed and foul-smelling clothes I wore, and the sweat which was itself like wearing a layer of material; I accepted it all with a tacit, “Well, it's all part and natural to the circumstance. Fuck the discomfort. I'm paid in experience.” 

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To get to Odessa, I would first need to get to Lviv. I had a splendid time of it in that photogenic western city, more fit for a food blog than a war journal, which tells you something of the atmosphere. Or at least the atmosphere when I was visiting: Lviv has since been rocketed. 

(For the details of that sojourn, turn here. Just make sure you book a return trip.)

I was the professional gadabout, exploring Lviv by the plate and by the cup. Yet as the week lapsed, so did I. I had arrived in Warsaw just over a month before, and had since that time passed through Krakow/Preśyml (the latter on the Ukrainian side, the former on the Polish), Yavoriv, Lviv, Odessa, and Mykolaiv. I had not yet begun the job I set out to do when I first boarded a plane in Tel Aviv. 

Inertia is for the soldier more difficult than any action, however difficult. A damp feeling of uselessness, a feeling of fraudulence—to myself, to those I have told about my mission, to the Ukrainians, to my friends—fell thickly upon me. My buddies, the Horsemen, were already in uniform; I was in shorts, eating my way through the still-free cities of Ukraine, bolstering the war effort only by supporting the local economy via wine bars, cafes, and restaurants. My former team had already begun reconnaissance missions; I was gathering intel on my next meal. They were crawling across no man’s land; I was shuffling over concrete, exploring the Land of Cockaigne. 

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The Horsemen

Worse than not achieving one’s goal is to have it taken from you at the brink of its achievement. I admit I was a shade petulant. I was embittered by again finding myself at the recruiting stages, having to stumble again through the process of placement. Thinking of my friends felt like looking at a portrait of a dear, departed relative. Before going on with the story, I would like to sketch this portrait for the reader.

The School siphons off volunteers with some army background for placement in operations teams. That’s how Adam, Luc, Gideon, and me, so distant in origin and temperament, came to share a tent for a month and a bond for life.

Dossiers

Name: H., Adam

Profile: Mid-30s, nearly 7 ft, the beard of a noble tsar or a lowly hunter

Place of Origin: California

Identifying marks: A tattoo which, beginning at his wrist and ending at his midriff, loops round his body and lists all the places of the world he has lived “long enough to pay rent.”

Remarks: If Adam were an historical figure, he would inevitably be written up in textbooks as one of those “contradictory” personages. A twenty-first-century philosophe, paradoxically blending the more mature strains of stoicism with the darker ones of existentialism. A storm in the heart of a diamond throwing off dark refractions. Of military family stock, going back to the Civil War. Wife deceased [inhalation poisoning], also a soldier. Generous to everyone and everything, one wishes he were more generous to himself. The self-questioning soldier-hero, if ever there was one.

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I hope you’ll find Haim’s firsthand account as enlightening and entertaining as I have. Enjoy!

As mentioned in my last letter, I had originally been attached to an intelligence-gathering unit comprised of four Americans (including myself) dubbed “the Horsemen.” But a “technicality” dismounted me, and I ended up back at what was termed “the School” to be reassigned. 

Every aspiring legionnaire passes through the School, where he will be interviewed by Majors Andre and Bullit. If the first is the school's principal, the second is its disciplinarian, a spitfire with a personality as lethal as his name implies. I gave Bullit my CV, which I thought impressive, but only derision showed on his face. 

“All your little specialized skills,” he said, tapping with his finger, “are deleted under a Russian artillery bomb.”

I would learn that Major Bullit’s temperament vacillated between mouse and martinet. He welcomed me and an Australian, Link, who also had a military background. “Thank you guys for showing up,” Bullit said. Walking off, he added, “Normal fucking people finally. God knows we’ve had our share of lunatics.”

A Hostelry 

The Legion attracts as eclectic a group as a European hostel. Eclectic and at times illicit. A slurry of the physically and metaphysically wandering, the misplaced or displaced, and the outright lost. Some of these wash-ups were adrift, sailing and rudderless. Some were addicts to drugs attainable only in the deep alleys of the mind: adrenaline, serotonin, endorphins. Most of these would-be soldiers were harmless, perhaps a danger only to themselves. A few were suspect.

