In Defense of the Defense of Ukraine

A dispatch from Haim Shweky

Last year, a reader named Haim Shweky began a correspondence with me. An Israeli-American, Haim sent in a series of dispatches documenting his experience as a volunteer soldier in Ukraine, which I published here at the Substack. Partially in response to Haim, my creative director, Nikita Petrov, a Russian national now living abroad, wrote a post exploring his own conflicted thoughts and feelings about what those of us with the luxury of not living in a war zone can do to help Ukrainians and to bring the end of the war closer.

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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Photo by Oro Whitely

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.

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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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