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Nikita’s post concludes with a set of questions about the war he was struggling to answer himself, and he asked Haim to weigh in. Below you’ll find Haim’s responses. They were written months ago, but Haim assures us he stands by them. In fact, he has continued to update us about his activities, and in the coming weeks we’ll publish a series of posts about his time in and around Ukraine.

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Dear Nikita,

1. What led to this war?

Adopting any one of the points in the causal chain you listed (Ukrainian constitution amendments, Minsk Agreements, Crimea, the Revolutions, etc.) as having led to Russia's war against Ukraine, how does this bear relevantly on the question of whether one who fights in this war ought to be fighting in it? 

The rumblings leading up to the eruption make for engaging and important study; their seismic observations furnish us with the knowledge as how we might best cap or stem future upsurges. The war itself remains a violation ethical, humanitarian, and legal, under any of the various spurts or incentives given, tout court. I often hear that Putin “has his reasons.” (He also has his means.) I happen not to agree with his reasons (especially not his means), while also maintaining reasons of my own. There is a rightness in keeping Ukraine sovereign, regardless of whether some of her own doltish or inflammatory actions exposed her to threats from abroad. But for me, this is not a purely altruistic enterprise. I also have a pragmatic incentive, biased as I am in favor of a liberal and free orientation, and opposed as I am to totalitarian systems. 

The recurrence and—absent a better synonym—normalcy of war was signaled in the line of Plato (or Thucydides) where he says that peace, in the historical story, is a parentheses. You may not accept the hint of permanency behind that remark, but until such time as we can devise a new story, the races and the nations will continue to fight. 

The cyclic rounds of battle till knockout or exhaustion that pugilistic humans have been engaged in for the past four or five thousand years will continue until the imposition upon the nations of a fresh Pax Romana by some supra-national organization (our two recent attempts at this, the defunct League of Nations and the often defective United Nations, have failed to meet so lofty a modus operandi), or until the Kingdom of Heaven descendeth upon us (my bet is equally split for the occurrence of either).

2. What is it about? 

We have known, not least since Crimea, that the Ukrainian frontier (redundant terminology in the Russian view) has always presented tempting swag to Putin to add to his bag of states flimflammed out of their independence and into a fatal pact with the Mephistophelian suzerain. Russia acts, of course, as if it is a bear reclaiming one of her lost and wayward whelps. 

This is not only a territorial battle, it is also an ideological contest. (That is why, along with its armed soldiers, an educational troop of schoolteachers is sent to educate—or rather, that most sinister word in the communist lexicon, “reeducate”—Ukrainian children.)

What it reduces to is best exemplified by what a former commander of mine once said, with epigrammatic neatness: “We are fighting to preserve our freedom. They are fighting to preserve their slavery.” I recall him having had Animal Farm before him on the table. He was trying to improve his English. 

3. What are the probable outcomes?

A former U.S. Major and fellow volunteer once expressed to me the situation this way: “The Ukrainian Army won’t defeat the Russian Army; the Russian Army will defeat the Russian Army.” 

And one need only juxtapose the numbers to see how outnumbered is Ukraine. Which will make this war a protracted one. Talk—and of course in the end it can only be talk—figures many months more to come. Already one year in, any estimate as to exactly when the war will end cannot pretend beyond the flimsiest conjecture. War, the attempt to choreograph chaos, is an ever-changing landscape. 

But to continue at this rate, at any rate, the Russian army cannot last. Each Russian wave that replaces the last is of lesser quality than the one before. A destroyed SU-30 aircraft, for an expensive example, will take years to replace. This applies to human replacements as well. Lesser models are being shipped forth from the factory line.

The conscripts being hurled forward to fill in for the fallen are of a different cut and breed than those employed during the first phases of the war. These conscripts may add up to that morbid term, “human fodder,” a faceless mass of future pesticide, but a colonel is not so easily replaced, and while the last precedent of a colonel being killed during war was decades ago, this war has seen Russia lose a fistful. When you kill a soldier, another poor brute will replace him. But to kill a senior commander is to kill years of experience.

The Ukrainians can never utterly route the Russian Army, but the Russian army can defeat the Russian Army. Eventually the machine will implode. Statistics are as flat and one-dimensional as the page they're written on, and there are in war immeasurable, intangible factors to consider. What the Ukrainians have in heaps is morale, a nationwide esprit de corps, while the Russians are hard put in explaining articulately what the hell they’re killing and being killed for. This morale and sense of righteousness is a most potent weapon. While a command initiates a soldier’s mission, this morale keeps him at it. 

I cannot say what a Russian victory will imply for Ukraine. Absit omen. To place a people in inverted commas (the “Israeli” people; the “Palestinian” people; the “Taiwanese” people; the “Ukrainian” people), as if their own very idea of themselves is up for external interpretation, is a dangerous and sinister opening line, and quite enough precedents in history show how that line develops. 

Irrespective of ties historical or genetic, these two peoples have become so at odds with each other that, in the event Putin does annex Ukraine, I don't know how he imagines to hold it. I can attest to a real and visceral resentment on the ground, an ardent loathing for “the Russian invaders.” And should Russia come to slip uninvited under the sheets of hotbeds like Lviv or Kyiv, I foresee a situation like Nazi-occupied Vichy France, with Russian police being slaughtered by resistance bands in the streets. 

This war has a concern beyond the immediate parties involved because it determines what national players can get away with and how they can edit the playbook; nations free and unfree will study this battle in retrospect and base their actions on it accordingly. Russia and Ukraine are only the conspicuous participants which occupy a ring of combat in which other nations may one day find themselves the pugilists. 

The nature of modern politics and our interdependent economies imbue some irony into the term “foreign affairs.” Geography, in this our globalized world, has been mocked into irrelevancy. Our horizons have been circumscribed, and we all live in close quarters, if not spatially. A colossal Chinese highway investment affects our own economic traffic; an Iranian “energy” program convulses Mid-East relations; a war in Syria changes hometown demographics; and a Ukrainian scrimmage disturbs not only petrol prices, but threatens the European order and, by extension, the global order. If you don’t involve yourself with the world, the world will eventually involve itself with you.

I am sensitive to the fact that Western responses might have perilous consequences by intensifying the stakes of the war while broadening its frontiers. A desperate Putin, or his successor, might up the intensity of his machinations against Ukraine. But I believe playing soft or hesitant with Putin as he goes about his sadistic (and increasingly masochistic) maneuvers would be yet more perilous. A feeble or accommodating response will be consequential on the historical scale. To allow Putin to “get away with it” is to not let us or posterity get away from the occurrence of similar intra-national crimes being exacted in the future, and those worse, given the precedent. The precedent we wish to set is now in the making, and it is up to a virtuous world, nationals and foreigners alike, to see how much it will tolerate before it musters itself collectively into a decided resistance. 

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4 and 5. What are your hoped-for outcomes, and how are your actions advancing those outcomes?

Should Russia win this war, it will still serve better for the world if they win it at a price. For it is not only the outcome which matters, but at what price and how it came about. Even knowing that Russia would ultimately take the country, I believe the Ukrainians would fight as determinedly, perhaps even more fiercely, if not impelled by hope, then motivated by a preliminary revenge. Greater glory can ultimately come of a noble defeat than that contained in the ignominious gains of the victors. 

So far from a hex, this may prove to be a benison. The war and the drubbing dealt Russia by Ukraine has exposed her as not the vaunted juggernaut she was hitherto thought to be. Ukraine will cease to be the main concern and promises to become one of many as China and other state actors maneuver for a larger share of the stage. Russia is in a truss, self-tied. What the junto in the Kremlin perceived would be an easy snaffle has by this time become for Putin a perilous and increasingly intractable donnybrook. Little did he think that it might be his undoing. 

Since the Russian irruption into Kyiv, and against the preconceptions of analysts and confidently delivered predictions, Ukraine has proved herself able to mount a mulish and indefatigable resistance. 

Tantus labor non sit cassus. May so great a labor not be in vain.

You state that you think any voluntary participant in this war should be able to answer these questions. And by asking them you are right to imply that the politically and historically uniformed are left overlooking the complexities involved in the issue in which they sometimes unthinkingly, and with Icarian precipitousness, involve themselves. One certainly ought to be informed about the issues for which he intends to kill and be killed. There are depths and possibilities to which the average fighter is unmindful. We oughtn’t be guided by the viscera alone.

But is participation against such ostensible tyranny contingent on one’s geopolitical assessment of what led to it? To distinguish between usurper and usurped in the present melee does not require so keen a political sense or poli-sci acumen. The moral imperative isn't so cognitive. 

I think moral “understanding” can derive from a place as much intuited as learned. The “right thing to do” is often instinctual; a certain je ne sais quoi makes us aware that something is “off.” To what extent that instinct is itself a product of social conditioning and education depends on the subject. But it is much easier to breed a monster than it is an angel.  (The world’s worst humanitarian offenders were just the sort of philosopher-kings the aristocratic-minded and totalitarian-prone Plato had in mind.) My point is that politics is complex; the morality of this war is not. In this battle, even one who is fighting subjectively for the wrong reasons is still fighting objectively for the right cause.

Take the proverbial image of the old lady who has her purse pilfered. Would you, the bystander, not pursue the perpetrator? We ought, as moral beings, to bring our morality to bear against immoral behavior. Purse snatching, for example, whether in the neighborhood or on the international scene. As thinking, cognitive beings, we can certainly theorize what social conditions and governmental actions led to the thief snatching the purse, and further demonstrate the insolubility of sending him to his jailers, feeding another body into the bloated incarceration system, perpetually extending it thereby, etc. (Glenn is particularly good on the subject.)

The Good Samaritan is still good, though he be a simple one. Morality needn’t align with linear reasoning to be found “correct.” The two—ratiocination and moral mathematics, the ability to arrive at the logical conclusion and that of arriving at the moral one—are separate and independent faculties in man. They do not always align; one need only view academic morality—the learned dictators, their professorial apologists (the “betrayal” of the professoriate)—to see how often and deeply they conflict. 

You allow for militant conduct so long as it is undertaken on the defensive. This personal ethic aligns with the injunction “don’t go out looking for a fight.” Why not? There’s plenty of scruffs already in process whose sides are only waiting to be tipped with the addition of your weight. Let's take this as our mutually agreed point of departure: the war being defensive is (thereby) self-justifying, clearly matching a Davidian victim against a Goliathan aggressor (arguments as to how liberally-oriented or corruption-free is this David figure are irrelevant to the question of how warranted is his stone-slinging resistance). The justification you lend in this instance has a universal reverberation; that is to say, the situation extrapolated out of Ukraine and applied, mutatis mutandis, to another part of our globe, would not lose in righteousness. 

Whatever the particulars, the fine points, the details, the specifics, whatever the particular histories informing this particular war, the justification behind Ukraine's fight lies on the general principle that one nation shall not violate the sovereign borders of another nation with impunity. Recognizing that this war's outcome will have repercussions beyond its immediate participants, wherefore your insistence in upholding the idea that Ukraine's fight ought to be confined to Ukrainians, or solely to those who have aught to lose? The world has something to lose by a Ukrainian defeat, if not as directly or immediately as the Ukrainians themselves. "Je Suis Ukraine," while insufferably trite as a solidarity slogan, at least has the merit in this case of being literal as well as figurative. We are indeed Ukrainian, in a way that transcends the passport. 

There are many conceivable reasons to be against a war, but to snip out that crucial indefinite article and not “believe in war” generally is to be mocked by each historical instance where one had unavoidably to fight for the achievement of peace. (One thinks of Gandhi’s insistence to a blitzed Britain to “fight Nazism without arms. Let them take possession of your beautiful island ... you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them”). War, regardless of your belief in it, stubbornly continues to believe in you; this at least until such time as some global order can be instantiated which will preclude the option by force. One might work toward some such ends alongside the pacifists while simultaneously not risking hypocrisy by fighting alongside the militants until such a scheme becomes feasible. 

The problem, as I view it, with the intransigent pacifist is that he lives out the world of his ideal. Meanwhile, he lives in this world, taking pragmatic measures to conduct the manifest world toward an approximation of the ideal. The message of the pacifist is only too relatable for any sentient creature: I will not participate in the act, in the final analysis, of destroying fellow human beings. Regimented death-bringing is an activity for which I shall never, can never, sanction. 

Then there are wars of invasion. Then there are wars of defense. Some Hitlerian figure with a forked but mellifluous tongue will eventually, inevitably come along, and induce a nation toward committing inhumanities in the name of humanity. Humans will ever be susceptible to the high call of duty to tribe and the hypnosis of jingoism. Many wars are not so easily decipherable. But Ukraine is one such war where we cannot just peace out.

The only scheme, as I see it, for avoiding war is a coercive world governing organization, or some neutering drug taken which chemically tempers our passions. And many a dystopian novelist, from Huxley to Orwell to Burgess to Rand, can tell you about the attractiveness of that. 

But your own line of thinking and searching opens up for me a line of self-inquiry. Am I really so certain in a belief that a dire action taken in the name of it so demonstrates me to be? Might there not be situational subtleties, political complexities to which a perhaps impulsive, even superficial passion blunts if not blinds me? Are there not socio-politico-historical factors which would serve at least to extenuate those actions which appear to me, in the present view, as unmitigated criminality? It’s only right to ask these questions. The question mark, not the exclamation point, ought to be the proud symbol of any true thinker. To hold an opinion categorically is to misread the definition of “opinion.”

I ask you to consider not if there is a clearly juxtaposed right and wrong side in this war (though I think it’s obvious which is which), but if there is a clear “righter” and “wronger” side. Made right by default in this instance, they remain blameworthy in others, and I’m sure there is a residue of antisemitic toxin latent in the voda. Polish and Ukrainian handiwork during World War II is hard to forgive and impossible to forget. (Here you may have the pacifist solution. The Jews might be the ultimate vehicle towards World Peace, in binding all the Earth’s disparate enemies together in brotherhood on the point on which all nations, however distinct, are agreed: hatred of the Jew.)

The advance of evil does not always come at one thrust but is a matter of advantage-taking. It creeps up incrementally, availing itself of the opportunity presented by popular indifference or international irresolution. One doesn’t require a comic book context to act. One needn’t be a hero in a fight on the side of exemplary good against rank and utter evil. It is enough that regular people, more or less good, fight on the side of the slightly better. 

We needn’t enlist on the side of pure good, or nothing at all, to be good; we need only enlist on the side of the better, to be good enough. I look forward to a continued correspondence in Burke-Mackintosh fashion on the merits of this particular guerre.

Peace out,

Haim

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The Ukrainian army is leading a successful counter-attack in the east of the county, having regained several key towns and some 700 square miles of territory (according to the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky).

It appears that at least one TGS reader and listener had something to do with it. On August 31, we got this letter from Haim Shweky, a military volunteer in Ukraine whose “Dispatches from a Few Rows Back from the Front” we published last month:

That I am writing this letter at all is a very simple fact that I cherish. You’ll have read in the news of a southeastward push by Ukraine towards Kherson. In the first phase of that operation I took modest part, brief though breathy. 

A more extensive account of this episode I defer to a hotel room in Warsaw, sometime next week, with the quiet and space and idle time (and stationary) necessary for written reflection.

Briefly, peremptorily: The assault eventually rebuffed the Russian defenses but that initial thrust was sketchy. Immediately we (recon team) reached our position the enemy seemed to know of it. Artillery and machine gun fire kept us head-down knees-up behind a berm. They seemed to have anticipated us and made the appropriate greeting. Friend was wounded by a shell and I medevaced him out. This was early in the fight. Some time elapsed before infantry and tanks arrived to relieve the team. They did so and our forces eventually nudged ahead. This concerns our assigned patch of dirt, near the small town of Pravdino. How the grand offensive turns out is for the news to report in time. 

This is only a hurried live broadcast; promptness justifies it, present events dictate it. From here (separate email to follow shortly) I resume the narrative where it left off, chronologically, recounting the pregnant before which gave birth to the now. 

Adopting a phrase I hear around the trenchmen, Victory or Valhalla. 

I had exchanged emails with Haim back in July. He referenced my conversation with Glenn in which we talk about the war and questions of personal and collective responsibility, in his original email to The Glenn Show:

A few weeks ago I was still in a TLV apt., amid cardboard boxes and plastic bags, packing up necessities, discarding superfluities. An episode of TGS was playing in the background of this playground. It was a fortuitous episode— the topic under discussion and the questions canvassed were exactly the ones naturally occupying my thoughts at this juncture. 

Here is what you said to Nikita (I paraphrase) over his Russian dilemma: “I think shame comes from not living in a way that you can find to be dignified in the face of the situation which confronts you. You have an account of the thousands of hours you spend on this planet, and you can at least take a little bit of comfort in that.” In knowing, in other words, that one of those hours was a fine one, a distinguished one; indeed that it was no hour at all, but eternal among the temporal and quotidian rest…

Following that comment, which (though you were only riffing ideas, as is your wont) spoke so directly to my natural feeling on the matter, I was the more fixed in carrying out my resolution. As you said, when the Fascists are in Spain, you go to Spain. Sometimes the true writer must leap over his desk.

I shared with Haim that his letter made me feel strangely conflicted. I hesitated to accept his no doubt courageous decision as laudable, but struggled to articulate why. I still do, but I’m hoping to make some progress by writing this post and exchanging a few public letters with Haim in the coming weeks.

This month I’ve been rereading this note from Leo Tolstoy’s diary, in which he’s writing about the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905. Russia’s loss contributed greatly to the success of the First Russian Revolution of 1905 and the two subsequent ones that followed in 1917:

The war, and the endless reasoning about why it is, what it means, what it will lead to, and so forth. Everybody’s in contemplation, from the tsar to the last engine driver. And everybody will have to contemplate, at some point, not only what the war will mean for the world, but also: How should I, I, I relate to this war?

Nobody’s doing that contemplation. They even think that they shouldn’t, that it’s unimportant.

And yet, grab him by the throat and start choking him, and he’ll feel that what’s most important to him is his life, the life of his self.

And if the life of his self is what’s most important, then he is, apart from being a journalist, a tsar, an officer, a soldier, also a human being who came into this world for a short while and who will leave it when He who sent him wills it so.

Is there anything more important to him than understanding what he is to do in this world? It’s obviously more important than all the contemplations about whether the war is necessary and what it will lead to.

And what to do about the war is obvious: Don’t make war, don’t help others make it, if you’re not trying to stop them.

This resonates with me on a personal level. The most practical thing that I’ve been “doing about the war” is sending all the money I make writing my newsletter Psychopolitica to buy humanitarian aid for Ukraine. I made a point of choosing a foundation that does not buy arms.

That said, I can’t agree with Tolstoy that “what to do about the war is obvious.”

First, there is one exception to his “don’t make war” suggestion that I expect most readers would make right away—that of self-defense, which is what the Ukrainian forces are doing today. I can’t imagine myself arguing that a Ukrainian picking up arms to defend his home is “wrong” to do so—perhaps because of the pathos of a defensive war that I have internalized as a child learning about World War II.

But secondly, there are cases like Haim’s, which are just very difficult for me to think about.

Unlike the Ukrainian from my previous example, who is forced to fight to defend himself, his family, and his country, Haim chose to join somebody else’s war. In my mind, such a decision requires a justification.

Haim provided one in his next email:

Nikita, I admire the honesty and self-honesty of your response. There’s a Hebrew saying, a biblical maxim, which translates to “the poor of your city first.” Meaning, in effect, not that we shouldn’t extend aid and succor to distant peoples and places, if we’re able, but that that aid is best and most effective which concerns itself with problems nearest. It also speaks of a certain ethical hierarchy—the old metaphor that between two drowning children, it is natural as well as right to choose to save one’s own.

Your conception of defending your own home when the wolves (or in this case the bears) comes knocking down the door is a valid one. And I’m sure that if your neighbor’s house was aflame you’d show up hose in hand. As well your neighbor’s neighbor. Of course, setting out to defend your neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor, etc., becomes increasingly less expected, less felt, less immediately important; and there arrives a point at which it is considered less reasonable. It is hardly expected that everyone self-export to some undiscovered bourne to enlist for the local cause.

I believe however this fight for Ukraine is not of less immediate import for ourselves than if it were my neighbor. In this globalist age, where distance is really no distance at all, Ukraine is indeed a neighbor, and in a more important sense than just physically conterminous: We belong to the same community. We can thus extend your definition of home. I’m seeking to preserve the shared “home” of our values, the home of a humanist and liberal tradition, the home of democratic process. Less abstractly, more directly: Safeguarding another country’s sovereignty protects my own, for even if that tyrant is not my tyrant, and that country is not my birth country, it serves all future tyrants a hard example that they can’t so easily usurp the rights and identity of a people without international, in addition to national, impunity. Whatever the ultimate outcome, the more difficult it is for the aggressor to achieve his aim, the more secure the future for weaker, vulnerable states against stronger, covetous neighbors everywhere.

My choice to go to Ukraine you see is not really, then, to go anywhere so foreign. Our Western language is the same, though the tongue which speaks it is different. Our political thought is similar, though the head in which it is held looks different. We share a certain heart, though the blood be different.

In mulling over this response, I have formulated five questions that I want to ask Haim in my next email and that I am also asking—and haven’t yet answered—of myself.

1. What led to this war? How far back do you trace the causal chains: to 2019, when the Ukrainian Constitution was amended to enshrine the country’s course on joining NATO; to the period between then and 2015, characterized by the failure to implement the Minsk agreements; to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014; to the Maidan Revolution of the same year; to the Orange Revolution of 2005; or all the way back to the fall of the Soviet Union? Perhaps further?

2. What is it about? What are the questions that are being decided on the battlefield? What is Ukraine fighting for, and what is Russia? What are the goals of the US and the EU in this conflict? What other players are there, and what are they trying to achieve?

3. What are the probable outcomes? What happens to Ukraine, Russia, and the world order if Russia wins? If Ukraine wins? If the war goes on for years without a resolution? What effects is this war having on the two countries and the world order already?

4. What are the outcomes you’re hoping for? A restoration of Ukraine’s borders to pre-February 2022? Or pre-2014? What about Russia, its role in the world (including its military interventions), and its regime at home—do you want those to change as a result of this war? How?

5. How are your actions advancing your preferred outcomes?

I think that anyone who wants to go beyond Tolstoy’s “don’t make war and don’t help others make it” must be able to provide at least preliminary answers to these five questions.

I don’t have them myself yet. But I will formulate what I can in the next installment of this series of posts.

I invite you to share your thoughts as well in the comments.

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I recently received a series of emails from Haim Shweky, a TGS fan who has made the startling decision to take a leave of absence from his job, pack up his apartment, and travel to Ukraine in order to join the fight against Russia. His dispatches recount his trip from his home through Poland and into Ukraine. Haim’s vivid descriptions bring this journey to life—it’s a true insider’s account of the excitement, uncertainty, discomfort, and boredom that attend what he regards as a mission.

With Haim’s permission, I present some (lightly edited) excerpts from his emails. He’s promised to continue writing when he is able, so you can expect to see the continuation of this saga soon.

Dear Glenn,

I write you from Warsaw. As of the next week, I’ll be writing from Ukraine as a volunteer in that country’s indefatigable people’s army. The plan is to contribute about a month’s stint, if they will allow it, before finally heading back to New Jersey in late August to visit family (after a three year absence). I plan, of course, to write of these experiences.

I’ve decided to take indefinite leave from my current job to travel, as I’ve always wanted. With an open schedule facing me, my thoughts turned to Ukraine. I have time, I have experience, and I like to think I have some discriminating sense of right and wrong (there is such a thing). It was thus a simple decision to resolve to join the Foreign Legion.

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